Making things happen
... with integrity
Monday June 28, 2004 Volume VI Number 26
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Big Fish by Ken Kemp |
omething about guys and fish stories. I asked a friend of mine just this weekend how the Alaskan cruise went. He just returned this week. His eyes widened, energy level went up a notch, he gestured broadly as he described the FORTY TWO POUND salmon he landed on the trip. “Took over a half an hour to reel him in,” Rick added, the tone of disbelief still lingering in his memory.
“Whoa,” I replied, nodding my astonishment and approval. My eyes as wide as his.
It was Father’s Day and I was wired for sound, carrying my heavy eight pound Bible and ready to preach. Everybody loves a fish story, (I had a couple of my own in my sermon notes, in fact) and Rick gave me one right there in the entry-way.
The
veteran movie-maker Tim Burton found a beautifully written novel that picked up
on the theme – a fresh new book by Daniel Wallace, Big Fish. It’s a
story about stories. The center-piece is a fish story. The Big Fish is not
just a story about pulling one in. The big fish is more than a tale. The Big
Fish is a weighty metaphor – which will, among other things, epitomize the
story-teller himself.
If you like stories (and who doesn’t?) you know the blurry line between fact and fiction. Reality and embellishment. Tom Sawyer called them stretchers. In Knights Tale, character Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany) called it scope. We give a story color. We make room for ornamentation. We expect a good story to ripen with age.
Will Bloom’s father, Edward, is one of those incorrigible story tellers. His repertoire is finite, and now aging and retreating into his world of past experience, he’s grown repetitious. It’s an embarrassment to Will, who must endure the predictable, tedious retellings; his father’s favorite listener – Will’s pregnant wife. Will’s mother, Sandy, is caught in the middle as mothers often are. She knows the point of conflict. She knows her son is annoyed and agitated by his father’s obsessions. She also knows her husband will not change. So she manages as best she can, to maintain her neutrality, because she so deeply loves them both.
Will has come to his own turning point. He has completed his education. He found a perfect mate. His career is taking off. And now, he is about to become a father himself. His own father is an enigma to him, a riddle that won’t be solved. “We are two complete strangers who know each other very well,” he says. And now on the threshold of fatherhood, he desires to know who his father really is, to understand him fully. All that has eluded him. When Will learns that his father’s cancer is terminal, he determines to break a three year silence, peel back the layers covering up his father’s true identity, and come to know if his dark suspicions about his dad are true.
Will dropped anchor on certain conclusions about his dad.
Ask his father a simple question about his past, and he will launch off on an
elaborate story involving colorful characters and impossible dilemmas and
sprawling landscapes and monsters and witches and giants and heroes and
villains and perfectly timed punch lines. He’ll set you up for the
delightfully surprising ending – and along the way, follow down unexpected
rabbit trails, all of which takes enormous quantities of time and patience,
especially when 
you’ve
been down those trails more than once. Will, a career journalist, spends his
time sorting fact and fiction, and with an editor watching over his shoulder
holding a red pen at the ready, eliminates fiction in favor of fact. It’s
dull. It’s predictable. But it’s reliable - unlike his father’s mysterious,
interminable ramblings. And it’s also a paycheck.
Will has concluded that his father, by commandeering the conversation with endless monologues, effectively covers up the truth about himself. While he concedes that his father is likable and gregarious and has a lot of friends, he believes that his father possesses a surreptitious, clandestine life - a life he’s managed to keep hidden. It’s a dark, shadowy world out there somewhere; a certain contradiction to the public persona perpetuated by this endless charade. Will determines to find out.
Who is my father?
* * * * * * *
Last Father’s Day weekend was one I will long remember. Our pastor’s vacation overlapped the holiday. He asked me to take the sermon. So I spent a good part of the week preparing my thoughts. I reflected long on this fathering business. I suppose Bill suggested I cover pulpit duties on that day because he knows it’s a subject I care about.
It was rooted in a conversation we had about a need every
child has – it’s the need to know their father’s approval. It’s a profound
issue, really. When a child grows up in the security of knowing that his/her
father brims with confidence and pride over his child’s capacities for future
success, well, it’s a prophecy that’s often fulfilled. If, on the other hand,
a child senses that the father is filled with doubts, is somehow
convinced that the
child’s belligerence, shortcomings, laziness, clumsiness, senselessness all
will lead to certain calamity, well, that can be prophetic, too. And it often
is. Children can and do overcome their father’s shortsightedness, but the
father’s influence can not be minimized. Or marginalized.
In biblical terms, it’s about “the blessing.” Good dads bestow their blessing on their children. It’s a father’s first duty.
That’s what I talked about on Sunday morning. Kids, without realizing it, are asking, testing, probing their dads. Do you think I have what it takes, dad? Will I make it? Can I do it? Watch me dad… did I do it well? Did I do it right? What do you think?
The dad’s answer to that question will make a world of difference.
* * * * * *
In that preparation, I thought a lot about the three men who were father figures to me: my two grandfathers and my dad. Last week, I told you about my mother’s father, Grandpa Otto. He’s been gone now nearly thirty years, but I can still hear his laughter.
