Nancie Laird Young - Tea With Dad: Finding Myself in My Fathers Life

Copyright 2021 Nancie Laird Young

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

ISBN: 978-1-9505847-6-5

Cover design by Asha Hossain Design LLC

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To Mom and Dad, without whose stories Id have none
and
To Rachel, Sharon, and Jane, my reasons for everything.

Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt I love.

~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail

A DRIENNE R ICH, Diving into the Wreck

A FEW YEARS AGO , a sudden blizzard in rural Vermont left me and the relatively few travelers remaining on the train I had boarded in Newark that morning stranded for eight hours. Both the main and the backup engines blew after plowing through too many snowdrifts. The train ground to a halt just fifteen or twenty minutes from my intended destination where I had expected to get off the train, jump into a waiting car, ride to a lovely inn geared toward writers, and spend a weeks vacation focused on mapping out a book based on three hundred or so haiku Id written over the past five years.

After many hours of waiting, during which the excellent Amtrak staff rationed power and fed us snacks of packaged cookies, chips, and bottled waterin between shifts of trying to physically dig us outan engine was sent from the south to push our train to the side of the main track in order to free the rails for other traffic long enough to allow time for another train to arrive to pull us back onto the main track.

Through that experience I learned the etymology of the word sidetracked, experienced its literal meaning, and began to realize how being sidetracked functioned both negatively and positively in my life.

Eight hours later, the train was moving again, but my destination station was closed and there was no one to meet me. The conductor and I agreed I would disembark in Montpelier, where Id had enough foresight before my phone battery died to request that my daughter make a hotel reservation for me. Id arrange for travel back to the inn the next day.

Of the four women staying at the inn that week, three of us had difficulties arriving on time due to the storm, so our host announced that rather than meet for readings the first evening, wed all get a good nights sleep, and after a full days work the next day, we would gather after dinner to hear what each of us had written.

I followed the group into the Gertrude Stein Salon that first evening and plopped onto the sofa across from the beautiful fire before asking, What readings?

I am not sure any of us had read the fine print on the inns website as we all seemed surprised and somewhat intimidated at the prospect of reading what we had written. Especially in early drafts. One of the women, my friend Jerilyn Dufresne, with whom Id planned this retreat, was working on her latest cozy mystery, another was writing an autobiographical novel, and the fourth member of our group planned to gather everything she knew about the trauma she and many women in theaterand the entertainment industry as a wholehad experienced and shape it into some form.

I moved off the main track Id been on with the haiku book. I could not imagine standing up in front of my friend and these strangers to read a selection of haiku, so I went to bed, got up the next day, and stared at the white screen of my laptop. Then I began to write.

That evening, I read an essay (now a chapter in this book) about the promise I had made to my dying mother to write and deliver her eulogy. I had not anticipated writing that piece or even thinking about that painful memory. I never expected that I could stand in front of anyone to read something so raw and personal. But I did it. Though a very personal experience for me, it seemed to resonate for the others.

For the next week, I put aside my stack of haiku index cards and for at least eight hours a day, sometimes more, I excavated, prodded, and pushed out words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that described feelings and experiences long buried in my memory. What I wrote revealed that though Id been chugging along for some time (some would say successfully), I was far from the destination Id planned for my life. I began to see my life much like the train ride Id just been ona long trip with obstacles in the way of moving forward and times I moved from one track to another to rest, recover, or sometimes reconsider my destination.

Thats how I came write this book, but it does not explain the form it took. My mothers death and my promise to write and deliver her eulogy, the fact that I did not, and the reasons I assigned for that decision all seemed central to my story at the time. But they were not.

Had I known myself better, I wouldnt have made the promise. Had I been in better shape emotionally, Id have been able to see that the reasons I conjured were part of a personal narrative Id written over the years about who I was and why I was where I was. I would have seen that my story needed a heavy edit.

At the time I saw myself as a huge failure. From the sidetrack I rested on at that moment, I saw my lifes litter on the rails behind me. Two failed marriages, a hopscotch career path, financial problems, and as a sixty-something-year-old woman, I was living with my father. And not because he needed me, but because I needed him