When we think of “opening a window,” most of us think of viewing some aspect of the outside world we know little about. We glimpse what it is like to be an American Muslim or how an itinerant fruit-picking family lives. We peek in on a Mormon in Nigeria or a highly paid fashion model in Manhattan. We seldom think about opening a window into our own lives. But years after my father died, a window flew up, and I gazed at a central quality of his that I had seen, yet not seen, all my life.
My father, I now believe, could be best understood by what he didn’t do. Here’s what he did do: He brought home a paycheck every week and worked hard at his job, whether selling hardware in Montgomery Ward or assembling airplanes at Eastern Aircraft. He was a loving and faithful husband and an okay father who sometimes told stories and even sang songs, and sometimes gave your face the back of his hand.
Here’s what he didn’t do: he didn’t go to any church, belong to any club like Rotary, Lions, or Masons; he didn’t have a group of friends with whom he played poker or pinochle or pool; he never went fishing, hunting, hiking, boating. He didn’t visit people. He didn’t invite people to the house; in fact, he didn’t like people to come to the house. If a car drew up to our curb, Dad would peer out the window and say, “Who the hell is that?” Of course, if people came into our house, Dad was pleasant and jolly, like the effective salesman he was. He never actually seemed relaxed with any callers, however.
Dad had no hobbies. He didn’t collect anything or make anything. He read two or three books a year, if they happened to be lying around, though he spoke with pleasure of books he had read as a boy.
He didn’t go to concerts or to hear the German bands that abounded in our area. He never took Mom to the movies. He occasionally daydreamed about being an artist though he never painted or drew anything. If my mother encouraged him to take an art course at the nearby university, he would scoff and dismiss the idea. “Those guys are just full of hot air; I couldn’t learn nothing from them!” Dad was a great scoffer. Of course he had no interest in politics; he wasn’t just a skeptic; he was a cynic.
He did not like to travel. Once, in Arizona, Mother insisted he take a trip on his own to California, to see the sights and visit a chum he had worked with. He made it as far as the Arizona border, then turned around and came back, scoffing and insisting there was nothing out there to interest him. He was very healthy, if not exactly fit. He struck me as a contented man. Now I wonder how deep the contentment ran.
The window flew open after he had been dead a dozen years. I had been reading and also learning firsthand about anxiety, panic attacks, and in particular, the recently labeled agoraphobia. One and one started to add up. Of course, I was free to theorize, since dad was gone and nothing could be proved or disproved. But as I thought about his many early losses, especially of his beloved mother when he was nineteen (“That nearly killed me,” he’d say), and about the frightening effects of the Great Depression that had swept the country just two months after he married, I began to see a possible explanation for his great reluctance to try anything new, to go out into the world and take his chances with what he found, to risk, even in fairly simple social situations. Dad wasn’t lazy, as I’d always thought. He was a victim of panic disorder.
I could be wrong, of course—or, as Dad would say, “All wet!” But the opening of this window has given me a perspective to understand this nay-saying, insecure man, and his journey, as well as my own and that of my brothers. There is that about opening windows—it always lets in fresh air, even if it is chilly.
Elouise Bell
Edmond, Oklahoma