My grandfather on my father’s side lived another ten years longer than Otto. Charlie sold French’s mustard his entire career. When he married my grandmother, they gave farming a try in the Province of Saskatchewan – but it lasted only two years. It was the roaring twenties. He and grandma left the farm and moved their belongings across the border and on to the windy city of Chicago seeking their fortune. Grandpa took employment with the R. T. French Company, and started out stocking shelves in markets all over the city. Before long, he became a leader in the sales division, and was promoted to management with an office at the Merchandise Mart – his home base for most of his career.
It was early in his marriage, about the time the two boys came along, that they wandered into the historic Moody Church, then located on Chicago and La Salle Streets. In response to an inspiring message, he took my grandmother’s hand and together they walked down the aisle as a public profession of faith. It would be a watershed moment, and would mark the family for generations to come.
My grandfather lived out the American dream as an astute and reliable businessman. He lived a regimented life, off to work early, donning a crisp business suit and stiff white collar and felt fedora and wool overcoat. He called his company, "the Firm.” They sent him all over the nation, especially after his promotion to national sales manager.
Trained in sales techniques, Grandpa Charlie tuned-in to people’s needs. Wherever he went, all his life, he would make friends. He was a story-teller. He’d learn family histories. He’d probe beyond the surface stuff. He learned about the children, their aspirations, their hopes and dreams. Whenever he came to visit us, he’d take the car in to the local dealer for a needed tune-up just to help my folks, and when he came back home, he’d tell us all about the mechanic. He’d get to know the taxi driver and the flight attendant and the people on the other end of the business trip, and we’d get a report.
But mostly, he liked talking about his church. Grandpa Charlie was known as a friend and confidant to pastors. He believed theirs to be the highest calling of all. He loved to tell us about the latest message he’d heard – he called them “tremendous.” He enjoyed it most when the message would stir people to make a decision. He always seemed amazed at the power of God to turn a life around and set it straight. For decades, he taught a Bible class in that large church every Sunday morning. His “study,” lined with Bible commentaries and dictionaries and concordances, was a favorite hide-away. Those well worn reference books stood there as a testimony to a little boy of the richness of spiritual development. Like his friends in the pulpit, his teaching style was exegetical.
He
knew as a businessman that his spiritual life was private. But he was known at
the firm as a man of integrity and honesty and predictability and his
colleagues held him in high esteem. And they knew him as a man of great faith.
When we talked, he would tell me stories of people who walked with God. He counseled many. And at the end of his life, he would go and visit the Navy base seeking out lonely sailors in San Diego who needed a friend, someone to talk to. Invariably he would tell them about a Friend who would never leave them or forsake them – and Grandpa had a pretty high success rate as a soul-winner.
When I was younger, I feared that I could never measure up to Grandpa Charlie’s expectations. Now, I realize those fears were self-imposed. And now, I realize with enormous gratitude, what an indelible mark he made on my life.
* * * * * * *
Will probed. He asked his dad some hard questions. He checked references, and pursued some of the leads he thought might illumine his quest. He listened to his wife, who knew intuitively that this stubborn young journalist, soon to be a father himself, had some lessons to learn.
The more he searched, the more it was confirmed. His father’s stories, embellished and stretched and colorful and glittering with ornaments, were mainly true.
There was another life – but it was a life of generosity and care and goodness. His father made a habit of improving the lives of others - largely through his gregarious laughter, uplifting stories and irrepressible humor.
And at the end of his father’s life, Will understood that he really did know his dad after all. And Will, the cynical journalist, the self-proclaimed realist, the new generation progressive, learned to accept his father for the man he is.
A big fish.
A big fish who gave him the gift of laughter. A big fish who was bigger than life. A big fish who loved his mother with a pure heart. A big fish who believed in his son. A big fish who knew that his son would become a good father, too.
And Will began telling stories in a different way.
He started coloring them up. He gave himself permission to embellish. To employ an outrageous metaphor.
And he started laughing again.
Like his dad.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
The generation gap is for real. But like me, you are learning not so much to differentiate yourself from those generations now gone before; instead you are working to find the values you can affirm. You want to embrace the stuff that lasts beyond the fads and trends you and I know won’t last. We want to pass along something that will take our children into this millennium and beyond. You want to build an altar.
I guess I liked the movie Big Fish a lot because story-tellers are often accused of playing fast and loose with the facts. Of focusing more on affect than accuracy. I’ve been there.
The closing scene, the memorial service, where Will gets a look at the impact his father had on so many lives, nailed it for me. People who came, and what a cast of characters, they were full of stories about Will’s dad – animated stories - the remember whens, and how he said it, and the surprise ending and the crazy things that made people feel they had a place; Will found out that the father he knew was a real man after all.
And Will learned that he could be a Big Fish, too. In fact, his wife, his mother, and his new son would want him to be a big fish, just like Grandpa.
My Grandpa Charlie was a big fish. I know I’d have to explain it for him to understand. But for you, well, I just did.
And I think you agree.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2004
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