A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [45]
The other thing going on that summer, I suspect, was a concerted effort by me to avoid spending much time with my father. We had a tiresome pattern of long, uncomfortable silences, and I was in no hurry to seek out more of that. Toward the end of the summer, however, my father asked me directly to go for a drive so we could talk. He needed to get something off his chest. We pulled over just off the Grand Central Parkway, near Flushing Meadows, where Rhonda and I had spent such a wondrous time with him at the World’s Fair when we were kids. My father pulled out note cards on which he had collected his points and began speaking—a steady, passionate stream of frustration, accusation, and invective. He told me all the ways in which my mother had failed as a mother, why she had driven him away, why she had betrayed my black identity, and on and on. I found those notes in his effects after he died. They still sizzle.
I really had no choice but to sit there and take it. He spoke for nearly two hours, raising his voice to overcome the roar of traffic passing by the open windows and to convey his pent-up emotion. Years of fury and regret gushed out of him. When he was finally spent, I surprised both him and myself by being calm. I told him quietly that I certainly missed having him in my life as a young boy but did not blame him for not being there, and that my mother’s urging of him to see Rhonda and me was the only reason he knew us at all. If we were going to have a relationship, I said, it would have to be about the future, not the past.
“I haven’t made any judgments against you,” I said. “I don’t even know you. The fact that I’m making other choices is not about you.” So let’s move on.
He was stunned that I did not fight back on his terms, yet stood my ground. We drove back to his apartment in silence. Nothing had been settled, but it was the beginning of a process in which I would try to forgive him for the hurt his long absence had caused us, and he would try to accept me for the man I was becoming. I would save a place.
After our long walk that summer day, my mother and I became much closer. We began to accept each other as adults, as friends. During the year I spent in Africa after graduating from Harvard, she even came to visit. It was an adventure all its own.
The villages where I lived in Sudan had no postal or phone service, so my mail was held for me at the main post office in the capital. Returning there from Darfur was the end of a long, lonely spell without contact from home. What a treat awaited in December when I visited the dusty, colonial post office in Khartoum to find piles of unopened mail. I needed a large bag to haul them away. I put the letters in chronological order and worked my way through them over several days. My friends’ sprawling lives, their milestones and their crises, were neatly compressed and resolved in one or two readings.
When I eventually reached one of the letters from my mother, dated sometime in early November, she wrote that she had saved her money so she could come see me, and I should meet her in Nairobi, Kenya, for Christmas. Since I had been anticipating the strangeness of my first Christmas away from home alone in a foreign environment, I felt a surge of excitement. I was touched by the gesture, too, since Mom had never traveled overseas before.
I quickly realized, however, that the date she had set for our rendezvous was only two days away. Her letter was weeks old by then, and she had, of course, received no reply from me that I would meet her. Communicating with her quickly was impossible. In those days, phone service in Khartoum was spotty at best. Even when it worked, an international call was expensive, required making a reservation at the phone company headquarters downtown, and was likely to be interrupted anyway. Sending a fax was impossible for ordinary people. There was no such thing as e-mail,