A Disappointed Man

Chester Dane with Marion and Willis 1940

My father was a disappointed man.

He’d been “more fun,”

Mother sometimes told us,

before the Depression.

I struggled to comprehend the concept,

Dad and fun

in the same sentence.

A boy from a hardscrabble farm

in the California desert,

he worked his way through college

only to graduate into a collapsing world.

Who wants a bright young chemist?

And for the rest of his life

he expected

nothing,

nothing,

nothing at all.

Nothing good, anyway.

In those long Depression years,

one job after another.

Last hired,

first fired.

Reduced finally to the charity

of his brother-in-law’s farm.

How he hated farming!

The servitude of it,

the endless labor,

the land always longing for rain.

Never, in all my father’s life,

was there enough

rain.

Family charity ended after he,

more principled than wise,

organized the other farm workers

to demand an eight-hour day.

When, at last, a cement mill called,

he escaped with wife and infant son

to work that could have been done easily

by anyone with a single course

in high school chemistry.

(His IQ tested in college

at 184.

Beyond smart,

well on the way to weird.)

Still, he went to his job at the mill,

steadily,

faithfully,

day after endless day.

“When the next Depression comes,”

he said, again and again,

“I’ll have seniority.

I won’t be one of the ones laid off.”

But he said, as well,

“The reason they call it work

is because you don’t like doing it.

If you liked doing it,

no one would pay you.”

And more often still,

“Life is a dirty deal.”

Any hope my brother and I ever found,

he crushed with scrupulous intent.

“If you don’t expect anything,”

he would explain,

not unkindly,

“when good things don’t happen

you won’t be disappointed.”

Most important of all

that his children

not

be

disappointed.

“And besides,” he always added,

“if you don’t expect anything,

whatever good does come your way

will be all the more sweet.”

Curiously, my brother and I

simply grew more determined.

Determined to find work we loved,

to make it the center of our lives.

Determined to make our lives good

in the very different ways

we recognized the good.

Determined,

always,

not to be our father.

The flame that might have destroyed

tempered,

instead,

into steel.

That neither my brother nor I

lived a life of disappointment

is the deepest gift of all

from our father.