abba

One of the pillars of my life is that period of written correspondence between my father and me while I was in college.  We would write great, long letters to one another - thinking through the mysteries, the practicalities, the mechanisms of life.  I do not have these letters, except as digested into me. 

We never planned it - it just happened - and it drew to an easy close as I neared graduation.

As my mind expanded and matured, my father was there, not as physical presence, still less as a guide, but as the most resonant correspondent possible, a loving and joyous fellow traveler.  These letters were the secret backstory of my successful entry into adulthood, and of my time at St. John's.  The warmth, the thoughtfulness, the loving wisdom and playful theorizing we drew out from each other!  They were a beautiful flowering of my father's peculiar genius for being a father.  The greatest blessing of my upbringing was that: my father had a genius, and it was not for work, nor pleasure, nor even exactly for being a husband - it was and is for being a father.  My relationship to him was and is through his most exceptional facet.

We were each in a sort of prime then: he of early maturation, I of new adulthood.  I think we are each in a more foolish stage at present - productive middle passages where the deeper faculties wait: his for retirement, mine for maturation.

Someday we will resume our correspondence, and in the same way, resume ourselves.