BBS ON FATHER'S DAY

Oh, all right. I’ll buckle to social pressure and talk about my father a bit -- though a conflicted and emotional subject it is. The Great Falls Tribune this morning is full of young, handsome, competent fathers. My father was something more problematic. At the end I thought of him as Pagliacci: laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. He used to read Karen Horney in an effort to understand what it was all about, but he never thought of professional help and, if he had, I’m not sure it would have done him any good. He also needed a good medical doctor but set a bad -- even lethal -- example for his sons by not going to one.

Probably I’ve done a pretty good job of reconciling the genes and convictions of my two parents, not that it’s been easy. But if life sets you a difficult puzzle, solving it is often the making of a person. I used to explain by telling people my mother taught me how to drive a nail straight -- hit hard and hit only three times -- and my father taught me how to sweep -- short, gentle, circling strokes. Both their lives were rather preoccupied by two American unsolvables: wealth and wickedness.

So here’s my father, visiting the Pittock Mansion in the West Hills of Portland, goofing around by standing in the shower, an illustration of ambivalence: admiration laced with not-quite-contempt, a dependable source of humor.

And here he is at the beach, demonstrating ambivalence about his size by pretending to be a shrimp.

My brother was happy to join in the fun when my father’s mail order for pajamas (he always shopped in catalogues as though he were still back on the prairies) was mistaken for an order for a nightgown.

Note the fetching argyle socks. In another photo he is reading what he fancies is pretentious enough for my father to read: “The Brothers Karamozov.” I don’t know who among us read it (not me) but at least it was at hand.

On my father’s birthday it was great fun to tweak his horror of liquor, instilled (so to speak) in him by his own mother who was a fervent member of the WCTU. This bottle of “Old Croak” was really honey. All those books were indeed his and no, he hadn’t read them all. I read some of them. Mark did, too.



It was way too much fun for the honey to last very long. To Mark and Paul the whole prerequisite for alcohol was the proper glass -- brandy snifter or shot glass -- but then, straight from the bottle could work. Mark needs a brown paper bag.


We girls joined the fun when my father grew a mustache for the Oregon Centennial. The trouble was that his face was so red that the red mustache was hardly perceptible without a little tweaking. Me on the left, shirttail relative on the right.

Bruce Bennet Strachan was taken to be at least a potential intellectual and married my mother because she was smart. Both were oldest children (as am I) and both felt the weight of the economic Depression plus being Scots (my father) or Irish (my mother) enough to have problematic emotional genomes. The key to their success and mutual attraction was humor: oh, how they loved to joke around!

My mother’s tricks ran to scary stuff. When she was a kid, she and her sibs got home to the farm from church early one Sunday. They took the extra clothes that always hang at the back door of a farmhouse, stuffed them with newspaper and posed them in the parlor. “John, John,” shrieked my grandmother, “There’s a gang of ruffians lolling about in the house!”

One of the earliest Fourth of July picnics I can remember was just the family -- Paul maybe still in his buggy. We spread our repast somewhere on the shoulder of Mt. Hood and demolished the watermelon. When we were all logy and sleepy, my mother said she was going for a walk and set off into the brush. After a while, my father suggested we follow suit and led us down a path to a half-disintegrated barn. “Let’s so in and see what we can find,” he suggested, so we did. But there were a lot of strange noises: wailing, whistling, boards cracking and thumping, even things on the roof! Then shots rang out! We were terrified and ran back to warn our mother. She wasn’t there! Maybe the Whatsis got her!! In a while she came sauntering out of the brush, with firecrackers in her pocket. It was years before we figured out what happened.

In the last years we all lost our sense of humor, which is a big mistake. Everything seemed so life-or-death. The ridiculous-ness of mere mortals being so desperate for virtue, learning, and mutual understanding escaped us like air out of a tire and therefore we drove on our rims too much. Pretension can be deadly. I’m not quite sure how this came about. And I’m not sure I’ve escaped yet.

So what do I think about wealth and wickedness? I guess they’re interesting -- in moderation. In excess they're ridiculous.