12 May 2023

On this day, 10 years ago(!), my father passed away
The scope and scale of the time, the life in between now and then is entering a new phase, a new level of focus. The relevance of the childhood, young-adult development grief is giving way to some more “adult” phenomenon. I’m an individual, it is (only) in my perception that the sense of being [overshadowed] exists.

For some many years after his passing, being a quite uncertain artist who was a lot more [stuck in one place] than he was at my age, I felt a little insufficient.

I can strike out on my own path, carve out whatever this “identity” is. But there is also this kind of pervading part of me that stays that young, that tender or unformed, as I was then. I am the child of this person, and I was a kind of child when he passed suddenly — our relationship calcified in that moment then then then.

He: doesn’t see me grow up, he doesn’t give me advice, he doesn’t laugh with his brother over the dinner table…
Those moments [frozen] in a time quite (un)like this. And the relative impossibility of transmuting those things to this life I have [now].

It all swims together in this moment, though. I don’t mean to posit this all as so linear. Clearly these plaes and times still ring on: my visit to the house where I grew up, sacred ground in a way. Sacred - just for me, maybe, but gosh it’s so heavy and loaded with [it] there.

I miss my dad. And it’s dizzying to try to understand that I lost him 10 years - ten years! - ago. Maybe because of this growing tension between the person I am in my grief (that child / 19-y.o., etc.) and the person I am in my life [now] - the practical shape my life has taken since; who I am now.
This impossible endeavor of retaining and — taking care of that person, that small and tender me inside all this else. That person needs care, affection — the source of which doesn’t walk this earth anymore.

It’s best expressed by clumsy, blatant, terse and straight-forward phrases:

I want to talk to my dad
I miss my dad
Why isn’t my dad here?
Why can’t I talk to him?

His side-cocked walk, his expectant look, his voice, the chores and travels and dinners — improvised pastas and Costco lasagnas. The simpler shape life and everyday concerns take in youth. Complex in youth but simple in looking back.

What is in that mystery of domestic life? How can it be so different in its orientation from what comes after, outside in public? What is it to have those thoughts, write them down and hold them somewhere close to the chest?..
How does this happen for/to/with others?

///

I feel you, in this moment,
inside the movement of the joints of my fingers.
In the gentle tapping on this table
In the churning din of this airplane cabin, this diversity.

The shapes and gestures my hands can make, the [intuited] movements, figurations, the [aikidoistic] articulations: the poise and focus and seeking.
What a fool ever to be tricked into seriousness, soft hearted, hard hearted.

///

This young father next to me, his partner and child. And how people look at themselves in the mirror, in the private photos they take of their own [character]/[essence]; videos of them dancing alone in their bedroom.
This young father sleeping, on some journey. Them together, a kid to grow older. Me, or you.

/

The way an object feels in the hand. A tactile exploration that lives ineffably with a: meandering through memory. Layers and layers of histories connected loose and free-associated. The sun that day, the reeds, the sound of [your father’s] voice calling for you across the house, the windows open. It’s summertime; easy time.

Do you have an object, the feeling of which you can call to mind? Turning it over in your fingers.
Perhaps which you always liked the feeling of,
somehow it making sense.

12 May 2022

We go through this world alone
and not alone. -- None so rarified as
[this] experience (the feeling of
this ring on this finger, this relation -
9 years on, to the day,
since my father passed away).

///

Like in 2013 - that isolated, rarified, lone feeling of knowing this great gravitational weight of losing this big person, this gravitational center - and nobody else knowing.

After telling him I was buying one to smoke in honor of my father, the man working in the humidor at Binny’s, Mike, remembered his own father to me, as it's from him that he smokes them too. Those sweet little things he saw fit to share, he latched on to; Said he was the funniest guy, a story about a day when his father, a drapery salesman, made some big sale and lit up a cigar on the drive home - he threw the match out the window but it blew back in and got stuck in the visor somehow, without him noticing. After arriving home, the neighbor called some time later to say Hey, [Mike's father], your car's on fire! He said why're you calling me about that, I hate that thing! The whole thing burnt down. It turned out that insurance only covered the headliner, so they had to call some scrapper to haul it away...

“…And he never hit me, but if we were misbehaving he'd have that look in his eye, and he never had to hit us…”

“…He took us kids to the Cubs and Bears games, took us out and did fun stuff with us, which isn't what the other kids had, their dads were always working or not home. -- ”

/

Hearing those rarified experiences of another, feelings and memories so deeply held but also known specifically only to this person. - That thing, so full, so rich, so endless, so rare.

My memories of my father are so. Specific little windows. And, to Mike's experience, him 40 years older than I, who still speaks from the perspective of the -kid-. That in common with another -kid-, buying a cigar because his dad always smoked them: "just occasionally," HCS would say.

//

This morning driving into work, thinking about this Memory, the knowing a person for some years and still feeling close to them despite that they haven't been around for the past 9 -- those various windows still persist, Mike's stories about his dad, but in a network, not a line, as when the person is living, as if: Last year we took a trip to Greece.

And amidst that array, feeling that this person could be a stranger, someone you spent time with for some while but who has moved on.
Or if not in the context of parent-child expectations, what if I imagnied this person as just a one with whose path I crossed for a while, bonded together somehow, but in-dependent?

