Callings

Hugh Jr. and Hugh Sr. outside Gillette Stadium, one of the last photos taken of my dad

 

“You missed your calling.”

Fathers say perplexing things sometimes, and Fathers’ Day seems like as good a day as any to remember them. In a solemn moment, my father offered the above observation several years ago, and it haunts me the way an echo haunts a canyon—mainly because I’d been turning the same notion over and over in my mind for many years before that.

Some people are born lucky and have but one calling that speaks to them loudly and clearly all their lives. When I see these people—and they show up with a refreshing frequency on reality shows such as “American Idol” and “So You Think You Can Dance,” the latter being one of my absolute favorite television experiences of all time—I feel stirrings of both kinship and envy. I admire their devotion and dedication to their talents and consider the depth of my own past commitments to the written word. At the same time, I am reminded of how often my loyalty to literature has slipped and faltered. There too, echoes from the past resound.

I grew up in an era when “doctor” or “lawyer” were the two top attainable career goals for one’s children. Sure, “president” got mentioned fairly frequently, but I could always detect a catch in my parents’ voices when they said it. There was realism and practicality—common sense, my father frequently extolled—and then there was the dreamer’s realm of fantasy—those “pie in the sky” aspirations that might tempt us for a while but would ultimately bring us up short. As anyone who grew up playing the game of “Life” knew: you drew the largest paychecks from “doctor” and “lawyer,” and “president” wasn’t a viable option on the game board.

Alas, from an early age, I chose another option that wasn’t on the board: the dreamer’s realm of fiction writing.

When I watch the interviews on talent shows, two types of participants often reduce me to tears: contestants whose family members so fully support their goals that they’ll pack up the minivan and drive across the country together for the auditions, and contestants whose families have abandoned them and left them to follow their artistic aspirations alone (and let’s be honest, when that aspiration is something like dance, there’s more than a little homophobia at play in many of the reactions).

“You’ll never make a decent living at that,” my father warned me when I first mentioned my plans to become a fiction writer. “Do you really think someone would want to publish something like that?” he asked after reading one of my short stories. “I’d be ashamed of myself,” he added—his subjective take on the choice of a front-and-center gay narrator, perhaps.

It was the last time I would show him any of my work. Years later, after that story had been published along with several others, he summed up his feelings by unknowingly paraphrasing the final line of a James Wright poem that has haunted many an aspiring writer:

 

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

 (from “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”)

 

My father may have been drunk when he informed me that I had wasted my life; after all, he rarely called me when he was sober. Even so, his feelings were made quite clear when he demanded that I forego my own graduate-school commencement ceremony in order to come home and attend my sister’s graduation from medical school. At the party following that event, my father mentioned matter-of-factly to a friend that I, too, had just graduated from school, the University of Idaho. The only problem with that was that I had just received—in absentia, of course—my MFA degree from the University of Iowa, the premiere writing program in the country.

All water under the bridge, I told myself as I headed back to my hometown a year ago to spend extended periods of time with my father in his final months. During those stays, the inevitable questions arose: “Why didn’t you become a doctor?” “Did you ever think of becoming a lawyer?”

I answered them dutifully and honestly, in order: “I can’t stand the sight of blood,” and “Yes, and I haven’t ruled it out entirely just yet.”

These questions about medicine and law were, in their own way, high compliments. He acknowledged that I had done well enough in school to pursue and excel in either one. By then, however, my father understood that neither career option reflected my true calling. He still wasn’t completely sold on the idea of writing, and I confessed that there were far too many days when I wasn’t, either.

Even so, my father had one request to make. He asked if I would write something exclusively for him: his eulogy.

My father did not ask me to do this because of some deathbed epiphany that his son was, indeed, a writer. He was harking back to his final words in that conversation from years earlier: “You have missed your calling.”

At the time, we had been discussing matters of the soul and spirit, and my father was suddenly filled with the belief that I should have gone into the ministry. “That’s your true calling,” he said. “You should be writing sermons instead of short stories.”

Now, nearly a year after his death, I reply: “Dad, at their best, they are one in the same, just like us.”

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