Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

What was your Dad like when you were a child?

Dad was 47 years old when I was born, so in some ways he always seemed old to me. He and my mother had been married for almost twenty years at that point, and in the same job and home for ten years, so they were very settled in their lives. I was a complete surprise and threw a wrench into things in many ways, but he always let me know that he was delighted with me and wouldn’t have changed a thing.

My father was 6‘4” and seemed tall enough to touch the moon. When I was just six weeks old he fell on the ice and broke his arm—thankfully on the trip after he had carried me in from the car—so some of my earliest memories of him are “The Elephant Game,” which I only understood much later were the physical therapy exercises he did to restore strength and flexibility to that arm.

Dad was the minister and in our church, Sunday School came before church and once I was too old for the nursery I was expected to sit through the adult service next to my mother. I grew up listening to stories about myself from the pulpit and having him say “God Bless You,” in his beautiful bass voice when I sneezed in church.

He was very affectionate and much more emotionally open than my mother was. He would openly weep at romantic movies and loved for me to sit on his lap and snuggle with him. He could also get very angry at times—until I was an adolescent that was more directed at my sister than at me, but his loud voice made it seem that he was yelling even when he had no intention of doing so.

Like many families of the era, Dad was the “fun” parent, the one who took us for ice cream, or to McDonald’s, or out for a late movie on Thanksgiving night, while Mom set the chores and kept the rules and made us stop playing for dinner, or bedtime. I’m told that in earlier days he was perfectly able to cook for himself and Anne, but by the time I came along there was some combination of more money and learned helplessness, but he still took charge of the grill for backyard London Broil in the summertime.

Since we lived in the parsonage, just across the driveway from the church, he was around much more than many fathers. He worked in the mornings at his office in the church, came home for lunch, then spent the afternoon calling on parishioners who were sick, or going through other crises. When I was little he would take me along when calling on families with children, and by the time I was in junior high I would often go along with him once a week when he went up to the hospitals in Albany. On Sunday afternoons we would drive down to see my grandmother in the nursing home. Many of my best memories of him are of conversations we had in the car together.

He was never athletic and not much of a sports fan, though he always enjoyed watching the baseball game. He was a Rockefeller Republican, voting for Democrats in the presidential elections and trying to keep his more liberal leanings confined to the Christian life he lived largely for others. If he hadn’t felt a call to the ministry he would have been a history teacher and was a scholar of the Protestant Reformation and a big fan of historical fiction. He loved to read and happily encouraged me to read any book in his library that caught my eye. He tried hard to teach me the habit of reading a daily newspaper and though that never caught, he did make me see current events on a national and international scale as relevant to our lives and worthy of my attention.

Although I think I’m actually better than he was at telling stories, I learned it from him, the art of observing the world for the purpose of distilling its meaning and finding its lessons. He had a hard time letting go of the details and sticking to the point, and so I also learned from him the joy of digressions, of conversations that start on one topic and drift over the course of hours into far different regions. I still find myself wanting to tell him things and to hear how he would incorporate them into his Sunday sermon.

While I was in Northern Ireland last summer, I started making a list of all the stories I tell that I'd like to write down. This is one of them.

My dad was a United Church of Christ minister. For twenty-seven years (from before I was born until after I went to college) he served a church in a small town in Upstate New York--population right around 3000. While he had a good ministry there, I never really felt at home there. We had no family within hours of us, and we valued education and travel and culture much more than the local average. I was a precocious kid with the vocabulary of an early reader and a tendency to talk about things that few kids cared about.

One day I was playing in the shrubbery outside my dad's office. I didn't know that the window was open, but my dad was working at his desk and half listening to my conversation with Evelyn Ottaviano as we played.

"Elizabeth," said Evie at one point, "You are SO WEIRD!" My dad paused, wondering how I would respond and was very proud to hear me reply, with a sigh, "I know. But I'm perfectly normal for a Hunter."