22 Oct 2012 (M)I found this to be profoundly depressing but not surprising. Long ago I had foreseen being disinherited and I suspect my brother will be disinherited too. I am collateral damage, because he is currently at war with Mother, and having not allied myself explicitly to him, I am one of the enemy, the disloyal.
By once again insulting me by hanging up on me when I was trying to give you badly needed constructive criticism, you have ensured that I never will communicate with you again. In life as in my will, I am through with you. --Dad. Ω.
He refers to our last phone conversation. How foolish it was of me to attempt communication through a medium that has an indefinite duration. A written letter can be set aside and at any rate has a finite number of pages. With the telephone, one cannot terminate the call until my Father has finished saying everything that is on his mind. He will go on for hours and hours. He never fatigues of talking. I remember once when I was a boy, he was driving me somewhere far away. I fell asleep while he was talking and woke up an hour later, and he was still talking. He had never noticed that I fell asleep. He never had the knack of paying any heed to his audience.
We began talking at about 23:00 and at 1:55 I said I was tired. He had spent the time complaining about my brother and my Mother, their evil ways, while I had listened and sometimes tried to explain to him their points of view, which I well understand. But I was tired after three hours talking on the phone. I had worked a twelve hour shift earlier that day. He is retired and stays up all night reading, brooding. At the time we were not arguing, but just when I said I needed to go, he brought up a new subject that displeased him and expected me to argue about it. He said that in my letter, mailed three weeks ago, which he had not replied to, there was a sentence that called into question the dignity of his father, deceased. I had asked whether a prominent politician, our cousin, had used his considerable influence to get my grandfather a job with the Civil Service. I had only asked whether this were so. I did not think this was insulting, but reasonable since it seems to have been a fairly common practice particularly in the past. It is well-known, to use an example, that Abraham Lincoln appointed friends and allies as postmasters, customs officials and judges. I did not see such speculation as insulting, and said so, but Father was determined to have his rage, because that is what keeps him going in his long hours brooding alone over perceived slights. He said it was Mother that put that idea into my head, evil Mother. I said no, Mother never talked about his father, which is true. So this is why I believe that I am a pawn in a larger battle.
I do not think I was ever important to my Father, only ever just a pawn between him and his wife, though at a tender age, something more, a surrogate. Now it is easy for him to discard me because I never mattered, was just an object. It makes me want to publish a book about him. I am not sure it is worth the effort however. If he lived to see it, he would feed off of the drama, with his love of anger and righteousness. Drama is what he likes. All his life was a battle with imaginary foes, just an arid desert where he plods along in his plate mail armor, shield and sword in hand, sweating and stumbling and cursing and swinging at djinn that are not there. Also it is likely he will be gone long before I am, and I am the one that must carry the name after he has passed. There is a certain freedom and privilege that comes with great age, the certain knowledge of imminent death rendering one immune to all risks. To cap it all, I always expected him to award his legacy to the last woman that whispers sweet flattery into his ear. He always placed the women he liked upon a pedestal, they were saints and goddesses, and he was their hero who knew what was best for them. The woman he currently places in this position is the girlfriend of my brother, who has no difficulty in saying whatever will soothe and please and coax and manipulate. She speaks to his loneliness and also his desire, something no grown man can do.
I've never been exceptional at social engineering. I assume that people are reasonable and fair-minded and speak to them as though this were so, or with the hope that this could become so with sufficient persuasion, but in the case of my father this is no longer so, and maybe it never was so to begin with. I have often wished I had more patience and interest and eagerness for cultivating others for my own advantage, as I see highly socially skilled women do, but then again with my genetics, I am doing about the best I can. When one considers what I came from and where I came from, it is remarkable what I have accomplished.
I do not know what do in response to the note card of my disinheritance, but I feel the best response is no response. My sense of justice wants to write a book, but that sense is so often wrong it seems to me. I want revenge, fairness, what's right, but maybe that is just my Father's blood in me and is not worthy. It may be that he was wicked or weak, two terms that seem sometimes the same thing, really. But I don't see that any of it matters or that anyone cares besides me. Sometimes I care, but sometimes I don't, sometimes I find the story dreadful and boring. There are things that can't be changed, that could only have been corrected long ago, but now are moot, gone, expired. One must live in the present and not the past. And so on and so forth. These are my thoughts now. Perhaps they will remain steadfast. I do think he is testing me, but perhaps I will be equal to the test. For now I choose silence.
