82. Suitcase from My Father
Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts and notebooks.
Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual joking, mocking air, he told me he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after he died.
“Just take a look,” he said, looking slightly embarrassed. “See if there’s anything inside that you can use. Maybe after I’m gone you can make a selection and publish it.”...
I remember that after my father left, I spent several days walking back and forth past the suitcase without once touching it. I was already familiar with this small, black, leather suitcase, and its lock, and its rounded corners. My father would take it with him on short trips and sometimes use it to carry documents to work. I remembered that when I was a child, and my father came home from a trip, I would open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savouring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. This suitcase was a familiar friend, a powerful reminder of my childhood, my past, but now I couldn’t even touch it. Why? No doubt it was because of the mysterious weight of its contents.
— Excerpted from Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 Nobel Lecture
Prompt:
Imagine that your father—or your father figure—left you a suitcase, either real or metaphorical. What would it contain? Words of wisdom? A check to cover therapy? Precious family heirlooms or nostalgic tchotchkes? All of the above? Tell the story of what you'd find inside.
Annie Jaffee
Location: New York, New York
About: As a native New Yorker, I took on people watching at a young age. Between listening to the suited-up men talk business and numbers on the train ride back from school, to having a conversation about the meaning of life with my cab driver at 2 am, the stories that people tell me about themselves make my life fuller. Of course, the pandemic has, in many ways, limited our abilities to connect with one another, but this project has challenged me to lean into new ways of connecting--both with others and myself--and for that, I am so thankful. I've learned a valuable lesson during this time, and it is one I’d like to pass to others: Share your joy and share your pain. You never know who may hear you.
Age: 22
Anonymous
This one is guaranteed to make my eyes leak. Dad has been gone for 27 years. Yet in many ways I feel closer to him today than I did when he was alive.
I don’t think Dad made a big deal about his legacy. I believe that he did everything possible to make sure that his family was provided for financially. He worried a lot, that’s for sure. He implored us to take care of each other. He lived by example. He was kind and caring. He believed in giving to others who are less fortunate.
Dad was not big on material things. He worried about money all the time. He wanted us kids to have everything we wanted, but we always knew that funds were limited. I’m sure he hated that, having to deprive us of something nonessential because the money wasn’t there.
What I inherited from my dad goes way beyond material things. Emotional displays always made him uncomfortable, and he would hate it that I am crying right now. One time I was talking to him on the phone and I told him I loved him and choked up, and he said, “You’re not getting weird on me, are you?” He was always at his best when he could make other people happy, and he did that just by being around them. Anyone who met him liked him instantly.
The gift I most cherish from my dad is a pair of ceramic kissing angels. He bought them for me one year when we went Christmas shopping on his birthday, just the two of us. It was extremely rare to do anything alone with him. Many years later I found a similar pair of angels and I gave them to him for his birthday. He later said he almost cried when he saw them. So I know he remembered. But he tamped down those feelings. He couldn’t show me what it meant to him in the moment.
After he died I started to talk to him. I would have long conversations with him when I was driving to work. I said all the things that would have made him uncomfortable to hear. I like to think the thing he would be proudest of, is that I married a good man who was and is an excellent father.
I was a rotten and bratty teenaged daughter. I will always regret that. Dad joked about it when I was older. I know he forgave me for it.
When I was preparing to retire, one of the hardest things was a persistent feeling that I was letting Dad down. He worked almost till the day he died, in spite of serious health problems. It was that important to feel that he could still be the provider. It took a lot of tears and a few conversations with him in my head, to realize that he would be proud of what I had accomplished and so happy that I was able to retire comfortably. It was hard for me to just accept that he would be happy for me.
We didn’t talk about these things when he was alive. Dad left a legacy of love. I miss him.
Léna Pignon
Location: Germany
About: I realized one of the things I love writing about the most is my family, its stories & people, and our shared memories - this prompt was great for that
Age: 28
My father already left some of the most important stuff in the suitcase he’s building. He taught me to persevere, to value other people’s work when mine is not good enough, and to allow myself to be bold – and unapologetic about it. I have been told many times that I am “too honest”, “very frank”, or, a personal favourite, that I “don’t wear gloves”.
