My Father's Ghosts

There is a great good fortune in having loving parents close at hand. There can be a great good fortune in the natural beauty and quality of the places in which we spend our youth. As a child, I could not properly appreciate these. I was unaware of just how fortunate I was until a friend of mine from college visited my childhood home. Seeing the view from my parents' balcony, seeing the verdant surroundings and large lot of the house, he said simply, "You do realize you grew up in a paradise?"

Nature in the Berkeley Hills is ubiquitous. All the houses are surrounded either by well curated gardens or by the natural trees and greenery of the hills. Blackberry bushes lined the streets alongside oaks, ivy, and the occasional redwood. When I was young the streets were calm enough, and the weather temperate enough, that I could spend hours wandering on foot in any direction. In so doing I found seemingly endless variations of the same idyllic neighborhood. If you wandered far enough uphill, you eventually crossed into the extraordinary realm of Tilden Park. If you wandered downhill in the proper direction, you found yourself on the UC Berkeley campus.

We lived in close proximity to the university so that my father, a professor there, could have a minimal commute to work. The campus merged seamlessly into the magical neighborhoods of Berkeley. You would wander out of the wild nature and hidden houses of the hills only to find yourself in the ostensibly more organized organ of education known as UC Berkeley, still replete with great redwoods, open green spaces, and lovely ornamented architecture. For a smaller person, for instance a young boy with a penchant for wandering everywhere he could, the campus was an exhilarating maze. It was an unparalleled collection of Neo classical buildings, open plazas with London plane trees, red brick roads between libraries, small bridges over running creeks, and the secret sides of buildings that might normally be inaccessible. Strange, climbable sculptures were akin to treasures one could unearth in this magical labyrinth. If you properly charted a winding path between several buildings and across a creek, you could climb a pair of stone gryphons. If you followed a small road through a redwood forest you could find a great brass orb into which you could climb.

The greatest prize of this monumental maze of academia and nature was, for me, my father's office. The analogy is not perfect, but he was like the king of Crete. There was no minotaur at its center, but in my mind my father was the one who had created this vast and wondrous labyrinth. He held dominion from his office, or so I thought, not understanding the realities of university hierarchies and management. Many came to pay him their respects, and the office was often filled with deferential people, such as teaching assistants, students, and sometimes other professors.

I was always treated as a prince when I made it to his office on days where he was present. I would be welcomed by the strange poster of William Butler Yeats expressing that "Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it." I would be fed fancy chocolate and delicious Blue Diamond almonds. I could rest on the couch should I so desire. My father's office was an intriguing place, both comforting and cold. An outer expression of the father who's love for me was always lensed through the aloofness of a man consumed by his profession.

Still, as king of the magical campus, he had, in the years before I could explore on my own, walked me around the whole of it. He would give simple explanations of the many buildings and open spaces we passed. He would also share with me which places he enjoyed the most, as well as amusing tales of how he had repeatedly fooled the campus police into not giving him various types of car related tickets. The whole of the place was thus imbued with memories of him, and memories of ceaseless discovery. Through my father the campus has been established in my world as a vast and sacred place, filled both with bright, open spaces as well as endless secrets.

As fathers are wont to do one day he told me he wanted to show me something special. He brought down from a shelf one of the many old books in his home office. It was a photo book. Perhaps he had waited until I was at an age where I might find such photos interesting, as they were not the usual images I enjoyed of fighter jets and astronauts on the moon. Indeed, by comparison, these were quite boring. They seemed at first simply to be black and white photographs of many of the more picturesque locations around the campus. I was immediately familiar with them. He then pointed out various gray, fluid shapes that seemed to stretch across certain regions of the photos. "You see," he said with utmost professorial gravitas, "there are ghosts on the campus." I was immediately chilled by and taken in by the photos. There were indeed many forms of what might actually be ghosts! Looking more closely at the flowing shapes you could sometimes make out limbs, heads, or even blurry dark spots that must certainly be eyes of some kind.

I spent the rest of the afternoon flipping through the book, taking in the strange images. Locations that I recognized with ease were revealed to be vast haunts for strange spirits. In a moment the entire world changed. Even at that age I wasn't sure how much I believed in ghosts. It seems like it should be a binary issue, but I'm fairly certain even adults, at any given time, fall on a scale somewhere between absolute certainty that ghosts exist or the opposite. I was instantly all the more enthralled with the campus as a whole. After creating the mystical labyrinthine campus for me to consume, my father had remade it into something even more fantastic. I continued to wander the Berkeley hills and the UC Berkeley campus for many years. I never did see the ghosts, but the fact that they might be there refreshed and brightened my sense of being an explorer in a strange and shifting world.

As a young adult I learned many things about photography. I was interested in studying film, and was lucky enough to be at a high-school with a film program. At that time everything we did was on super eight film, so we had to learn about optics, light meters, and, amongst other things, the various tricks you could pull when working with cameras and film. For instance, if you had the right type of camera, you could simply leave it open and expose the film over a long period of time. If there was movement in the frame, it would come across as a ghostly blur. It seems unlikely that most reactions to learning about long exposure photography lead to a kind of shock, but this was the case for me. Over the years I had started to forget my youthful excursions through the haunted labyrinth of UC Berkeley, but this new knowledge brought those experiences into immediate focus. It became clear that I had been successfully and completely duped by my own father.

It wasn't that he had successfully gotten me to believe in ghosts. As I mentioned, I believe that I and most other adults vacillate in many of our beliefs, the existence of ghosts being a major one. It was that even after more than a decade he had never bothered to mention the fact that he had been kidding. In fact, the book had never surfaced again. After that one afternoon of believing one could photograph ghosts and that a host of them inhabited UC Berkeley, the book seemed to effervesce, just as a phantom might. When I was back home I confronted him about it.

"You told me there were ghosts on campus! That was just long exposure photography."

"Oh yes. That's right. It certainly was. You believed me?"

The joke, it turns out, was not that he was trying to trick me. Rather, he could not help himself, and his own sense of playfulness would simply shine through in odd moments without any premeditated effort. He didn't mean to fool me for years and years, he had simply wanted to entertain the both of us in that moment. In the end, he was as surprised by my extended belief as I was by the fact that there were not, at least the way I had thought, ghosts on the campus. I could see then, having confronted him, the incredible weight of authority a father has, and the power of my faith in mine. It was beyond formative; his playfulness had set the very esoteric boundaries of my belief systems.

My father's ashes dispersed and my own self having become a father, I struggle now with new ghosts. Unfortunately the humor seems to be gone. When I wander the campus I cannot help but recall, with bruise like nostalgia, my youthful days of exuberant wandering. Faced with the very real absence of my father I think of what I have and have not done with my life. Is this what a ghost is? The shape of a person you once looked up to and loved, an absence, that also serves as a bludgeon for the self? Though it happens infrequently I am now able to wander the campus with my own son. I see him devouring the magical surroundings with his senses. To him everything is life and change and growth. I must try to bring some of my father's joy to bear, for I now know how much my every word, how much my simple bearing, will sear meaning into this young wonder's being.