None of that "Cat's in the Cradle" shit
“Cat’s in the Cradle” is a song from 1974 by Harry Chapin that tells the story of a man who was too busy to interact with his son, who then, when grown, is too busy to interact with his father. The refrain ends with the lines, “‘when you comin’ home, Dad?’/’I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then.’” The last refrain reverses the trend: “‘when you comin’ home, son?’” My father and I both always hated this song, he because it reminded him of his father, and I because I already felt the intrinsic tragedy. This year I forgot my father’s birthday (October 30th). I was busy with the — I was going to say with the holiday weekend; but this year October 30th was a Monday, and I did nothing but lie around all day. I completely and properly forgot.
He and I agreed that, unlike his relationship with his father, there would be “none of that ‘Cat’s in the Cradle shit’” between him and me. His words, said to me as he was driving me from my mother’s house back to his and my step-mother’s home to spend the weekend. I wish we had kept that agreement. It’s the inevitability of the thing that gets me: I don’t feel depressed, just very very sad. He said this to me over dinner once shortly after he and my mother seperated. I understand him so clearly now. I don’t think I can go on this way. I miss my mother so. I miss my father so. “Sometimes I feel like my soul’s on fire.” Kathleen Emery’s 1988 version of “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” (Jazzman Records) comes to me in moments like these. “Sometimes I feel like my soul’s on fire, and I’m about to die.”
Somehow Chapin’s song was never so cathartic for me. The obvious reason is that I was always so much closer to my mother than to my father, but then why would the Chapin make me so upset and the Emery fill me with strange hope? Once when I was in middle school we were asked to suggest songs for dance class. I asked to play “Cat’s in the Cradle,” because I was a maudlin kid and wanted to feel something. I stayed alone in the classroom after everyone else had left and rolled my body with the song. That was the last time I really danced, I think. The next period was lunch time; but I was entirely dissolved in tears, and my math teacher had to sit with me in the teachers’ lounge while I composed myself.
It’s not regret, and it’s not grief. My father always described his affect (and I think it’s the same one I’m feeling now, which paradoxically brings me closer to him through our estrangement) as “wistfulness.” Sadly, pensively, slowly, quietly, the attention drifts over the horizon into the summerlands of what once was, and of what might have been, and of what never was but ought to be. After Cody1 died Allie2 said to me, “I hope they’re together. I just hope they’re together.” She was talking about my mother and Cody, who always liked one another so. Those little kids will never know their father, really. I don’t know who has it worse: “when you comin’ home dad?” I know full well that for them it’ll be never, but I sent my dad a belated birthday email, and there’s at least a chance he’ll reply. He did send me an email on my birthday this year (after himself being belated on it last year), and apparently he had some health scare from which he is now mostly recovered. I had no idea. If he died, I don’t know that I’d have been informed, much less invited to the funeral. Ah well — it’s the same cycle, again and again. “We’ll get together then, Dad/we’re gonna have a good time then.”
