My father has been gone for almost fifteen years and yesterday I saw him vividly as my aunt described how she and her brother used to drive around Boston—my father at the wheel, Miriam in the rumble seat. The year was 1947. Allan was working on his doctorate at Harvard; Miriam was an undergrad at Boston University.
They were children of the depression, Finnish kids who’d grown up in the conservative confines of Finnish-American Lutheranism. (I remember seeing one of my father’s diary entries from the day he turned 12: I got ten cents and a new hair brush. Pretty good!
Poverty was one thing; the Lutheranism another. Miriam and Allan’s father was a minister. Stern and formal their upbringing was. Their mother, devout to a T, was fond of vanity, vanity, all is vanity. If my father brushed his hair he didn’t do it before a mirror.
Now the war was over and the Finn kids were driving around Cambridge, Allan home from the Pacific, Miriam released from the parsonage and the wind was blowing through their hair and so were the ideas that struck everyone who went to post-war college as new and liberating.
“Allan was talking about Karl Marx and I was regaling him about Freud,” Miriam said during our phone chat. “Ideas were fresh; everything was heady.”
This was the happiest New Year’s Day conversation I’ve ever had.
Do you remember when ideas were fresh? Listening to Miriam I recalled reading Lorca for the first time and being so struck by his rich figures of eternity I ventured into a cemetery and ate some grass.
Planet of the Blind 