Introvert Born or Made? #3

Part Three

Bad Influence of the Paternal Example

Showing off was the ultimate no-no, my father scolded over his iceberg lettuce with mayo, and old fashioned beef stew at the round oak kitchen table pushed up against the strawberry patterned wallpaper. Dinnertime was an opportunity for a parental lecture, and he used the occasion of a captive audience often. Admonitions, and reiteration of the rules all children should obey was his primary parenting style.

Ich kann lob stinkt, his mother had warned him, which loosely translated from the colloquial German of her Prussia born father meant self-praise stinks. Showing off was akin to thinking you merit attention. Such an immature thought went against that essential directive to shush. As a result, more than not being encouraged to stand out among my peers, I was subtly and overtly discouraged from doing so.

It was impolite, I was told, to act like you’re better than someone else, which was Dad’s idea of showing off, of trying to be in a spotlight, demanding others’ attention. Did that stifle any impulse for extroverted behavior, or simply align with some genetic leaning toward introversion?

There’s really no way to know. I certainly wasn’t aware of holding this notion in some high esteem. More likely, it was just another rule to obey so I didn’t get a spanking.

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I don’t have cherished memories of my father. Other than levying rules like don’t contradict your mother, and don’t make noise when I’m working, he was fairly disengaged from direct parenting of his only daughter. Looking back on it, he occupied little emotional space in my life, except for when he took a belt across my bare bottom for sassing mom, or denying to her I’d eaten the cookies missing from the package despite their gummy residue in my teeth.

When I think of him now three main memories arise. In one he’s sitting in the recliner to the side of the brick fireplace at the edge of the family room with its rustic colonial décor and knotty pine paneled walls. His black rimmed glasses perched on the edge of his rather large nose, he’d not really be watching Lawrence Welk or Bonanza on the TV across the room. National Geographic, Life Magazine, or US News and World Report among other publications within his reach in a beaten copper kindling bucket absorbed his attention. He read vociferously, like it was required to know what the magazines told him about the world.

His ability to lose himself in the adventures of other locales, achievements of featured communities, and the argued politics of the day was impressive — particularly for then never being discussed with the family. He lived so tucked away in an inner life that I never really got to know who he actually was beyond the disciplinarian mother demanded he become when I displeased her. I got his measured, impersonal punishments, but rarely his kindness or interest in me as a separate individual with hopes and dreams.

So rarely that the only instance of interest from him that I remember didn’t happen until I was about 24, taking a constitutional law course, and sending several of my assigned legal arguments to him. He wasn’t a constitutional lawyer, just a tax and estate one, but I was curious to see if his comments would differ much from that of my instructor.

They didn’t. Nor did those graded A+ papers cause him to encourage me to become a lawyer myself. He assumed I’d be a housewife, his limited vision of what was appropriate for women in the 1970s. Never in my ambitious yearnings did I aspire to that as my only role as an adult.

Needless to say, we didn’t know how to meaningfully communicate with each other. But it did cross my mind to wonder if he wanted or even liked children, or if he agreed to my adoption just to keep his wife happy — or give her someone else to focus on.

In another memory, it’s the sound that stuck with me. Most workday evenings he barricaded himself behind the pocket door separating the family room from his study where he worked on clients’ taxes, fingers flying on the adding machine atop another antique oak table Mom found at some farm estate sale in Iowa.

That’s the sound I remember, the click click click of entering numbers, and the shuuck kwuck that came when hitting the button that made the machine sum up and spit out a paper trail, like a cash register receipt. He could do it without looking, like touch typing, or me playing the piano without keeping my eyeballs on the keys.

Working with his adding machine seemed to be the kind of solitary activity that he liked best. Or maybe he just liked separating himself from the rest of the family. His study had its own half bath and phone. The only stereo in the house was on a green marble topped credenza housing his albums. No one else was supposed to use it. He sometimes played some gospel or instrumental music when he wanted to drown out the TV in the next room.

The closet in his study was where he hid his stash of Mavrakos chocolates, a beloved St Louis brand, and his home office supplies. A double wide window looked out on a large box hedge lining the driveway and screening the view of the back side of the house from anyone coming up the long driveway seeking a door to knock on, and the brick patio with a concrete bird bath in the center for when he needed to gaze out on the soothing site of Nature.

