Home again

I returned home yesterday. Big city. Bustle. We biked across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn to see an amazing dance performance for DanceAfrica's 30th anniversary. I once took a class taught by Chuck Davis. I miss dancing, particularly African dance. My father agreed to go with me, but it was clear that this is really not his thing. And I was trying to figure out how my romanticized notion of my upbringing could possibly connect to his seemingly increasing traditional and benighted ways. I know, it's normal to have the moments of disillusionment about one's parents, but it's strange that this is happening in my late-20s. For a variety of reasons, my father has remained pretty unassailable in my mind. The last few years, though, we have actually had a lot more tension than ever before. I suspect that as a teenager I knew I had no alternative, and so I didn't object to his comments, didn't push back against him.

The first time I remember really challenging him was when he had hired an Israeli handyman to repair something in the house. I came back from college, and my dad was out. The Israeli started talking to me, and he started asking me about my sexual experience. It was so jarring and so inappropriate (I'd known the guy for about 5 minutes, and he was in my house, where I was totally alone) that it really freaked me out. When I complained to my dad, he seemed pretty indifferent and pointed out that the Israeli did good work. My father raised me to be a feminist, socially conscious, and my father is gay...I thought that would increase his understanding to what it might be like to be a young woman alone with a strange man who is asking her about her sexual experiences. Apparently not. Ten years later, my father still hires this person to do (shoddy in my opinion) work on the house.