on father's day: crows & genetic memory

This fine crow made an exciting guest appearance in the concert hall
on the 4th of July a few years back, during a choir rehearsal. 

This morning out on my run I had to take detours several times to avoid dive-bombing crows protecting their fledglings. This whole area used to be an enormous orchard—the main drag two blocks down is Orchard Street—and one of my professors told me, years ago, that we had such a robust population of crows here because of the apples.

I don’t know if that’s true. But I like that story. I’ve since had this mental image of the ancestors of our crows establishing their little community, like pioneers settling down on a homestead with fine soil.

Today, the first two times I had to turn around to avoid attack, I didn’t mind so much. By the third time, it was starting to get hot, and I just wanted to get home. I was annoyed, and wondered why these damn birds hadn’t gotten the memo. “I thought you remembered faces, guys, and passed on that memory to the next generation?!”

I used to have a companion crow. I don’t know whether it was male or female, but I thought of it as an old codger. It would hang out on the grape arbor and make pleasing sounds while I worked in the garden. One day it followed me to work. I would walk a block, and it would fly ahead a bit, land on a wire, and wait. Repeat.

That was a while ago, but I feel like s/he should have passed along the word, that I wasn’t a threat to the babies.

Well. Not really. I was tired. But thinking about protective parents, thinking about genetic memory, on Father’s Day, after a several weeks of news stories about deeply traumatic, tragic events perpetrated by men—I felt grateful.

My own father was handsome, charming, and wealthy. And a narcissist. And, in his later years, sexually attracted to children—although I don’t know whether he acted on his impulses. My father could not forgive his own dad for abandoning him and his mother, but he himself abandoned three wives and many children. So. Not the best guy.

We know that trauma can have lasting effects, for generations. And all that science-y stuff doesn’t surprise most us, I think, because it’s so easy recognize at a basic level that patterns tend to repeat, children make the same mistakes as parents. Both my parents were broken, each with a long history of abuse, abandonment, trauma, and neglect.

My parents were able to protect and care for us right at the beginning, mostly—I remember my dad defending my mother’s heartbreaking abuse of my sister with an outburst: “She kept you babies clean! She changed diapers!” So that biological urge to protect kicked in, but only up to a point, when the brokenness and mental illness overwhelmed instinct.

So it’s a wonder to me that my own children are free of the burdens of that long legacy, that they aren’t just feminists, but they understand the dire need for a massive shift in our cultural understanding of masculinity and manhood. And they are kind.

Seth, the “baby,” just finished his first year of college, and that adjustment would have been challenging even without the cancer excitement. But the nest has been empty long enough for me to settle into a new rhythm, long enough to conquer the urge to continually catalogue and lament all our (many and real) parenting mistakes. Now I am able to simply enjoy the men my children have become. They are so fortunate to have been raised by a gently protective and loving dad—who is better than I am at dive-bombing potential threats as the boys have launched. But I’m pretty adequate at keeping a welcoming place available for them to come home to.

I’m grateful for all three of them.