Two Memorials

I have a perverse fondness for air travel. I don’t enjoy the hassle, the rush, the stale air and overpriced food, of course, but there’s something about being strapped into a sealed metal tube for hours on end that gives one a sense of perspective. Sometimes when I’ve got a window seat and the weather’s clear, I’ll spend most of a flight gazing at the patchwork of civilization down below, and at its intersection with wilderness. It’s beautiful to see how limited we still are by the lay of the land, how little we’ve touched many of the mountain ranges in the western US, how the houses and fields peter out at the edge of some gaping ravine or jagged ridge. All it takes, though, is a middle seat or a grey day to turn that sense of perspective inwards. It’s akin to a meditation retreat: nowhere to go, nothing to do (once I’ve given up reading the selection of overly ambitious tomes I’ve hauled along) but be here. In a sort of anti-meditation, at these times I throw notions of present-moment, embodied mindfulness to the four winds and give my memory and imagination free rein. Flights are good times for dreaming, remembering, consolidating, integrating. They offer enforced pauses, liminal times of neither here nor there, and in that sense they force us to slow down and take stock. 

A few transcontinental flights and about ten months ago, I spent most of my 5 or so airborne hours composing a sort of eulogy for my father. Though he’d died quite suddenly, he’d been sick for a decade or more with Alzheimer’s; my mother and I had lost him a long time ago. I flew home at short notice to be with my mother and, on the return trip from New York to Portland, the piece came pouring out of me almost fully formed. 

Now I sit here on the same flight, in an aisle seat at the back of the aircraft, and my thoughts turn to the two memorial services we’ve given for my father in the last two months. One was a family affair at the house my parents have long spent their June-to-August academic summers. The Vermont house was one of my father’s favorite places, but somewhere he went to retreat from distraction and concentrate on his music rather than to commune with family and friends. Episodically (and at times manically) social but at heart a loner, he’d never have come up with the two-day party and family reunion I planned and, with support and financial backing from my mother, executed. But he’d have appreciated the lamb roast, the ping-pong playing (we staged a tournament in his honor in the upstairs of the barn), the informality of the service, which took place under a pavilion on the lawn in a spot where we used to play badminton, where he used to smoke his pipe and blow smoke-filled bubbles, the piano playing of some of his favorite music performed by an old family friend. And he’d have been right at home during the carousing that followed. 

Amidst the day’s varied reminiscing, listening, eating, and playing, his spirit was present, hovering in the big white tent during the brooding chords of his Suave Mari Magno, as well as afterwards, boozily, in the ping pong arena. And the man that his friends, family and neighbors evoked in their eulogies? Funny--indeed, downright hilarious, even in his last, mostly silent years, when all he needed was a gesture to break up however momentarily the malaise in an institutional ward. Vivacious. Brilliant when it came to music, and intensely focused, dedicated, and single-minded. Uncompromising. Both intolerant and incapable of mediocrity and of pretense. Intolerant, too, especially when it came to his own family of origin, of their seeming inability to relate to him in his chosen field. His little sister, now over sixty herself, remembered with a chuckle how awed she’d been at George’s musical capacity when they were still teens--and how his response to her enquiries (“What are you working on?”) had always been brusquely dismissive: “Composing. Go ‘way!” 

The Vermont service blessed me with the sorts of anecdotes and recovered memories about my father that, as the only son of a dad lost too soon, I find myself hungry for. But more than this, it offered the opportunity to channel him, to bring him back for one long summer afternoon and on into the evening.

Six weeks and three cross-country flights later, a second service, this one put on by his former colleagues at the Columbia University Music Department. Instead of a white wedding tent by a haphazard woodpile on a sloping lawn, the venue was formal, citified: Columbia’s Italian Academy, a.k.a. “Casa Mussolini” (cue my father’s wickedly delighted laugh here), monumental and indeed rather fascist-leaning with its columns and lush red curtains. 

With a small handful of exceptions, the audience was different from that in Vermont: distinguished professors, former students of my father’s now risen in their own musical careers, colleagues too from my mother’s department in her university. No political agitator-slash-shepherd types, no apple-grafting, suspender-sporting opera buffs, no long-lost Edwards cousins over from Maine for the weekend. There was no lamb-roast, no ping pong tournament, and substantially less drinking. But the event brought him back in ways that the Vermont service didn’t. 

Two of his compositions performed, including a late, playful and texturally richly varied chamber piece. The audience was about the most sympathetic imaginable, and the emotional and intellectual impact of his writing was palpable amongst the hundred-twenty-odd people suited and seated, so many of them musical and intellectual peers of my father’s. The man this group evoked in their eulogies was recognizably the same as the one who had been brought back for us in Vermont, but the perspective was different--more institutional, certainly, while still retaining the earlier event’s strong sense of his human qualities. Indeed, the institutional angle revealed aspects of my father I’d never had occasional to consider. He was evidently a capable administrator and, as department chair, a fair-minded, selfless leader. At the reception, a woman he had hired over a decade ago told how my father, her new boss, had encouraged her to “follow [her] conscience” when faced with her union striking just as she was supposed to begin her new position, and assured her there would be a “job waiting for [her] when [she] returned.” Other speakers emphasized how much they respected not only his music but his writing about music, as collected in a book of essays published in 2008. As in Vermont, there were speakers who had known him only in the last five or so years of his life, after much of his decline had taken place, who nevertheless had rib-splitting anecdotes to share. Andy Delbanco, a Columbia colleague from another department who had known my father only in passing, spoke poignantly of the way he communicated with looks, facial expressions and the occasional gesture even after words had failed him. What moved me was how clearly Andy had been able to know my father even under these limited, limiting circumstances, and how much respect for him he’d developed. In some ways this was the bravest speech of the evening, because Andy didn’t shy away from touching on some of George’s more difficult qualities. His utter intolerance for nonsense, said Andy, sometime meant that he haw it where it wasn’t, dismissing people too quickly or harshly. His disinterest in meaningless banter and, if it came down to a choice between the two, his preference for awkwardness over fluff. A former student echoed this sentiment: brilliant in the classroom, George was not afraid to wait out ten and fifteen minutes of silence before he was satisfied that his students had no answer to the question he had posed. Silence, it seemed, was part of the method to his madness long before the madness overtook the method.