His study had two other doors besides the one leading back to interacting with family, and not counting the closet and half bath. One of those extras went to the garage and was the primary door we all used for going in and out of the house. The other was almost never opened, but was there for the rare occasions he’d have a client come to the house.

My final prevailing image of him is how he was more often in a suit and tie than any other clothing. There must have been three dozen or more neckties hanging on a rack over a door inside the hall closet that also stored his suits fresh from the dry cleaner. He never left for work without wearing a fedora and a calf length overcoat on the colder days. I don’t think he actually owned a pair of jeans, or a sweat suit.  At least, I don’t remember him wearing those. He had khakis for vacations, but never shorts, likely because he was a little bow-legged.

And when he cut the grass on the riding mower, he did so with his light colored plaid cotton sport shirt tucked into those khakis. I know he went fishing and hiking on summer vacations in the mountains, but since I wasn’t included but once that I recall — on a torturous day-long walk entirely downhill on the Old Fall River Road in Rocky Mountain National Park — I don’t remember his wardrobe for those activities.

If he used after-shave at all it was so sparingly that there is no smell I can associate with him. Rarely did he smile. So seldom did he laugh I can’t remember what his laugh sounded like or what his face looked like then.

I write that and think, how sad to have not made a more vivid, or positive, impression.

But don’t get me wrong. He was a quintessentially organized and dutiful person, dedicated to and heavily burdened by ensuring that his family had every material need taken care of. Maybe he just didn’t know that that wasn’t all we needed.

A rather insular workaholic, it’s fair to say he had only two real friends, and neither of them lived in our local community. Not even in the state we did. He took leadership roles in church, mostly out of a sense of obligation, but never parlayed that into developing a social circle. Despite those weekly roles, if he was overly religious, he kept it to himself.

If I modeled anything of my life from the examples he set, it has probably been the workaholic and limited friendships role modeling.

Oh, and the recliner chair. I’ve never been without one since returning from Europe.

He hated to be asked tax or legal questions outside his office, so when people tried making a friendly connection that way, he would direct them to making an appointment. It was one of his strongest ethical maxims not to socialize with people he did business with.

So he belonged to no clubs other than a garden club that I can vaguely remember.

There was once on a weekend when we drove far out into the country past the St Louis suburbs, and stopped to pet the cows loitering along a barb-wired fence. I suppose it was a natural reaction to getting several sets of hands stroking her nose that one cow stuck out a humongous tongue to return the favor.

Eeuuww! I still remember the slimy, sand paper roughness of it running past my wrist almost to the elbow.  Mom screamed of course, thinking I was about to get eaten.

 Dad played no golf, no tennis, nor did he watch football. When he watched baseball it was usually over the top of the magazine in his hands. I can’t recall him ever hosting parties for the dozen or so people he employed. He was never a buddy-buddy kind of employer. Whether it was a need for privacy, a fear of breaching his highly valued privacy, or a classist drive to maintain a separation between himself and his employees, I don’t know.

Likewise, except for belonging to the Summer Residents Association of Estes Park Colorado, which mostly rotated the hosting of weekly barbeques, he didn’t socialize with our St. Louis neighbors either, unless mom dragged him to the progressive dinners that happened a couple years for the holidays.

As I recall, our house served celery with cream cheese or peanut butter, cherry tomatoes and olives on little cocktail swords but no alcohol at all, and canned Boston brown bread with cream cheese formed into stars, daisies, and hearts with the help of metal cookie cutters. Was that calculated to service an expectation without encouraging people to hang around? If so, I can see my father’s somewhat anti-social influence in that.  

I never had the impression that he thought himself better than others. He just seemed to have little curiosity about how others lived, what interested them, what they did for work and play, except from the impersonal distance of being reported in a magazine. Maybe, like me, he felt that making small talk was boring.

I don’t know if he thought of himself as an introvert, but he certainly acted like one. Perhaps this is where I got it. Perhaps this would argue in favor of the so-called nurture theory.

Or, maybe I would have been an introvert, regardless of this stellar example.

In installment #4 Maternal Strictures I recall how my mother's behavior could have driven me into introversion as a self-preservation measure.

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