24 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

We both realize, of course, that all my efforts to rescue you from the past and come to know you, perhaps even love you in a way I never could before, are just as much an effort to come to terms with myself—and perhaps acknowledge the love you had for me…

In what ways am I like you? What would you recognize of yourself in your son? These are questions of interest to me because at one time I wanted so much to be not like you.

I have my mother’s eyes, blue, not brown like yours. Flora had your eyes. She was also, like you, skinny. I have a tendency, as I age, to put on weight. Remember that “spare tire” around the belly that Peggy accumulated in her later years? I have that, too. You never did. At the age I have now reached, your hair was sparse; combed flat on your head, and barely concealed your scalp. Mine, though long since turned to grey, is still quite long and thick. Oh, and I still have most of the teeth that I was born with. I was scared years ago into the habit of nightly flossing by my fearsome Chinese American dentist; my mouth had begun to show the ravages of poor dentistry—worse, in Britain, during the war, for sure—and the cavalier neglect of my youth. Most of yours had been replaced long since by the dentures you took out and left in a glass on the bathroom shelf each night.

Is my voice a little like yours? Perhaps. Sixty years this side of the Atlantic have worn the edges off the public school-Oxbridge manner of speech that I grew up with, but even today my fellow Americans immediately hear the remnant of a British accent. Because they seem to love my voice so much, I think I might inherit some of the mellifluous quality of your baritone—though I incline more to tenor.

I have none of your skill with hands. When it comes to anything handy I’m a hopeless klutz—a term you’d likely not have heard of but you’ll know what I mean. Put a hammer in my hand and I’ll no doubt end up breaking something. With luck, it won’t be my finger. The kind of things you took care of with ease—the home repairs, basic electrical and plumbing—are the things I need a handyman to help me out with.

I inherited your love of mysteries, thrillers, suspense books of all kinds. I even wrote a couple of them myself, back in the 1980s. Did you ever read them? I can’t remember anything you might have said about them—but then, I can’t be sure I gave them to you to read. I took the skill you had with words and turned myself into a wordsmith.

There are other, more fundamental things that lead me to believe we have more in common than might appear at a cursory glance. When I sit for my daily half-hour’s morning meditation, for example, I often see you sitting in your wing-back chair, silent, prayer book in hand, completing the “office” that was your unfailing commitment even in the years following your retirement. I came to my personal need to delve into the realm of the spirit only much later in my life.

I inherited your social conscience, your socialism, your left-wing political views, your commitment to social justice. I watched as you became more conservative toward the end of your life—you were not a Thatcherite, I hope!—but by the time you came to the broader perspective of advancing years, the England of your youth was barely recognizable. Such is my impression, anyway, from where I sit half a world away after half a century’s exile. By this time, social programs like the National Health and National Insurance had long been institutionalized in Britain, and the Labour Party had become less about the welfare of the working classes, it seemed to me, than the advancement of the nouveau middle class. There was Tony Blair, halfway Tory. Mass immigration, too, from India, Pakistan, the West Indies, Africa and the Middle East had changed the racial demographic of old England and introduced racial tensions little known in the early years of the twentieth century. And with the construction of the Chunnel between Dover and Calais, the age-old insularity of the British was no longer assured by the island’s physical isolation from the European Continent. Clinging to the treasured pound sterling while other European countries adapted to the euro, the Brits at least had to yield to the metric system in their currency. No more twenty shillings to the pound and twelve pence to the shilling.

An inveterate traveler and explorer of the Continent in the caravan you towed everywhere behind you on your summer trips, you would have been horrified by Brexit and the xenophobia it betokened. You prided yourself on being tolerant, open to historical and demographic change, curious about the customs of our neighboring countries, especially their food and wine. You welcomed people from throughout the world into your home—Monu from India, Graeme from South Africa, that Japanese Anglican minister whose name I have forgotten, the black African bishop, handsome in his purple bishop’s cassock—and relished cultural differences, intellectual conversations with your guests. More gregarious than I myself have ever been, you embraced humanity and the joys of human interchange. While I suspect there must have been an introverted part of you, there was always that actor, too, the extrovert. Sometimes, admit it, the shameless show-off.

Your Christian faith… I’d love to have talked to you about this some time because, while I long since abandoned that faith (I never dared to tell you face-to-face for fear of hurting you; how dumb was that?) Yet I share with you the belief that there is something more to life than the physical body and the material world it lives in. I had not yet discovered Buddhism by the time of your death. For much of my life, indeed, I would have scoffed at it, as at all religious belief. I wish I’d that opportunity, though,, because we would surely have had something to talk about. And not only the human ethic of Buddhism, the dedication to principles of behavior I deem admirable, essential, really, to a well-lived life; but also to its spiritual dimension—for lack of a better word—a belief in values that transcend even death.

Oh yes, I would have loved that conversation! And I am sure you would have, too. Your Christianity was not of the exclusive kind; you were informed about other faiths and eager to find common ground between them. In your last years you became deeply involved in new ways of thinking about the Christian faith and made several pilgrimages to the ecumenical community at Taizé, in France. I remember the spirited exchange between you and Ellie’s father, Mike, at the seder you attended when you and Peggy came to visit us in Los Angeles, exploring the similarities and differences between Christian and Jewish faiths, between Passover and the Last Supper. Was that not an occasion to be remembered and celebrated! I know Mike relished it, and recalled it often. That you were unable to pursue that friendship was a matter, only, of the geographical distance that lay between you. Such a shame!

And now that I think of it, there is one other thing we share: you were a tease. I am a tease. Just ask my grandson, your great-grandson, little Luka—who is a bit of a tease himself!

Signing off with a smile for now, your son, Peter