Of the Father

Hey Sam,

in my last letter I wrote that my Dad “assumed I was a bit dumb” as a boy. It was a joke, but I now realise that quoting your Grandfather out of context might paint him with a certain broad brush stroke he doesn’t deserve, so I thought I’d try to fill you with a little more detail.

In general I have to say I’m pretty happy with the selection of parents I made in this world, even if they weren’t always as satisfied with each other. They got divorced when I was eleven. Sean and I stayed with Mum so she became my main role model growing up. Her view of the world and the way she dealt with the divorce, when it happened, shaped me in more ways than I can count. Instead of moping around (or after moping around) she flew to Nepal, climbed mountains, drank yak milk, prayed at temples (before Elizabeth Gilbert) and fell out of a boat while white water rafting.

She was (and still is) a rockstar to me. That’s part of your DNA too, just so you know, so if you find yourself with a sudden urge to milk a yak, you know where it comes from.

On my Dad’s side, things were a bit more complicated because we saw each other less often. He was dealing with guilt and responsibility and we sided with Mum. It took longer for us to come back together and understand each other and, as is probably common, it’s taken me a lot of time to realise the things I inherited from him.

That’s him in a local newspaper, advertising canned water. It’s a product that never really seemed to cement its market place value but I remember thinking of him as some kind of rugged adventurer, like Bear Grylls in a car. He was a rally driver and seemed to change cars every year. In particular I remember a Peugot with hydraulic suspension that would rise up like a dog when you turned the key, and a Triumph Stag convertible that, when the top was down, often sported two excited boy’s faces high up above the roll bar.

He once took us down a dirt track and over a jump in the Triumph. We held on, got serious air, and nobody was hurt. When we landed there were still two excited boys in the back, no empty space where a boy used to be. At least I assume that’s the case because my memory finishes mid air, like the credits of a Dukes of Hazard show, with an airborne car and two grinning faces sticking out the roof.

In another car memory (and this one is getting to the point so bear with me), we were crossing a succession of crossroads and I was in the passenger seat. In rally terms that makes me navigator. Dad asked me to keep an eye on the left and to let him know if any cars were coming. I was flush with the responsibility.

‘Clear?’ He would ask.

‘Yes."‘ I would respond.

‘Clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Clear?’

‘Go for it.’

I don’t think I ever said that. It was a minor change he added in later that evening and the effect of it (plus the way he told the story) caused a whole table full of dinner party guests to laugh. That moment is very bright in my memory, as if I have taken it out many times and polished it to a gleam. I think in that single moment I understood the role of story telling and how the truth can sometimes be subservient to the desire to entertain.

When I was a teenager I became obsessed by the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. I can still sing (badly) every song by Jesus, Judas, Pontius Pilot or the Jewish Priests. For some reason it’s only the men’s parts I remember, I’ll get stuck if I go for Mary’s tribute to Jesus for instance, the one she sings after Jesus trashes the temple in Jerusalem. The chorus is fine but if I try to remember why she doesn’t know how to love him, I’m in trouble.

When I was around ten, the movie came out at the cinema in Adelaide. We were all going, me, my brother, my father, my mother. The whole family. It was my first viewing, but not my last, and it led in a direct line to a teenage version of myself compulsively acting out entire scenes alone in our living room, one moment down in the dust as Jesus and the next washing my hands as Pontius Pilate.

Jesus Christ Superstar is pretty brutal toward the end. The main character gets nailed up on a cross and left to bake in an unforgiving backlot in L.A. by a bunch of Romans in pink singlets and chrome helmets.

Now I’m aware that this outcome shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, but at the time I was surprised, due to a couple of hasty parenting decisions Dad made on the drive to the cinema.

Before I get to the film in question let me fill you in on a bit of backstory. My Grandma on Mum’s side (your great grandmother) was Catholic and, in my memory, fiercely so. I used to stay with her sometimes. She would brush my hair, something I still love, but it often happened under the gaze of a representation of Jesus that looked like it belonged in a David Cronenberg movie.

The memory plays out like this: Grandma Morgan is brushing my hair underneath the picture of Jesus. He is looking directly at me. His forehead is bleeding from the crown of thorns, the blood runs down his cheeks into his eyes, dripping back out like tears. He should be squinting from the sting of it but he isn’t, he’s staring straight at me, as though I am to blame. His hands are on his chest. No, wait, not on his chest, but in his chest, because he is pulling apart his sternum, cracking open his rib cage with his bare hands and pulling the skin back to expose a beating heart, like a piece of gristle, a half chewed thing on the edge of your plate after a visit to Sizzler. His open and bleeding heart.

That painting on my Grandma’s wall was enough to traumatise me away from organised religion my whole life. It was also enough to start me crying and wailing in the car as it dawned on me that the movie I was about to see was going to end with the same guy’s death scene.

I cried and wailed in the car, trying to get Dad to turn around and take me home.

“I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go. Stop the car!”

Dad got creative. ‘Jesus doesn’t die.’ He said.

‘What?’

"‘Jesus doesn’t die. They changed the ending... Jesus lives!’

Ok, now this might sound bad. And at the time it was, kind of. I remember sitting in the cinema dark an hour or so later, thinking ‘He’ll be ok, any minute now they’re going to get him back down.’ Instead he bled out and there was a weird laughing, screaming, dissonant soundtrack, like fingernails over blackboards, as the men in the pink singlets and chrome helmets laughed at Jesus bleeding from his crown of thorns, asking his father why he had forsaken him.

Fortunately for both of us there was a great song and dance number to end the thing.

I don’t know if this episode created trauma in me (now I get it, I’m a parent too and I understand that sometimes you’re desperate enough to say anything to your kids to make them calm down because you don’t want them to be in pain, especially not within earshot) but it stayed with me and, like the joke at the dinner party, I learned something.

With the power of storytelling comes the responsibility for what stories you tell.

We all make a fiction out of our lives. We tell and retell our stories, taking them out of the attic and showing them off, but the more we polish those gems we have stored away the more we turn them into what we want them to be, not what they are (or were). I think it’s important to remember when we tell stories of the past, that’s what they are, stories.

When we become parents we realise how much of our parents are in us. Dad’s initials are E.G. which stands for Edward Graham, but I prefer to think of him as e.g., an example of what a Webber can be. I know I’ve accumulated stuff from lots of people but from my father, I now realise, I took the ability to spin a yarn.

So Dad, if you’re reading this, I hope you don’t mind me taking these old stories out for a spin, they’re too good not to share.

And Sam, if you’re reading this, maybe you’ll regard me with the same caveat that I have granted my own father, a caveat best expressed in Mary’s song. One lyric I remember very well:

He’s a man. He’s just a man.

Love,

Ragnar.