Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirty-three

It is often said that the hardest days after the loss of a loved one are when all of the mourners leave and you’re truly alone. Mother was buried on a Wednesday, and the last family member, my cousin Denise, left that Sunday. My father and I went back to the apartment and there was truly nothing to do. We tried watching television but finally decided to go out to dinner. The two of us had never been at a loss for words, but now we were. Daddy kept ordering vodka. I snapped at him that he had had enough. “I need you to be with me,” I blurted out. He didn’t drink any more. We sat in silence.

The next day we took care of a number of business matters, primarily insurance and financial tasks. Daddy said that he’d like to visit his mother and sister in Illinois. My eighty-eight-year-old grandmother was pretty frail and Daddy had discouraged her from attending the funeral. The trip to Illinois turned out to be good for him, but I worried about returning to Stanford and leaving him alone. I suggested that we go directly from Illinois to Palo Alto, where he could spend a couple of weeks with me. My friend Randy picked us up at the airport, and years later she’d tell me that she was worried for Daddy’s survival when she saw him. “He was as broken as any person I had ever seen,” she said.

One evening during Daddy’s stay, I arranged a little dinner at my house. Harold Boyd, a black colleague from Stanford, invited a few people closer to my dad’s age. Daddy had a great time that evening and in his subsequent meetings at the university, brainstorming with the director of Stanford’s Public Service Center about programs to involve the university in the broader community.

After a couple of weeks, Daddy said that it was time for him to return to Denver. He told me he really liked Palo Alto and might consider moving but wanted to think about it. I encouraged him to do so, telling him that we only had each other and should be together. I didn’t push, figuring he needed time to decide. So I put him on the plane in early September, though I worried constantly about him.

I was having a rough time too. I threw myself into my work at Hoover, but the sadness was sometimes overwhelming. I had many friends and found plenty to do, but I felt incredibly empty. Deep despair could be triggered by seemingly innocuous events. One evening in the checkout line at the grocery store, I saw a woman of about seventy. She was wearing comfortable old-lady shoes. My mother will never grow old, I thought. I left my groceries on the counter and ran to my car, where I sobbed uncontrollably until the feeling passed.

The first weekend in October, Randy suggested that we take a football trip. I was by this time a rabid fan of the Cincinnati Bengals (the Browns had folded for a time), and Randy loved the New York Giants. The two teams were playing in Cincinnati, where she had family and a place to stay, so we decided to make the trip.

I got up that Sunday morning in Cincinnati and called my dad to check on him. I noticed that he sounded more cheerful than he had in many weeks.

“Daddy, what are you doing?” I asked him.

“I’m packing up,” he said. “The movers will be here tomorrow. I’ll be in Palo Alto on Wednesday.”

Daddy had arranged a visiting fellowship through the university’s Public Service Center and rented an apartment. I later learned that he was already in touch with Harold Boyd from dinner and a new friend, Lois Powell. Harold was a little surprised to find that my father hadn’t told me he was moving. So was I, but I couldn’t have been happier. I wanted to be with my dad. I was really pleased that he wanted to be with me too.

Within a few weeks, Daddy had settled in. In addition to diving into his work at the Public Service Center, he once again befriended and began to counsel student athletes. My father was making friends as rapidly as he always had. His little apartment, stuffed with the family furniture, became a gathering place for all kinds of people—especially middle-aged ladies who brought him food. Daddy would, in turn, invite them out to dinner or buy them Valentine’s Day candy. After about six months he asked me, “Do you think I’m dating?” It was so cute. I answered that yes, I thought he was, and that I was very happy about it. He beamed and continued to ask the ladies out—several of them. Yet he kept a crocheted plaque above the refrigerator that said “Angelena’s Kitchen.”

We still had our moments of great sadness, the most wrenching coming the first Christmas Day after Mother’s death. The holiday season had been tolerable. We engaged in many of the Christmas traditions we always had, decorating both my house and his and shopping for family presents. But on Christmas morning when we lit the last Advent candle the emptiness was overwhelming. We’d received an invitation from my senior faculty colleague Jan Triska to join his family for dinner. I’d declined, thinking that Daddy and I would want to be alone. But as we sat in silence after dinner, I decided that we had to get out of the house. I called Jan and we went to his home for dessert. I have been forever grateful to the Triska family for the kindness of that invitation and the respite it provided on that difficult day.

Ultimately, I decided that Daddy was adjusting very well, so I felt freer to travel and accepted a three-week visiting professorship at the National Defense Academy of Japan, in Yokosuka. I had never been to Japan, and I have to admit that it was a somewhat hard place to be under the circumstances. The academy, their West Point, had never had a woman teach there. In fact, I don’t think they had ever had a woman on the school grounds before I came. One clue was the absence of a ladies’ room. The school solved the problem by making one of the men’s rooms off-limits to everyone else but me. I never knew exactly what the huge sign on the door said, but it had a few too many characters to simply say “Do Not Enter.” Later I would be pleased to learn that the academy admitted its first female cadet in 1992.

I also had a hard time adjusting to the rigid hierarchy. All military academies are hierarchical, but in Japan this is exacerbated by cultural customs. Somehow I could never learn to bow at exactly the right level. One day my host professor told me that I was bowing too low, requiring the cadets to try to go lower. The next day I wasn’t bowing low enough. The language, which is also hierarchical, made it difficult to find an appropriate greeting in a case where a female of higher status addresses a male of lower standing. When one of my host professors invited me to his home for dinner and his wife served us but ate in the kitchen, I was just appalled. In general, I found the whole experience stultifying and looked forward to returning to my tiny hotel room every day.

I’ve always said that I love sports so much that I’ll watch anything with a score at the end. In Japan that meant watching the Grand Sumo Wrestling Tournament. I actually came to like it, giving the wrestlers nicknames like Fred and Toby since I couldn’t understand what was being said. To this day, I still like to watch sumo wrestling.

At the end of my trip, one of the professors told me that I’d been extremely successful in my teaching. “More important,” he said in heavily accented English, “it shows the Japanese that not all black people are stupid.” I knew that he meant it as a compliment, so I thanked him for his kindness. Fortunately, I’ve made many subsequent trips to an evolving Japan that have wiped away some of those early negative memories. I am happy to say that I’m now quite fond of the country, which has changed a lot in twenty-five years.