My Father, Wandering

Abstract

My Father, Wandering Christopher Gonzales (bio) A large painting used to hang in the living room of my childhood home. The artwork is no longer there, having been carried away to a closet during one of my mother’s more sweeping renovations when my father was still alive and residing in the nursing home. I think of this painting as the one with the dark blue letters over a murky orange background. The painting evokes the pleasure of reading, with the artist giving careful attention to each printed character, as if the curves and forms of the letters themselves are the subject of interest. I’m reminded of printer’s type, rolled in deep blue ink, with a warm background suggestive of a hazy sunset. A wisp of a figure, perhaps a foot high, squeezes between two of the letters, as if having been exploring the stacks in a library, and now, burdened by the weight of all the words, pauses, mouth open with melancholy. At some point in my youth, I became aware that the artist of this painting was my father, J. Rene Gonzales. I think of my father as someone who wandered. Even after his frequent reassignments in the Army—Arkansas, Louisiana, Maine, North Carolina, and Korea—he continued to move from place to place: Texas, New York City, New Hampshire, Vermont, and several cities in upstate New York, never staying anywhere for long. As he moved about, he broke contact with his Mexican-American family in Austin, Texas, for 25 years, keeping his distance until well after our family settled in Middle Grove, New York. He made very few trips back to his family home, and, toward the end of his life, Alzheimer’s made him so ill he couldn’t travel back. In my attempts to revive and understand him, if only for myself, I started to latch on to my mother’s phrase: he was such a wanderer—a bohemian. People with dementia typically lose their ability to recognize familiar faces and places. They begin to wander or get lost or become confused about their location. This wandering can be dangerous, even deadly. The stress of this risk can weigh down caregivers and families. After my father’s illness, I began to think of his “wandering” with a new, different meaning. When I was a child, the most distinctive features of my father’s physical appearance were his salt-speckled curly black hair and rich brown eyes. His cheekbones and the bridge of his nose were pronounced, yet not severe. One of his former lovers, a Cornell student in the 1960s, described him as [End Page 122] “handsome,” but in a distinctly non-Ivy League way: “intense, artistic, cynical.” At a glance, he stood out. Exotic, interesting. Distinguished, memorable. Not Anglo. In other words, he—and we—didn’t blend in 1970s upstate New York. My mother added, in hushed tones, that my father might be a gypsy. Of course she didn’t mean the historic, real-world Roma peoples. Nor was it used as a slur. Rather, she was evoking a literary romanticization, like the writings of one of her favorite poets, Federico García Lorca. This was the problematic, mythic, and imaginary idea of the gypsy and bohemian—a racialized other—that my parents admired, found useful, and discovered could help them make sense of their place in the world. Once, when my father was driving, we came upon an old VW Bug that had gone off the road. My father stopped the car and got out to help them. He and one of the passengers were rocking the car, working against the suction of the springtime mud, trying to get it back on the road. As he was doing this, still holding on to the car, suddenly the other passenger jumped back in and they sped off, leaving my father angrily gesticulating. “What were you thinking?” My mother seemed shocked, sitting in the passenger seat, glaring at my father. “Well, they deserved it.” From my place in the backseat, I understood they were referring to my father’s gestures, the arm-waving. A short argument ensued: “I bring you to upstate...