A Remembrance of My Father
Glenn Tinder — a serious thinker and great dad
Dad turned 100 on April 5, 2023, the same day I turned 70. On May 3 of this year, I scattered my father’s ashes on the same wooded hill in Wayland, MA, where Dad and I had spread my mother’s ashes in 2017. My wife, Shelly, and son, Brett, were with me. Across the colonial stone wall 30 feet away, we could see the house they had lived in for over 50 years.
A professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, he published eight books and dozens of articles. None of his books were best-sellers except, for its niche, a college textbook, Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions.
He was a deep and original thinker, synthesizing political theory, philosophy, and religion. Even while becoming distinguished in his chosen specialty, Dad was a quiet rebel, often drawing outside the lines of standard academic discourse. In 1989 he published the cover article in The Atlantic, Can We be Good Without God, which became part of his book, The Political Meaning of Christianity. The article, which drew an avalanche of letters, can still be found through a standard Google search.
He was a serious guy, my father — not one to entertain frivolities. When I couldn’t come up with work during the summer after my sophomore year in high school he didn’t like the idea of me goofing off for three months. So, he established a plan to immerse me in the work of two writers he treasured.
Every weekday morning, I spent four hours reading the four main novels of Dostoyevsky and Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason. Periodic reports were required and discussed. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I liked Kant enough to come back to him in college. And in the afternoon, I could join my fellow goofballs outside.
But Dad also enjoyed having fun and had a good sense of humor, especially about himself. As I grew into adulthood I got a kick out of teasing him, explaining that I was getting back at him for making me read Russian literature and German philosophy in high school.
The distant relationship he had with his father reinforced Dad’s commitment to spending time with me. Playing catch in the yard or a nearby park. Going to movies at the big theaters in Boston. When I was nine we went to see Lawrence of Arabia at the largest screen in the city.
When I was older, we attended two huge Washington rallies protesting the Vietnam War. We took a two-week bike ride into New Hampshire and Vermont and, a few years later, attended a three-day workshop on father-son relationships. When I was in high school we traveled around France and Italy. Dad encouraged me to smuggle a switchblade from Rome back into the United States.
During some of these activities and others, we discussed light existential themes of meaning, connectedness, and death.
When I got into trouble in my 30s with alcoholism, ruining a career I spent seven years training for, Dad was warmly and unfailingly loving and supportive.
My mother, Gloria, was a lovely and professionally accomplished woman but did not have a presence in my life to match my father’s. After she died in 2017, Dad lived on his own in Lincoln, MA for another year and then moved down to a senior living community in NJ within a half hour of my wife and me.
Shelly and I double-handedly cleared out Dad’s home, the one I had grown up in after I turned 12, and prepared it for sale. On the other end, we carefully researched retirement homes, visiting those we winnowed down to a brief final list. Dad was happy, as were we, with our choice and he spent his final years there.
My father grew up in Bishop, CA, a small ranching town between the White Mountains on the Eastern edge of town and the Sierra Nevada a couple miles to the west. Today, Bishop is known for its proximity to skiing, boulder climbing, and the ancient bristlecone pines. My father grew up in the middle of nowhere. My father often talked about crossing the Mojave Desert to visit family in Los Angeles and how he dreaded the long car ride even though he enjoyed seeing his first cousin, who was like a brother.
The dominant geological feature for Dad was the nearly 14,000-foot Mount Tom, four miles from his ranch. His spiritual outlook was forever shaped by the grandeur of the Sierra Nevada, towering over the valley in which Bishop was nestled, and the endless vistas of the desert.
Shelly and I were delighted when the three of us were able to fly into San Diego, drive north, and spend several days in Bishop, which is still a small town. When we saw where Dad grew up, it was hard to imagine the town and area giving birth to any scholars. But from Bishop he went to Pomona College, where he met my mother, on to UC, Berkely for his doctorate, and then across the country for his first job.
Dad did not grow up in a family from which one might expect a writer and professor to emerge. His mother was constantly irritated and distracted and captive to the doctrines of Christian science, which view illness and suffering as delusions. His father was a small-town lawyer of modest ambitions and success. An alcoholic, he did not say one single word to his only child until he was twelve. This was one reason Dad was so intent on being present in my life.
As my father approached 100, he often expressed his astonishment at having lived so long, even questioning whether longevity was a goal worth striving for. Through his mid-90s he still read the New York Times every day. When Shelly and I visited, as we did several times a week, one of us would contest him in chess as the two of them sipped high-end scotch and munched on Macadamia nuts. As a recovering alcoholic, I was happy with Diet Pepsi
During the last years of his life I told Dad what a great father he had been. He saw me through tough times as a teenager and an adult with wisdom, compassion, and love. He lived the humane values he wrote about in his books and articles. These qualities live on in the 500 letters he wrote me beginning in the 1970s.
Whenever I visited, his first question wasn’t whether I had published an article but rather how my AA sponsees were getting along. He often followed my answer with the comment that helping these people in AA was the most important thing I could be doing with my life.
I love and respect my father for many reasons. He was a towering presence in my life. Perhaps the greatest gift he has given me is his quiet but unyielding integrity and respect for truth.
Later, in 2023, my father’s energy began to wane. A couple of years ago, he stopped reading the New York Times and no longer felt able to play chess. His alertness and conversation began to fade. When we visited, he was often focused on the TV screen. Before the turn of the year and after his third COVID-19 infection, he ate less and less until he took neither food nor drink.
During the last several days I held his hand and talked to him about one thing or another, not knowing what he took in. He died quietly. I wish I had been there, though I was cheered when told that the nurses played classical music during his last hours.
