There are later home movies that feature me as a sullen 11-year-old, tall for my age, with the long legs of a runner. My petulance is obvious as I shrug myself away from my mother’s outstretched arm–asserting my will, brandishing my independence. It’s as if we had never been attached by a short umbilical cord, carrying her blood into mine. The way she looks at my father, who is again behind the camera, reveals her frustration.
What wasn’t filmed during those years was the way I altered my stride whenever my mother and I were out together. I either loped ahead or trailed behind, refusing one way or another to match my steps to hers. It was the punishing stride of adolescence, meant to force her back behind a boundary line I’d decided upon. Also never filmed were my father’s sad eyes when he tried to tell me how much my behavior hurt my mother.
Now it is decades later. I walk with my mother through her garden–down some stepping stones, along a path to look at the rosebushes or to cut camellia blooms for vases in the house. Her pace is slower these days, and I adjust mine accordingly. My father is in the room that has become his corner of the world since Alzheimer’s imprisoned him. It’s the last room he will see when his eyes close for the final time. His feet no longer walk across the earth’s surface, yet he is everywhere I look.
Sometimes I think we need look no farther than the pattern of footprints stretched out behind us to understand the lives we’ve lived. We can follow the first tentative steps of our infancy through the long, defiant strides of adolescence and young adulthood–the running-away years, the years of putting distance between ourselves and our families, of burning up time–to the more solid footprints, set down as we grow older. We learn the value of standing still sometimes.
These are the tracks we leave on the earth. If we look closely we can also see our parents’ footprints, often close to us, as they guide and lead us, at other times far behind, as they wait for us to turn and remember them.
We slow down, finally, to look longer and more carefully at our parents. My father, who strode confidently onto the stage of history, sat at my dinner table many years ago after his presidency had ended, and tried subtly to pick tomatoes out of the pasta dish I had made. I had forgotten that he didn’t like raw tomatoes, and he was trying to move them aside while talking, hoping I wouldn’t notice. He was always polite–achingly so–and even in the depths of his illness, still is. I think there are times when he eats only out of politeness, because he’s being asked to, not because he’s hungry. If I knew this before, during the more restless, fiery years (and I’m sure I did), I didn’t stop to linger on the sweetness of that quality, or to learn from it.
We think differently about days that have been set aside to honor our parents–Mother’s Day, Father’s Day–which once were just reasons to go buy cards or gifts, but later take on deeper meaning. We pause on those days, overwhelmed by a surprising surge of reverence for the task our parents took on: bringing us into the world and trying their best to get it right. Whether we have gone on to have our own children or not, we realize what an awesome undertaking parenthood is.
There are people who would say that my father’s footprints are larger and deeper than those of other parents because his political legacy gives them weight, creating indelible marks in the halls of history. But those aren’t the footprints I see when I look back down the years. I see the soft scuff of dirt rising up from his brown walking shoes as he took his daughter to the top of the hill to fly a kite. I see the traces of his riding boots, caked with mud, on the concrete floor of the tack room when he carried in his saddle and bridle. I see his footprints pressed into the wet sand of the beach as he walked toward the sea to catch steep waves and ride them back to shore. His stride was as smooth and certain as it was when he walked into the White House, and onto the stage of history. I see a small girl on that beach as well, pressing her feet into the shapes that her father’s feet have left to see how much bigger his footprints are.
I have gotten lost in those footprints during my life; I have fought hard and bloody battles to pull myself away. These are the tracks I have left on the earth. But now I look for my father’s tracks on every beach, every trail. Because they mark the way home.