Very often when I hear this, I am reminded of one of the suitcase’s precious gifts: my father has never once expected any of his children to compromise about their honesty (or confidence, or loudmouth-ness), even when it was perceived as arrogance. He taught us that while we must be honest and respectful (of people and of things), we should stand up for ourselves and what we Feel Strongly about – and he supported us in doing so when we needed him to.
I will always remember how he stood up to my brother’s school when he was in trouble – a mixture of unreasonable people, stalled bureaucracy, and real bad faith. He was so mad at them that I knew he was right, and they were wrong; and my brother, even though he hadn’t exactly been a model student, was a victim of a fucked-up system made by fucked-up people with fucked-up lives.
(I swore back then that I would slash that woman’s tires if I ever saw her, but I never saw her again. Being a bit more grown-up now, I know I wouldn’t slash her tires – but I like to think that I would explain to her how fucked-up a person she is.)
Being a veracious person has had its downsides (quite a fair share of awkward silences), but it’s a trait I have grown to love – I like how it defines me a little bit, and I like that people ask for my advice within the realm of stuff that I’m good at, because they know that my empathy will not wash out the important stuff I have to say.
So, in honour of my dad’s birthday more than a month ago, here’s your prompt – what trait do you possess which you have grown to love?
Mine is that I am honest, and I got it from my dad.
Lori Tucker-Sullivan
Location: Detroit, MI
About: I am a writer living in Detroit. I write essays and nonfiction and am currently working on a book about rock music widows and what they taught me about grief (forthcoming, spring, 2021). I was inspired to write about my father because he was a complex man of his generation. The idea of what would be found in his suitcase seemed to be a perfect way in which to exam his many facets through an examination of physical items.
Age: 56
My father’s suitcase would be made of old leather, beaten up but proud in its weathered patina. In later years, my mother talked my father into using light, fabric suitcase with wheels when they traveled with their seniors group, but those suitcases lacked personality and age; definitely not the kind he would bequeath to me.
Opening the suitcase, what would I find? If thoughtfully and honestly prepared, it would be full of items both good and bad that would create a picture of a complicated man; a man of his time, with the usual, almost typical demons, and would reflect the constant struggle he must have felt (though never really articulated it) to be a good husband and father during challenging, changing times, when the definition of “good father” was being shaped into something new, something he didn’t quite know how to fit into.
I would find a leather football helmet he wore playing the quarterback of his high school football team in Tellico Plains, TN. As an 88-year-old man with a back injury, I once sat with him in the doctor’s office after a CT scan that revealed six healed-over fractures in his back. None of us ever knew he had these back issues. “I got those playing football in high school. Maybe one is from that time on the shop floor when I got hit in the back by an engine moving down the line on a chain that came loose. I don’t really remember.” By this time, he often called me Della, his sister’s name, because he was no longer sure who I was. On the ride home that day he regaled me with football stories as though it was a steamy fall evening in the hills of east Tennessee and, as his sister, I never really appreciated his athletic skill as I should have. He rarely missed a day of work, and never complained of being sick.
Next would be his wedding band. He and my mother were married for sixty-four years. They eloped by traveling across the border to Georgia where it was legal for my 18-year-old mom to marry. He took his wedding vows very seriously and woke up every morning to earn a living to support his family, which is mostly where he felt his responsibility began and ended. It was the sixties and seventies, after all, and his expectations were narrow. He never accepted that my mom worked and thought others would see it as a shortcoming on his part. But he also came home every day and started dinner and was a good, if reluctant, partner in the kitchen.
