Today is my father’s 86th birthday and if he was still with us he would be ecstatic about the recent fortunes of the Boston Red Sox, a baseball team whose luck was never good during his lifetime. (My dad passed away just two years shy of their improbable triumph over the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series).
My dad was a political scientist. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and owing to his Finnish heritage he wrote his dissertation on Finnish foreign policy in the years that immediately followed World War II.
Although I miss watching the Red Sox with him, I miss even more our long walks together when we would talk about politics and world affairs.
I also miss his terrific laugh and his slightly impish sense of humor. I miss the way he used to dance in the kitchen with our family’s dogs. I miss his off key attempts at popular songs.
I miss his unflinching contempt for the Nixon administration. I can only imagine what he would think of the current state of our nation…
He would be delighted to know that my wife Connie and I are moving to Iowa City: he visited this uniquely diverse university town several times when I was here as a graduate student and he once said that if only the rest of America could be like Iowa City, why then we might have a chance at being a good country.
(Iowa City is the kind of place where you can see people wearing buttons that say: "Poetry-It’s good for the corn…")
Just before he passed away my dad learned how to get on the internet. He sent me a funny little poem that he wrote from his retirement community in Exeter, New Hampshire. I’ve lost the poem and regret the fact because it was irreverent and it had to do with his more conservative neighbors. I shall, however, attempt to reconstruct the poem in honor of Allan Kuusisto’s birthday:
"Hey there skinny,
We may be ninnies,
(O yes, we may be ninnies)
But by God, we’re good New Hampshire Republicans!"
SK
Planet of the Blind 