A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [40]
When we have dinner parties, I like to go around the table and say something about each guest and our special connection to him or her. In addition to being a good icebreaker, it gives me a chance to testify publicly about the value we place on our friendships. Often, others at the table will follow my lead and describe how the other guests have contributed to their lives. It is like a snowball of goodwill. I think it catches everyone by surprise when we say aloud that we appreciate their presence in our lives.
Ironically, however essential it may be for our own souls to show that love, we often don’t do so until it’s too late. That came to mind when I visited an old friend, Morgan Mead, whom I had first met at Squam Lake as a teenager through Will Speers. I happened to catch Morgan after he had recently attended several family funerals. “You know,” he said wistfully, “I’m giving all of these eulogies, and I’m getting pretty good at them.”
“Morgan,” I said, “that’s fine, but you have to learn to tell people you love them before they die.”
Chapter 5
When I was at Harvard, a fellow student who was a jazz aficionado figured out who my father was. I acknowledged the relationship and added gratuitously, “But he’s a jerk.” Jerome Culp, a black coal miner’s son from Pennsylvania who was a resident graduate student tutor, took me aside afterward and encouraged me to respect my father publicly and keep our differences to myself. “One day you will find your way to each other,” he said. “Save a place.”
I was skeptical. The strained relationship between my father and me seemed irreparable, and the distance between my mother and me, for that matter, was wider than it should have been. But by the time Diane and I moved to Brooklyn and got married, my outlook had changed. When you’re young, it’s easier to hold grudges, I find, and allow conflicts to simmer. It almost comes naturally. But as an adult, you become more conscious of the passage and limits of time, and you realize that your ability to resolve personal differences is a sign of maturity. You come to understand that forgiveness is sometimes needed to heal ancient wounds. That’s particularly true if the wound was inflicted by a parent.
My father—Laurdine Kenneth Patrick—had an unusual first name. As the story goes, my great-grandparents lived on a farm in Colorado Springs, some distance from their best friends, Laurence and Nadine. They promised their friends that they would name their first child Laurence if a boy, Nadine if a girl. After a series of miscarriages and stillbirths, my great-grandmother gave birth to a healthy son. Fearing he might be their only child, they invented the hybrid name Laurdine. Except on legal documents, my grandfather stopped using the name as soon as he was old enough to get away with it, preferring “Pat” instead. Growing up, we knew him only as Grandpa Pat. Still, he named his son, my father, Laurdine Jr. My father disliked the name as much as his father had and also used “Pat” professionally and socially. Even my sister and I called him Pat. But he passed “Laurdine” on to me as my middle name. There the tradition ends.
My father was skinny and tawny colored, with a black goatee, light brown eyes, and a bad left hip from a teenage football injury. He walked with a limp but otherwise never seemed to age: He credited health foods and herbal teas, long before they came into fashion. He thought that horehound tea, whose odor was comparable to that of a rotting carcass in the woods and which tasted like poison, cured anything. When I visited him as a kid, once I was given the tea for a cold. I concluded that the bad taste just made you forget what else ailed you. My father had a special charm, especially with women. There were many. Though I have no idea how he reconciled it with his black militancy, his girlfriends, for the most part, were white. It was one of many contradictions in a man I