You're Doing What?!

Some families have traditions of owning property for centuries, legacies of membership in Ivy League clubs or family pews in certain old churches. My family is pretty much the mirror image of that—we have traditions of upheaval and change. So we are never much surprised when one of us announces that she is leaving her job to start a business, or writing a book, or going back to school. Especially the going back to school part.

And one reason why has to do with what my father, Bill Tidwell, did when he was almost forty. He left the military after twenty years of service and went back to college. The university worked with my Dad to transfer some of his military experience into college credit, but as a general studies student, he was required to enroll in the basic classes in literature, history, and science like any other college freshman. These classes became part of our family experience as my father struggled to make the transition from soldier to student. Most people can barely imagine their parents as young people, much less imagine how they responded to reading Virgil’s Aeneid or Spenser’s Faerie Queen. But I am one of the rare people who can tell you about my Dad as a college student, because I remember it. I was there.

I can remember a Sunday afternoon when we took a family drive in the country from our house in Anniston, exploring the small communities of Webster’s Chapel and Reed’s Mill, an area where my Dad would eventually buy some land and build a house. On this drive, my mother read aloud, as she sometimes did on long car trips (this being in the days before audio books had been invented). The story that day was the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” an eerie tale of a minister in a small town who literally hid his face in shame over secret sin. The story left us all little spooked, and maybe my Dad wanted to make a joke to break the spell. Later that day, when my mother was holding my two-year old sister, Beth, in her arms, Dad snuck up behind them and presented himself with a handkerchief tied over his face. Beth shrieked with alarm and wouldn’t come near him for hours.

I had the sense of how my father’s  studies were affecting how he looked at the world as we sat and watched the evening news about civil rights, antiwar protests and the moon landing. How deeply my father’s those lessons were integrated into his approach to life became very clear to me in an incident that occurred after his graduation, when I was a high school student. There was a misunderstanding and subsequent disagreement between my parents and I about permission to attend a rock concert on a week night. This story gets retold in my family now as The Night I Ran Away, but that is pure hyperbole. All that really happened was a dollop of adolescent rebellion: I was denied permission, but I went to the concert anyway. (A double bill of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Black Oak Arkansas—a southern fried rocker’s dream show).  I knew there would be some kind of punishment for my disobedience, and I nervously awaited my Dad’s verdict—how long would I be grounded?

But my father surprised me with a novel approach. He had remembered some readings from his political science classes about civil disobedience, and he assigned me the task of reading and then writing him an essay in which I compared the positions on civil disobedience of Socrates and Henry David Thoreau. Wondering what mad parental mind trick this might be, I read the short assignments. Gradually,  I saw what my father was trying to teach me: Socrates had broken the law of the land and willingly drank the poison that was his punishment, believing it was a just verdict he must accept. Thoreau, on the other hand, had resisted paying a war tax for noble reasons, but had let wealthy friends pay his fine and get him released from jail. My father wanted me to be willing to accept the consequences of my behavior, and when I told him I did, he replied that if I truly understood that, then I was not a kid anymore, and I didn’t need the rules governing my curfew to be quite so tight.

Socrates and Thoreau changed the quality of our family life, because my father was able to let his education be more than a hoop he was jumping through on his way to the next thing. I didn’t maybe grasp that then, I just thought my Dad was kind of quirky in his disciplinary methods. But now that I am a student again, at midlife, I so admire what he did then, and hope I can let what I am learning work its way into the texture of my life, so that it enriches who I am and how I relate to the world. If so, I’ll just say it’s family tradition.