Symmetry

November 8, 2021

When we look beyond our schedules: our jobs, chores, our laptops and cellphones, and pause, we may stumble on the sublime harmony of the universe, which is God’s presence. Some get there often, even daily, others every so often. But we all know the signposts, the beacons, that are unmistakable and undeniable. On two consecutive days this past week, our family observed two of them: the fifth birthday of our younger grandson, followed the next day by the anniversary of my father’s passing 37 years ago, four days before his 60th birthday.

The boy, Patrick, celebrated joyously. He anticipated the “full hand” (five fingers) birthday, with grandparents, gifts, pizza, cake, the works. The next day my sisters and brother and I recalled our dad, who left us so suddenly at the end of his workday in New York City, not far from where he grew up.

Patrick does not know that he came into the world the day before his great grandfather left it 32 years earlier. Eventually we’ll tell him and his older brother more about the man who, three generations ago, in a different world, created a path to goodness for him, a straight road to a life of strength, dignity, integrity, and faith. We siblings know it and remember.

Joe Walsh grew up an only child with his parents, my grandparents, in the Bronx borough of New York, attended the local Catholic school a few blocks away then Fordham Prep, where he played football. He went on to Fordham University for a while. After Pearl Harbor he joined the Army Air Corps and served around Nome, Alaska, during the Attu-Kiska campaign, when the Japanese tried to seize the Aleutians. After the war he returned to New York, married our mom, Patricia, and went to work for New York Bell Telephone. They, and soon we, after I was born, lived in a small apartment in lower Manhattan called Stuyvesant Town, which I read somewhere was marketed for the postwar boom, to returning vets and young couples. We have photos.

With their first two kids they made the huge decision to leave New York and moved to the burbs in northern Jersey, to what must have seemed like another planet. That was the era of the Levittown-type explosion of suburbia, subdivisions crammed next to subdivisions stretching out from the cities, transforming the boondocks. The family roots remained in New York, the culture that shaped our parents’ lives: the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, family connections, neighborhood, church, work. From there the years sped by. And here we are.

Sandy and I were in Nashville when he passed, the first three kids were little, Kathleen had not arrived. We drove the 15 or so hours to Jersey in a blur that has never completely dissipated. Like all families experiencing the early death of a parent, we lived with the sadness that we would not have him as he grew old, that our kids would never know him as we did.

He grew up and lived through adulthood, marriage, and parenthood in a world that paid homage to traditions, the traditions of family, work, church, and the obligations and responsibilities they create. Since he stayed with Bell after the move to Jersey he rose every workday before dawn for the long bus trip to the city, like hundreds of thousands of other suburban fathers. He persevered, as fathers do, seeking good for his family, which meant the best education he and  Pat could manage for us. For many painful hours on Saturdays he drilled me at math, which was effortless for him. I stared blankly at the long-division formulas he sketched on graphing paper with mechanical lead pencils.

I scraped through. I wanted to go to the public high school with my friends but ended up at the austere all-boys Catholic school. For him, the front and center mission always was the best education he could afford. Education, and the quality of schools, helped drive Sandy and me in 1986 from what was then sleepy, small-town Nashville to industrial, congested, high-cost New Jersey. Schools matter.       

The world changed in the Sixties for the worse, as Vietnam, civil rights violence, and assassinations tore the country apart. The cultural revolution, as some saw it, distorted and ridiculed the values and priorities of the Greatest Generation. The sad stories, now dated, have been told many times of young people who in those years broke with their parents, swamped by anger, aimlessness, despair.

He did not change. The values he lived and taught were immutable and eternal. We took them with us through the hard times, to college, the military, marriage. He let us live our own lives. He mellowed—maybe not the right word—but I felt he was pleased, quietly, with his handiwork as we became adults. He and Mom came to Nashville, went with us to a cabin by a lake, he and I rented a boat and went fishing miles from the nearest town, as we had out on Long Island when I was a kid. He went for walks with Laura, then four, and with Michael, who was two.

He loved us in the old-fashioned way a father loves his family, love always limned with the seriousness that grows from acceptance of responsibility—duty, maybe, in the timeless subtlety of Thomas Aquinas who wrote in his Summa that love, simply, is the desire for good for another. The love of a father is always there, light on emotion and melodrama, rock-hard, unchanging. What else? What else matters?

The other day, Saturday, he would have turned 97. Not that that was likely. Time we know is relentless. Now Patrick, at the far end of that graceful curve of family symmetry, will establish his own milestones for eternity. The “full hand” will shortly become six, seven, and so on, the experiences and achievements will accumulate as he moves forward, growing in grace and wisdom, as the prayer goes.

The special connection, two days on the calendar, but really, for all of his life, will remain. He’ll never outgrow the unique closeness to a man in heaven who looks down and smiles on him, his brother, all of us. Even as the birthdays add up, he’ll carry forever his own link with the family past, a mysterious link to love and faith, hope and goodness.