These experiences unlikely, beautiful, rare, and precious, because it was all so improbable, random, necessary, wonderful. -

//

I found out from a phone call (from my mother, who in turn found out from an odd network of people - phone calls down the line - perhaps from Jay to dojo folks to the Bono's, South Philly folks who took care Chiba and Rico and helped my dad at the dojo and at home for many years, to Susan(?), to my mom to Me) that dad had died suddenly in Turkey - today, 9 years ago. Drowned, somehow, on the "last swim" he always took when we traveled somewhere with access to water - often running late already, often running straight to the airport from the salt water ("salt water is healing!" he always said), wet bathing suits tucked somewhere.

>>> One year, after or just before he had had a knee or hip replacement surgery and was slower than usual (joints worn out from a college football injury (2nd team All-American, "would have been 1st team if I didn't get clipped and taken out for the rest of the season") and a subsequent life in dance and Aikido), we were running late for a flight - he implored Henry and I to “run! run! quick quick!” from a distance; we left him behind!
And we were already fed up from the avoidable urgency of running so late, and out of breath nearing the gate, having lost dad 2 minute ago - we hear his voice again saying “hey! don't stop, keep running!” And this man is getting driven on one of those airport golf cart things! Hooting at us to run faster while he's just getting carted along. Fed up, man!

And I was on the line from my dorm room my freshman year at Northwestern. Say I left the common lounge area where I was watching/playing video games with the other NMQ residents because my mom said something like "are you sitting down? I have something to tell you" - to my room for some quiet. In there mom told me - and I think Henry was with her on the line too. And we cried on the phone together that night, and eventually I left my room -befuddled.-
They were still playing out in the lounge and I sat down in that easy din.

I don't remember the next bits as well but I think one of the RAs who was often hanging with us gaming in the lounge asked [if I wanted to take the next turn and I said no [I'll just chill] / [after a beat - "I just got a call from my mom - my --(with difficulty at saying something incomprehensible)-- dad died"]. I told them some way, I think, and cried with some support from those folks].

But walking around my day today, I'm remembering those bits where I knew this devastating truth, and everything else carrying on. When after hanging up I walked out of my room into the same joyful din I left before I was so changed, as the only one who knew this thing, this rarified experience, the person, the loss, the relation, that unknown, that befuddlement.

I may also have kept it secret somehow. I recall playing an IM soccer game with my dorm team some evening a few days later and walking with the group the mile back to our dorm and taking those steps, looking at that cloud-streaked sky - blazing orange and purple with silver lines during the game, now bluer on the walk back after sundown - I listened to a voicemail left by Lee Hyla, whose call I missed while on the field. Him saying he's so so sorry for my loss, offerng support and a warm welcoming place to stay with him and Kate. I wasn't sure how he knew, how to communicate, it all. But: that message to my ear only, all unknown to others on the same walk back; alone in company, all good, all bad, all uncertain, all present.

I usually feel more significance around his passing on the anniversary of the burial on the 25th, but today I'm thinking about those stories we call to mind, that mixed-up network of experiences and recollections that constitute this Man as he is now - memory, ripples of his living left here and there in the lives of poeple he touched - Aikido students, dance peers and mentors, the Lakota Sioux dance folks, perhaps audience members during his most active years presenting his own dance work in the 70s and 80s, parts of him I know very little of; mine, my family's. -

Brushes, all kinds of brushes - and some secondhand ripples on and on that we all make.

Henry Clay Smith III - (9/25/1945 - 5/12/2013)

HCS III - odds and ends

For those who knew my dad, or maybe have heard me talk about him, know he was a very singular person. And one of my favorite things to do as I relate to him now is to remember him to others, to share stories about him or bits of his work that I have or know of.

One of his resolutions for 2013 was to “Market my work again + make a mark,” and to “Get back out there as a teacher and artist w/ a story to tell.” There’s plenty else tied up with being his family or being his son, but, along the lines of remembering him to others, I’m starting an informal archive of the materials I have of his art-/life-work, perhaps filled in with my own anecdotal memories plus whatever materials might be around online (especially, for example, the digitizing work Kristoffe Brodeur has done of a number of video tapes he left behind.). I don’t know how long it will last, or what all will be covered, but consider this a brief and momentary start to something which may also be brief and momentary.

The creative work is a part of my Dad that I don’t know a lot about—the much he was up to before I was born, and even some during—as he wasn’t often one to volunteer much about his work with us or what it meant to him. But his cutting his own path and making and trying are parts of him I’m particularly proud of and inspired by. And between my own questions personally, my journey artistically, and because I have with me a few boxes of odds and ends that I think are worth sharing, I thought I’d try something new here.

Personalities aside, maybe you can peek through this informal & incomplete blog/archive as a way to see what sorts of things one leaves behind when they go without planning to, odd context-less aspects we are challenged to make sense of.

For me, it’s a way for me to remember this very particular person and to remember him to others; and hopefully it’s also a way for the people whose lives he touched as a teacher/artist to remember him or to know more about him too.

And for Henry III, perhaps, it’s a way for him to go on “making a mark.”

Cheers,
W