It would contain the wings he earned as an Army Air Corpsman during WWII. Since he left the auto plant to join the army, he went through basic training as an airplane mechanic, but was also trained in shooting from the gun turret of the plane. He only flew practice missions and got his papers to ship out to Dusseldorf two days before D-Day. He never made it to Europe, and I think it bothered him more than he ever let on that he never saw battlefield action. We once went to the Air Museum so he could see a B24 bomber being restored. He wouldn’t talk with the other vets there, and I think it had to do with not seeing actual combat. I think he felt he came up short more often than he ever let on. When my brother received a deferment and avoided going to Vietnam, my father was incredulous. He suggested that, if he had courage, he would find a way to go. It ruined their relationship for many years. Why are father-son relationships so fraught? Why does the literal baggage of the father pass more to the son than the daughters?
The suitcase would contain an empty Mason jar that he would use to can the fruits of his garden—tomatoes, green beans, corn, sauerkraut, vegetable soup. A root cellar under the basement stairs held dozens of jars through the winter. There would be a beautiful rose, maybe pressed. It saved him, I think, to come home from the factory every summer day, and stand alone, quietly, watering his garden and rose bushes. He would stand there for half an hour, at least, while inside we washed the dinner dishes and did the women’s work. He cleared his mind, he contemplated. “Roses don’t like to get their feet wet,” he would tell me years later as we planted a garden at my home. “Water them from above so the plant gets wet. Don’t just water the soil.” It’s funny that I don’t remember much other life advice, just gardening advice.
I’d find his worn leather wallet that may contain a few bills but would definitely contain his membership cards to the Democratic party and the United Auto Workers. I think he was prouder of those two slips of paper than any other identifier. I’ve had the distinct honor of telling the story of my father’s union organizing and party membership to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Cory Booker; all three teared up.
There would be copies of the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. He read two newspapers every day, one in the morning in the breakroom where he arrived early every day to have a coffee and read, and one after returning home in the evening. It’s where I got my own love of journalism. Around the same time as the doctor’s appointment for his back, we waited at a coffee shop for my mother to finish her own appointment and I shared my Free Press with him. He made a difficult admission to me. “I mostly look at the pictures now. I can’t seem to follow the stories anymore. I think it’s my mind. I miss reading the paper.”
If the suitcase’s contents are honest, there will also be an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. It will have been found on a dusty basement shelf or even in our small, detached garage. Though my father was sometimes obviously drunk, he never drank in front of his family. The addiction, coupled with the shame that came from his Southern Baptist upbringing, made for a mean drunk that would lash out at whoever got in his way. For several years, he would stop at the liquor store on Friday and nurse a bottle through to Saturday night, affording himself Sunday to be hungover before going back at work at 7 a.m. on Monday. He overdid it one weekend when I was 13 and ended up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. We had to rush him to the hospital which forced his addiction to become public. He was embarrassed, but worse, had to miss a day of work. Though he never resolved the issues that caused him to drink, he never drank again. I know I had a different relationship with my father than my siblings did because I had time to know him sober.
The suitcase would not contain any of my rock n roll records because he hated those and the noise they made. He hated the way I dressed and the amount of time I spent on the phone. He hated every boyfriend (and only slightly liked the one I married). He hated that I needed to go away to college to become a journalist, but he instilled in all of us that we would go to college and reap the benefits of his labor. The generational difference between us was nearly impossible to overcome and we really never did.
I came to have the best relationship with my dad later, through his love of his grandchildren. It’s just easier on so many levels. My most enduring, loving memory of my father is him holding his grandson, newly brought home from the hospital. He didn’t know I was standing outside the nursery where he sat in a rocking chair holding Austin. “I wasn’t sure when I heard your name. What kind of name is Austin? But then I thought, it really doesn’t matter. Do you know why? Because me and all your friends are going to call you Sully.”
When dementia overtook my father, his personality returned to that of the mean drunk. My husband, -who had never seen this side of his father-in-law, was stunned at the change, but the rest of us recognized him. Dad and I had some of our worst fights when he was in his late 80’s and believed we were trying to lock him up because we were hateful. I try not to remember those times as the ones that defined us, because he was ill. We certainly struggled to exist together, until the point at which he no longer knew who I was, and he became, for the remainder of his days, that high school football star.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.