At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

§  Totem and Taboo : Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913)  .............FREUD

(DAD IN 1954: AGE SAME AS MINE NOW)

My father ruled any scene he encountered. He was a Masters-in-Education, a Bachelor-in-American –History. He was the principal of the high school.  He was 100 percent genetically German, his dad an immigrant in the early 20^th century....Grandpa: a small, kind, elegant artisan (he was an engraver), product of Bavaria- born 1889 (that oddly fateful year of his birth... Whatever that could have been like. The year Hitler born, the year Nietzsche went insane.  Seems an important year. To me....)

Dad was always trim.  A 34 inch waist of which he boasted.. The best suits he could afford. Big damn black glasses of the kind I doubt they even make anymore. Thick lenses, magnifying the calmest eyes a boy could hope for in a daddy. Nothing fazed him, ever. Always a logial solution, delivered with a self –deprecatory, but also self-serving, “There! See how easy it was to solve that problem?”

In my Father's presence was a always a preternatural calm that surpasssed any understanding I could ever bring to the scene.

In WW2,Dad was in Nuremburg in 1945, doing ‘translating’ work between the Germans & Americans, visiting all his cousins & aunts and uncles in the ancestral homeland.  What he might have seen, or heard, I shall never know, until , I hope (fingers crossed:) I die and am reunited with his essence, his spirt, whatever it is called these days…him…..dad..

Death may not work like that, I realize.  I have read Eastern psychology/psychiatry/’philosophy-so –called’  that assures me that my current identity is an illusion, a makeshift construction, with a big stupid damn Liar at the focal point of consciousness: me.  My ego is shit. It will be sucked up into the Absolute when I shuck off this body.  Sometimes I feel: the sooner the better.

Dad didn’t give a rat’s ass about religion, though he taught Sunday School for the local congregational Church for many years until his  (in the family: infamous) break with the Church. It was as dramatic as Luther’s break! Except it was undoubtedly for personal professional reasons, a personality conflict with the minister, who had influence in town & did not, maybe, like my dad.  Dad and Mom broke decisively from all  Dogma, services, baptisms, all that nonsense , in 1964. 

I came around in 1967. The, ah, "summer of love'.

I was to find my own answers.

Which I do, daily . Here. On os. And in my books.  Growing up in a spiritual vacuum leaves you clean and pure and willing to let go into some Mystery you know damn well is there, but cannot be described or worshipped, just…experienced….

Dad succumbed to Dementia.  Not Alzheimer’s, thank heaven.  Just a …dulling, blunting of his enormous personality…into what others saw as a bombastic irritable silly-ass childlike damn fool…but I knew was the core.

I descended to the mad core of my dad.

From duty. A son must protect his father. Once he has overthrown him in his mind….

And am finally rising again.