70th Birthday Greetings – an exchange with Jonathan

Dear Mark,

 

Congratulations on your 70^th birthday!

 

70, as they say, is not nothing.

 

Mark: As I sit here in the Netherlands having only recently passed the 48 year mark, and having done quite a lot of different stuff in that time, I have an increasingly if all too slow-developing appreciation of (or interest in) the question of what makes life good and worth living and how to enjoy it. In this relation, you come to mind.

 

While there are aspects of our parents’ lives that will always remain mysterious or unknowable, there are other aspects that are familiar and remain a source of strength and inspiration. One of those I’ve come to appreciate over the years is your periodic though consistent tendency toward contemplation and reflection.

 

Amid the ups and downs, the excitement and frustrations, stresses and humor, this aspect of your has always been there. Whether around a 1970s campfire, a walk around the block in the 80s, or at some late hour in some American or global location over the last two or three decades, this aspect of you always emerges.

 

I’ve said in the past, the intellectual curiosity you helped instill in me as a child has remained with me and has been one of the great gifts in my life. But this ‘reflection stuff’ is another aspect of your personality and your presence in my life that is important to me.  

 

I suppose identity is a life-long process and as we pass various milestones we pause and reflect on who we are now. We think about our path to the present and also about the relationships that have defined us and continue to define us and give our lives meaning.

 

While you might not be big on birthdays, this particularly birthday is (almost) undeniably big. At the very least it’s a suitable occasion to remind you of the profound importance that I attach to you and to our relationship, past, present, and going forward.

 

In the meantime, here’s to a great year, to you and ma, and to all of us.

 

No doubt we will talk later today with Nan and the kids, and of course we’re looking forward to your visit.

 

Love,

Jonathan

 

(dashes off to give his the semester’s first lecture on ‘world capitalism and its critics’)

 

 

It is a happy thought for me that I might have contributed to your intellectual curiosity.  Not sure how I helped out in that development. I am similarly not so sure about this reflection and contemplation business. I am naturally curious about what is going on around me, perhaps at times with some intensity. But, that is frequently more impulsive and erratic. 

 

It is of course wonderful for me to be able to talk with you (and Nan, too) about your research and thinking. Your mother is willing and interested in what I am working on. She really is helpful with editing. Aside from her you and Nan are the only people who don’t glaze over when I get started talking about what really interests me. I don’t have people around me who can really engage with me. So, I find myself holding the throttle down so that people don’t flee.

 

It is true that our parents in many ways remain mysterious. My father revealed an enormous fact to me when I was about 12 years old. My sister Ba had committed some travesty at boarding school that required him to drive out to Troy NY in the middle of the winter (this was before the Mass Pike so it was a long day’s drive each way). I just remember on his return at dinner with just Ed and me and mother at the table he said, “You children have to understand that there was life before you. And, there will be life after you!” (In part referring to the well-known expectation that we should leave the house and not return after college) It really had not occurred to me that my parents actually existed before me and that their lives were not dependent on my existence. I was just part of their saga. A mystery about your mom’s dad was his life as a musician. Before getting married he played saxophone in a very important popular band in the late 1920s. Louis Davis playing music in a big stage band???

 

Between the less than reliable nature of our memory and in my case the fact that my father died 45 years ago, he is just a few fragments now. What with the sharply differing memories of him amongst us Orton siblings it is hard to believe that I really know anything about him. It is one of the regrets of my life that he did not live long enough to have seen me even into my early 30s. 

 

Thanks for the birthday wishes.

 

Love,

Mark

 

BTW – see you soon.

 

Thanks Mark.

 

Regularly looking shit up in the dictionary and asking how things work in presence of impressionable children over the course of 12 to 20 years is not to be underestimated!

 

 And that was just the tip of the iceberg. 

 

While your moments of reflection might be impulsive, I’ve been around you long enough often enough to have enjoyed an accumulation of those impulsive  moments such that they actually amount to more than a pattern of sorts, and one that has impressed upon me this importance of periodic reflection. I suppose when it becomes obsessive compulsive there are reasons to worry, but when it occurs around the stoop on a warm summer night or some other such place it’s a sweet thing that I can hold onto amid the infinite mystery of the broader conditions ….

 

Jonathan 

Sent from my iPhone