The Parts We Share

I’m sitting in a parking lot when I get an email from my husband with an attachment. The email’s subject line is “Your dad – old newspaper – for fun (attached) + Jason.” I open the attachment and see a smiling photo of my dad from high school next to a young girl’s photo under the headline “Teens Front.”

I scroll through the article quickly at first, not sure what to expect. Then I see words like “newspaper” and “play” and I’m confused. I go back to the start and slowly read through it, understanding better that it’s a feature on my dad as a then senior at Winona Cotter High School.  

“James is this year the assistant conductor of the Cotter Concert Band.” 

“James worked, summer before last, for an organ builder, rebuilding pipe organs.” 

“James has taken part in drama productions.” 

“He demonstrated the organ at St. Stanislaus Church for the Southeastern Minnesota Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.”  

“Also a member of the Rampart, school paper, staff, James represented Cotter, along with five other delegates, at the National Catholic Press Convention in Milwaukee last month.”  

Even though I’m alone, I repeatedly say aloud “really? Huh.” 

All these bits are news to me—perhaps more “news” than they were to the readers of the Winona Daily News December 16, 1958. After all, the readers then were living in Winona, Minnesota, and might have known my dad and what he did.  

But I don’t remember these stories. I’m not sure I ever heard some of them. I wonder if he told me and I just wasn’t listening.

I ask Jason to search for other articles for me in the online database, suddenly aware that there might be an untapped vein of information—more clues to help me understand my dad’s childhood and what led him to be who he was. 

From that larger search, I learn the name of one of his piano teachers, or a voice teacher, it’s unclear from the article. I see that my dad put an ad in the Daily News when he was just 17 for giving piano lessons in his home. I see there were recitals by his students at my grandparents’ home, a house I remember well from my own childhood. This part sounds vaguely familiar. I see my dad’s name in the cast list for more than one play, bit parts for sure, but a pattern. I see him play for weddings and celebrations, which I knew occurred.  

And there’s a random mention of him attending a birthday party when he was five. I see some names of his peers I recognize, names he mentioned or people I met later in life.  

I ask my mom if he shared more details when he was alive about some of these childhood and high school experiences, about traveling to Milwaukee or writing in the school newspaper.  

“No, I doubt it,” she says. “He just didn’t like talking about his childhood much.” 

As I wrote and revised my memoir, I spent so much time reflecting on why that might have been the case, and I thought I’d “dealt with it.” But now this newspaper article brings it all up again and I can’t help but ask myself why he shared the parts he did and why he didn’t share the rest. 

And I can’t help but wonder, what are the parts I share with my two sons? What will they remember? What would surprise them decades from now if they read an article about me? 

My boys have gone with me to drive by homes I lived in, places I went to school. They have heard me talk about my high school experiences, the good and the challenging, what extracurriculars I was in. And I wrote an entire book about my past and so many of my thoughts, so if they really want to know, well, there’s that. 

I know my kids would never be surprised to read something about my passion for reading or writing or my work in education. In 35 years, if they saw something about me being on the math team throughout high school, they might not remember that. Maybe it’s just the outliers here that surprise me about my dad, the parts that don’t fit the larger person I constructed in my mind.  

What surprises me within the articles about my dad isn’t his passion for music, but when he put himself out there in front of others—to appear on stage, to promote himself as a piano teacher. I suppose his willingness to do recitals as an adult is similar, but I always saw behind the scenes the lack of confidence.  

I’m surprised when he says in one spot that literature is his favorite class because he really didn’t like to read fiction by the time I knew him. But maybe that was just something he said for the article, or maybe he did once like reading fiction and then he changed and grew. I could re-learn a lesson here that it is a good thing to remain open to personal evolution. 

Perhaps what surprises me the most is that I feel sad when I read the articles—sad that I can’t ask him for more. Sad that he didn’t tell us more. It doesn’t make me miss him or want him back. The pain he caused on a regular basis was too much. Instead, I think some of the sadness is just about the finality of death, the reality that all untold stories are forever out of reach. It reminds me that when we die, we leave behind the parts we shared and then also an impenetrable silence. I spent 12 years reading his journals and reflecting and trying to understand him more deeply. All it takes is one article with some unknown facts to remind me that there are things I will never know. 

His untold stories of childhood contain now-hidden clues to who he was as a parent and an adult. I try to share more with my kids, but I’m not sure that helps them understand me or my choices. Maybe we can’t understand until we are older. Perhaps I can hope that the stories I tell and have told and have written down will be there for them when they begin to wonder—if they begin to wonder—why I made the choices I did, why I was the parent and adult I am. 

I also wonder if the parts of our lives that we share with our kids don’t actually help them to understand us as much as we might hope. William Martin’s The Parent’s Tao Te Ching describes a paradox I’ve experienced when trying to understand my children: 

“Although you give your children names, 

their reality is nameless and mysterious. 

Their mystery is hidden, 

yet plain to see. 

It disappears when you stare at it.  

It hides when you seek it.” 

Perhaps no matter how many stories I tell my kids, no matter whether someday they try to read and understand me, the mystery of who I am will remain hidden. I’ll always wish my dad had shared more while he was alive, but maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe the parts we share across parent-child relationships are always a little bit fuzzy.  

Maybe that mystery can make me marvel more at the incredible complexity of the human self. How amazing is it that we can spend so much time intentionally sharing our experiences, hopes, fears, sadness, and dreams with people and yet our essence is still only known by ourselves? And even the most self-reflective among us don’t truly understand or know ourselves. We are amazing, complicated, unknowable entities! If there is a divine entity that knows us completely, if there is an afterlife where we become aware of ourselves and others completely, well, that will be incredible—and unimaginable now. For now, perhaps it is enough for me to know the parts we share, and the parts I learn later on, and then to stand in awe and wonder at all that lies beneath the surface.