My Father's Tadasana

I climbed my first mountain when I was eight years old, Mount Monadnock in southern New Hampshire.  No one in my family hiked but my mother’s hippie friend Barbara Williamson invited me to join her on this trip, along with her young daughter, her long-haired bearded boyfriend and some of their friends. From the way things worked around my house, I wouldn’t have been able to go on that hiking trip unless my father approved.  That he did so was extraordinary and life changing for me.

 

My father, who was born in 1932, grew up in an Italian American family in Everett Massachusetts.  His father, Louie, had moved back and forth from Italy so many times as a boy that he never learned how to read in either language very well.  Louie worked as a barber at his own shop near the Fenway.  My father’s mother, Amelia was also Italian but American born. She spent most of her later childhood cooking, cleaning, and being pushed around by her father and four brothers after her mother returned to Italy.  (Some say she was sent back by her husband.  Others say she left of her own volition.)  Louie and Amelia married at 20 when Amelia became pregnant with my father.  Perhaps due the trauma of her childhood, Amelia was not able to hold on to life for very long.  At 32 she died of a self-starvation leaving Louie and Michael alone to fend for themselves.

 

My father rarely spoke to me about his mother, but I knew that they were close and that her death left a wound inside of him that never healed.  My father carried a dark weight of depression in him that could get so bad that it sometimes sucked the light out of our home.  He was often angry, sometimes slow burning and brooding and at other times quick fire and violent in ways that you could never predict.  I tried to learn the signs of his anger so I could get out of the way when he erupted but wasn’t always successful. 

 

My father wasn’t only darkness.  He also brought the sun into my life. He encouraged me to do things that other men in my family and neighborhood did not usually encourage with daughters if they paid attention to them at all.  Holding my hand, he would skate me wild and fast around the rink.  He took me skiing, sledding, and swimming, and signed me up for sleep away summer camp on a majestic loon graced lake in New Hampshire. He encouraged me to do well at school especially in math and science and to grow up to be independent.  My father’s love and tenderness meant everything to me especially because I sometimes got the opposite.  I tried very hard to be a good girl, good at school, good at swimming, good at piano, polite and neat when grandpa Louie visited.  But I could never do enough to keep the shadows from falling, the violence returning, the darkness descending.

 

The few memories I have of that first hike are dreamlike.  I recall squishing in the backseat of the VW bug with Barbara’s daughter and their friends, water running over rocks as we climbed, my canvass sneakers getting soaked, hiking in the cold and dark. We got home so late that my father let me sleep late the next morning.  When he brought me into school, he told Mrs. Weatherbee, “She got in late from mountain climbing so I let he sleep in.”

 

That he allowed me to hike up Mount Monadnock with a bunch of hippies in October of 1971 was a testament to his desire for me to live fully in the world, to not end up like his mother who he believed lost her will to live because her life was kept so small.  Her death which broke his heart also broke him open to wanting more for his little daughter than his family and culture usually gave.  As is so often the case with our lives, I lived in light and shadow inextricably linked and shaped by each other.

 

I have been hiking Mount Monadnock for over 50 years now.  I have hiked in many other places in this country and Europe but have a special fondness for this mountain, the first I climbed because of my father’s faith and love for me.  When I hike there now, there always comes a time when I feel his presence with me.  Now that he has died, much of the conflict and pain that lingered between us has dissolved into my expanded heart.  He is so happy to see me hiking up this mountain.  It is what he wanted for me but could not always show it, to be free, to be courageous, to be myself.