Chris

Chris has had a hard forty-seven years with few comforts. He bore adult responsibilities even as a child. His father was a harsh and tyrannical man with a short fuse and a mysterious history. When Chris’s parents divorced, Chris was three and his mother was twenty-three. His father, a decade older than his mom, absconded with Chris and told him his mother had run away. After that they moved from state to state and Chris’s father married a succession of women he bullied till they disappeared. Chris remained, did the housework, went to school, tried to please his moody old man. One year his mother took his father to court and won the right to have Chris spend summers with her, but that only lasted a few years, till his father disappeared with him again.

As a teenager Chris was drawn to heavy metal music and dreamed of being a rock star, became a lead singer and lyricist for a band, and thought for a while that he might actually make it. He was attracted to a girl who was also reared by a difficult father. They set up housekeeping and soon had a son. Chris, accustomed to responsibility, supported his family. A daughter arrived, the wife drifted into addiction, and Chris became a single father. Now his daughter is fifteen and his son, barely out of his teens, has fathered two babies with his young girlfriend. Chris is a stable, supportive, loving presence in his granddaughters’ lives. By consistent hard work and persistence, he has moved up and up in his job till now he spends most of his time traveling, training others, and he’s weary from an unending series of long flights, mid-range hotels, and irregular sleep. He checks in on his precocious fifteen-year-old daughter by phone, and he worries about her.

He’s doing a training session in Portland this week, where his mom now lives, and they had dinner together tonight, trying to know each other and to connect honestly and with love despite the rubble of many years of broken connections. She feels his weariness and his kindness, she appreciates the salt-of-the-earth humor that gets him through, and above all she admires his endurance. Whatever comes to him, he bears up, carries the weight, and does his best.

He puts his mother in mind of what William Faulkner said, accepting his Nobel Prize in 1950: “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”  Chris’s mother loves him immeasurably. He is my first-born son. We’ll see each other again on Thursday, and he’ll get to meet Bella then, though he won’t see Bella’s father, his half-brother. Seth is off on another tour.