Last Sunday, we picked up my father, loaded up the wheelchair and headed out to Como Park for an outdoor concert. The evening was humid but cooling off slightly and I was thrilled to find the usually packed parking lot offering up a single handicapped spot right near the Pavilion. I pulled out the handicapped sticker issued to me under Dr. Lagalwar’s signature ( he had them issue me one that’s good until 2017 - makes me shudder a little to imagine doing this four years from now), slipped it on my rear view mirror and, after a bit of maneuvering, we rolled in the direction of the trombones that were already in full swing. And Swing it was.
As we settled in, I scanned the audience. There were a few stray families with toddlers, but mostly I saw a lot of permed white curls. For most of the audience “Sentimental Journey” was an adolescent memory. I’ve been to enough of these concerts in the last few years that I was pleased to find Stan Bann’s Big Bone Band unusually skillful. I relaxed in the summer breeze and found myself thinking about this phenomenon of reliving your parent’s past.
My father has no tolerance for music that doesn’t meet certain parameters: it has to be classical ( and then preferably Beethoven or the Romantic Composers) or it has to be pre-50’s Jazz or Swing. All my life this has been such a definite rule, that I automatically switch my car radio to the Classical Station (or pop in a Louis Armstrong CD) when I’m picking him up at the Assisted Living. Since I drive him somewhere at least twice a week, this is having an impact on my musical experience.
When he first moved to Minnesota, we tried taking him to a few plays, but it became clear that his dementia made it hard for him to follow the action. Music, on the other hand, held his attention. I’ve gone to a lot of concerts in the past four years that would not have made my high priority list. Chamber music, piano concertos, swing and jazz - some days I’m grateful for new discoveries, and other days I feel like I’m being abducted into his world.
More complex was the period - mostly over now - when he wanted to relive World War II. I thought I had dealt with the German past exhaustively when I was in my thirties. Back then, I plowed through everything in the library pursuing the question that bothered me most: Was there something inherent in the German character that predisposed us to genocide? I was relieved to find that the answer seemed to be “no”, although it did seem that Germans were more organized than Turks or Cambodians. Just how organized, I didn’t realize until my father’s insatiable need to relive the Third Reich led me to find copies of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and some truly horrifying German documentaries that drew on SS documentary photography and even some film.
Most revealing was the night we watched a movie called After the Fall. It’s fiction, based on memoir, and set in an elite Nazi boarding school similar to the one my father attended. I switched on the movie for him, and then settled in to file his tax documents. I soon lost track of my folders. The brutality of the movie - the discipline imposed in order to make brave Aryan men out of boys - shocked me. My father stared at the screen, rapt. The stories my father told of his time at the NAPOLA in Köslin told of friendships with other boys, occasional pranks, a crush on one of the teacher’s daughters. I leaned toward him during a break in the action and asked: “Was it really this bad?” He tore his eyes from the screen and nodded toward me. “There were days.”
I had a sudden vision of my father - a sensitive boy who loved to play the piano and caper around the house pretending to be someone else, raised by a father who resisted corporal punishment - hundreds of miles from home exposed to this harsh environment. A place where feelings were weakness and survival meant acquiring a tough exterior. No wonder he didn’t take my mother’s and my homesickness seriously. It was only a feeling.
