You wrote that due to a strong mother and an indulgent father, both your daughters
were feminists from birth with a “charming but rather firm ‘don’t push me, asshole’
implicit in their attitude toward men, culture, and authority.” I don’t know that I can
say our two daughters were that way from birth, but I believe they’ve grown into it.
I asked our youngest daughter about another Harrison that made headlines recently
for his graduation speech, telling the female graduates their highest calling was to
motherhood and hearth. Sweet lord, people either paused from their labors teary-
eyed as this man called us back to our roots or they lost their ever lovin’ shit hoping
the ground would open up and swallow him or at the very least he’d get cut from the
team. I did bristle at his aggressive diminishing of women (men and the Mass also
took hits), but it was a graduation speech for gosh sakes, one of those quiet events
made noisy by the internet then people get all hard and frothy. Back to asking our
youngest about it, a week after the speech mind you, she firmly said, “People really
need to move on”—a variation of “Don’t push me, asshole.” I grinned, and moved on.
My wife/their mother/that strong woman and I were reminiscing this week about a
hard season when hiking down Barr Trail she slipped and fell and broke her ankle.
In the wake of that grievous wound, an acquaintance took her to lunch and asked,
“What have you sensed God teaching you though this?” My wife/their mother/that
strong woman just looked at the woman and had the presence of mind to say, “I don’t
know”—three little words that encompass “Sometimes you slip and fall on a wet root
and end up breaking your ankle and the search-and-rescue team has to come and save
you and it hurts like hell and you have to have surgery and the recovery takes forever
and you’re never really the same after that and there’s no lesson God wanted to teach
you, that’s just what happens sometimes when you hike big beautiful lung busters
in this lovely world, these precious days that we get to only to spend never to save.”
That’s a mouthful but still just a gently firm elaboration of “Don’t push me, asshole.”
I’d say our two daughters and one son are feminists all having grown tall alongside
a strong mother and an indulgent father, a life and a time I remember as charmed.
We were, as you wrote, “in love with this life as deeply as possible.” It left a lasting
imprint on our brains and hearts, and we all suffer from saudade—that Portuguese
word I first learned from you: “a person or place or sense of life irretrievably lost.”
Our heartache rises now unbidden. It happens, for people move on. And we all did.