14 // COASTWEEKEND.COM
BOOKMONGER
Essays on absence from La Grande author
n a display of cross-state
literary cooperation,
Oregon State University
Press has just published a
collection of essays by East-
ern Oregon University pro-
fessor David Axelrod.
In “The Eclipse I Call
Father,” Axelrod tackles the
concept of absence from
many different angles.
His brief opening essay
contemplates haiku com-
posed by the 17th-cen-
tury Japanese poet, Mat-
suo Bashō. One translates
like this: “In the misty rain /
Mount Fuji is veiled all day
– / how intriguing!”
If not an actual eclipse,
the mist presents a shroud
of a different sort — and it
raises the question: how do
we see past the surface of
I
things? Whether in the natu-
ral world or the human psy-
che, do we have the capacity
to imagine what we cannot
witness?
In other essays, the
author revisits the childhood
he navigated, mostly without
his parents. His daredevil
father died in an airplane
crash when Axelrod was
very young. After that, his
mother left him to be raised
primarily by her parents, so
Axelrod became acquainted
with absence early on.
Whether talking about
climate change or racism or
what he regards as dimin-
ished “qualities of being in
the world — modesty, inti-
macy, loveliness — ubiqui-
tous [once] but largely for-
eign to us today” – Axelrod
wonders how we can grap-
ple with these transforma-
tions effectively, particu-
larly if there are people who
won’t even acknowledge
that they are occurring in the
fi rst place.
One of the most poignant
strands that runs through
these pieces is the grati-
tude the author feels for his
maternal grandfather. Rob-
ert Peters was a homespun
man, not without faults,
but he took his grandson
on rambles across the hills
and dales outside their Ohio
town, and secreted spare
change into a “Davy fund”
to keep the boy in shoes and
occasional treats, and broke
out in occasional gobbledy-
gook to enliven a mundane
exchange.
Now that Axelrod has
raised sons of his own and
is at the age that his grand-
dad once had been, he is
given to “looking over my
own shoulder again into the
abysm of time” and musing
about legacy and both our
personal and generational
responsibilities in linking
past generations to future
ones.
On the one hand, he fi nds
his thoughts “exacerbated
by the awareness, as we
age, that life feels increas-
ingly done with us and that
we stand in the way of the
young whose anger about
their future seems directed at
our generation….”
And on the other hand,
he wonders if this may be an
exercise in hubris.
“We call our habita-
tion a lifetime and imag-
ine it somehow a suffi -
cient sum of meaning and
insight, though ours may be
nearer to the experience of a
box-elder bug — whose life
spans a year — than it is to
the whitebark pine — whose
life spans centuries.”
These wide-rang-
ing essays are tinged with
humor, laden with emo-
tion, and aching with beauty.
They mark missed opportu-
nities, they celebrate differ-
ent kinds of landscapes and
they spotlight a motley but
meaningful assortment of
relationships.
“The Eclipse I Call
Father” provides thought-
ful, but rather melancholy,
reading.
THIS WEEK’S
BOOK
The Eclipse I Call Father –
David Axelrod
Oregon State University
Press – 224 pp — $21.95
The Bookmonger is Bar-
bara Lloyd McMichael,
who writes this weekly col-
umn focusing on the books,
authors and publishers of
the Pacifi c Northwest. Con-
tact her at bkmonger@
nwlink.com
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