A couple months ago I came into my inheritance. It happened at my mother's house in Laurel Springs, N.J., as I played on the rug with my daughters. My sister, trailing behind her three teenage sons in a storm of hugs and fist bumps, threw a cardboard box on my lap. "What's this?" I asked. "Open it," she said.
Out popped a laminated nautical map of the San Diego coast. A shotgun casing rattled inside a plastic box. Taking up the most room: an American flag, folded up into a thick triangle. Our father, who died this past summer, had made arrangements to be buried at sea. The package came from the Neptune Society, a company that offer cremation services and burials at sea, mostly for veterans.
My father and I had a complicated relationship, and we hadn't seen each other for the past 20 years. My first reaction was: What do I do with the flag?
Flag-waving, depending on whom you talk to, is either something one overthinks or doesn't think about at all. There are fairly regular reminders on flag display and etiquette. President Obama's flag pin-wearing defined a news cycle in the 2008 election. A Federal court recently upheld a school ban on T-shirts with flags. Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy says he doesn't recognize the U.S. government while waving Old Glory on horseback. A sanitation worker saved 700 flags from the trash and gave them to the Merchant Marines for a proper send-off ceremony.
Growing up, I idolized Michael Nester, a Mensa card-carrying Teamster from Arizona, in every way exotic to a boy growing up in South Jersey. I regarded dad as a noble savage autodidact and aspired to be like him. We bonded over patriotism, even though I only half-understood what he was saying when assigned me to read Ayn Rand and Voltaire and everyone in between. It was the Reagan '80s, and my dad was often hilarious expressing his patriotism. "Just give me three thousand G. Gordon Liddys and this country could take over the world." We cheered on Ronald Reagan when he defeated Jimmy Carter. I drew stars and stripes on my book covers and notepads, and played with army men in the backyard with firecrackers.
Then, as so often happens with fathers and sons, things went sour. He was laid off, his company a casualty of the great 1980s recession. After years of money struggles, he got his job back, followed quickly by an affair for which my mother could never forgive. Then he up and left New Jersey for Tucson, Ariz. I was 17, my sister 16. He never came back, never sent support checks or birthday cards. I was disillusioned.
In the intervening years, the flag became a vessel for what I would call my father's anti-social feelings. He turned more right-wing while I went moderate left. He bought guns and end-times supplies; I moved to New York to be a poet and, eventually, an English professor. He ignored me, I resented him. Years go by much easier when there's a country's width between two people. Then a flag turns up on your lap.
My sister, who flew out to Tucson to help empty his apartment, thought I should get the flag as "his first-born son." I've never owned any flag, unless Phillies pennants or rainbow Gay Pride banners count. I'm not what you would call a flag-waver. Now that I had one, I felt more puzzled than partisan. What if I spilled something on it? Burnt it in the fireplace by accident?
This debate turned into an allegory for my relationship with my country. Right wingers like my father revere flags and distrust government; lefties like me find flag-waving an empty gesture and place more importance on public trusts. I was of the same mind as Samuel Johnson, who wrote that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Back home, I discovered something else in the box: a DVD. I put it in my laptop, and was transported aboard the USS Comstock, behind a shaky camera. Boxes of 16 servicepeoples' ashes and 16 flags lay on a table with a purple tablecloth. This, I should note, marked the first time my father was ever out to sea. After enlisting in 1965, he never served on a ship, didn't go to Vietnam—a juvenile record, so the family story goes, kept him stateside. He worked at the Navy yards in Philadelphia, where he met my mother on Market Street, and Norfolk, Va., where I was born.
Through the noise of wind gusts, I could make out the words of the officers at the podium, a biography for each veteran's whose ashes were consigned to sea. "Two tours in Vietnam. "A chaplain for 26 years." "Retired after 20 years. "Dedication to family and friends." "Instilled his love of the military in his children." "Operational specialist World War II, given the Victory Medal. "A gracious caring and loving grandfather."
My father's turn came last. His dedicatory words were the most brief: "Michael Nester, born June 11, 1947, in Maryville, Tennessee. He treasured his time in the United States Navy, where he was honorably discharged and is proud and humbled to return to the sea." Then, a sentence read very quickly from The Order for the Burial of the Dead: "fair well, fair winds and following seas unto almighty God we commit the soul with sure and certain hope of Jesus Christ and eternal life." A whistle, and down the chute the box my father's ashes went. The ceremony ended with a 21-gun salute.
It hit me: this flag was my inheritance.
It's not often I feel the need to go to a hardware store, but off I went to purchase a flag pole and bracket, which I inexpertly bolted to the front of our house. I unfolded the flag, and it was huge: 5-by-9 feet, a burial flag. So I bought another, and folded my father's back into its neat triangle.
What did it all mean? I've no idea. I can't decide if this was something I wanted to do or something I had to do. I talk to my students about symbols, about one thing standing in for something else. This flag, this inheritance that turned out to be much larger than I thought, stood for whatever my father and I had between us. Blood and genes, sure, but also love, even the frugal and distant kind. When a flag is all that's left, you look for the country for which it stands. I'm still looking.
Daniel Nester is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose.