Dear Dad,
We recently had a conversation about what kind of wisdom
comes with age. We’ve both known some old people who seem unwise, and some
young ones who are ahead of the game. And I think you and I (both of us now
being over the trusted age of thirty) have occasionally been unwise in our
post-adolescent days. Oh, well.
While I’ve known a few foolish geezers, over the years my
respect for a certain kind of wisdom I see in you has continued to grow: your
stories. Again and again when I have faced uncertainties in my life, I have returned
to your stories.
Your stories aren’t doctrines, because that’s not what
stories are. So I’m not saying they’re right or wrong. What matters is that
they’re yours, and when you tell stories about your own life, they’re some of
the truest stories I can imagine. You only mess them up when you try to explain
them. That’s best left for Aesop. Your stories are more like compressed data.
They do more work than any quantum computer I’ve heard of can do, and they are
like a vein of gold that keeps growing and branching the more I dig into it.
They explain themselves, and they are resilient.
Some of your stories are entertaining. My kids have heard
stories of your experience in the National Guard so many times they probably
not only think that I was there with you in that tank, they probably can
imagine themselves in there, firing at trees hundreds of yards away in target
practice.
But your stories do much more than entertain. They teach.
When I think of you riding in the back seat of the car while your parents heard
the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and you wouldn’t shut up, I feel like I
am present there, and I feel like I am learning about my family, and what it
means to be a family. You’ve never told me what Gram did when you were making
too much noise, but that doesn’t stop me from remembering what I know of her,
and imagining her response. And you haven’t mentioned your brother in that
story either, but I can imagine him learning a lesson as well when Gramps
turned around and smacked you to get you to shut up while he contemplated what
was about to become of his military service, and of his wife and sons, and his widowed
mother and his younger siblings. Just reflecting on that makes me think more
seriously about my own obligations to others. It’s a tightly-packed story that
is full of webs of relationships, and I am grateful for every time you’ve told
me.
The same goes for all the stories you’ve told me about your
life during the war, and afterwards. The way Gramps prepared you all for the
trip back home while he prepared himself and his men for war. The way Uncle
Charlie taught you to use the tools he knew. You’ve told me about Uncle Charlie
so many times I wish I knew him myself. In fact, I think I do, through you.
Because, after all, your stories are also like tools. I
think about the stories you’ve told me about how to take an engine apart so
that you can put it back together again. I remembered that when I took apart my
lawn mower engine once, and I thought about it the other day when I took apart
the vacuum cleaner to figure out why it wasn’t working. I took out the parts
methodically, and laid them out in order of removal, so that I could put them together
again. You taught me about algorithms when I was a kid, sketching some out on
napkins at the pizzeria in Woodstock, but also teaching me the word “algorithm”
and then telling me stories that illustrated algorithms. You were making me a
philosophy professor whether you knew it or not. Not bad for an electrical
engineer!
A few years ago my youngest brought his friend over to our
house. Her car door wasn’t working right. He told her to park it in the
driveway and said that his dad could fix it. Somehow he knew that I wasn’t
afraid to take things apart and tinker with them. He also knows that I still
own and use tools you gave me when I was a boy. As we took apart that car door
there in our driveway, Matt watched and learned. Not long afterwards, when he
wanted to fix something on his own car—something he had never done before—he asked
to borrow my tools, and got to work. He was unafraid to use tools, and unafraid
to try something new. You know why? Because he saw it in me. And you know what
he saw in me? He saw you. Your stories—the ones you told and the ones you
showed me—those live in me all the time. Not surprisingly, he's now certified as an automotive electrician, and working as an auto mechanic. And he's good at his job. That's a picture of your stories, living in your grandson. I hope you're as proud of him as I am.
I think one of the things I have learned from your stories
is a willingness to try to work with my hands to make good things. I’ve made a
lot of the furniture in our house, and as you know, I’ve worked with stone and
bricks and mortar on three different continents now. When I lay stone, I am
always thinking about the structure in front of me, thinking about stresses and
balance, physics and aesthetics. Despite a lack of formal training in
engineering, standing beside you while you built a pier on the reservoir, or
while you explained the bridge you built across the creek behind your house, gave
me both the gumption to try building things myself, and a sense of what would
work and what wouldn’t. Of course, that bridge also came with a lesson in law
(which is why you couldn’t modify the banks) and a lesson in measuring the rate
of flow of a river (something I had no idea how to do until you told me that
day.) I can’t look at bridges and cantilevered and suspended structures without
thinking of the engineering lessons you taught me through your stories.
The same is true for my adeptness with languages, and for my
ability with music. Yeah, some of that is probably genetic (from you, again)
but a lot of it is just learned fearlessness. I have never seen you turn away
from a musical instrument just because you hadn’t yet received lessons in it.
And I’ve seen you play in public many times, and your stories—I want to
emphasize this—your stories of messing up have been a huge gift. “Don’t stop,
just keep playing!” This is one of the things I tell my students now about public
speaking, and about writing essays. “Always have a song you’re ready to play.” Years
ago when I was having dinner at the home of the Lutheran Bishop of Nicaragua,
someone handed me a guitar and said “Play us a song.” This was a complete surprise
to me, but thanks to your stories, I was ready, and I led the whole group in
several songs.
If I tried to write down all the stories you’ve told me, it
would take a long time. I hope you continue to write down the stories you know.
And I hope you tell them simply, unadorned, without feeling like they need to
be dressed up. Just pick up that guitar and sing them, Dad. You have such a
good voice, such a gift for music. You’re our family’s Homer, our Vergil.
In the same vein, if I tried to write down all the ways you
show up in my classes, or in the ways I raised my kids, I doubt I’d be able to
get it all down, but I hope this little letter at least gives you an idea of
that. Those napkins you scribbled on at the pizzeria helped my kids do better
in math and science. The times you told me about meeting someone who spoke
another language and you tried speaking to them have indirectly emboldened your
grandkids to study and work abroad in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.
You taught me my first lessons in logic, and I taught them to my kids, and then
your granddaughter grew up to be a far better reasoner than either one of us. Hopefully
you and I will get a little credit for that when her biography is written—a little,
but not too much. She deserves most of the credit for taking the stories we
passed on, unpacking them, and then retelling them in her own way. And I love
to watch her do that.
Speaking of languages, your stories have taught me in some
other ways, too. Well before I could read Chomsky you mentioned him to me. I
don’t remember what you said, but I remember the way you said it. It was like
when you mentioned Feynman, Bernoulli, Les Paul, Vivaldi, Buckminster Fuller,
Linus Pauling, or one of the other creative thinkers you were the first person to
teach me about. Years later, when I was teaching at Penn State, one of my
students mentioned Chomsky, and said wistfully that she wished she could have
the chance to meet him. I asked her “Have you tried writing to him or giving
him a call?” “I can do that?” “Why not?” I was passing along to her some of
your willingness to try. After she went home to Boston for semester break she
came to visit me in my office, and told me that she had called him and he
invited her over to his campus. They talked for an hour over coffee. She was
thrilled! That’s a win in your column, Dad. Well done.
When I was a boy you also bought me a subscription to
Scientific American, and a copy of Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia. I
wish I still had that Van Nostrand’s. It’s horribly out of date, but I spent
many hours paging through it, and it was a gift of love. People don’t often
think of science as stories, but what else are scientific papers? They’re
letters written to strangers, telling stories as clearly and as straightforwardly
as they can. I remember reading about the work of Benoit Mandelbrot in Scientific
American, and I have not stopped learning from that story ever since. If I
had a list of how many times I’ve taught principles I learned from those
articles, it would be a very long list. Another win in your column, I think.
I could go on for a long time, but I have more work to do
today, so I’ll end here. I just wanted to say, in the form of a letter about
stories, that I love you. Thanks for telling your stories, Dad. I keep telling
them all the time.
With love,
Dave
*******
I write about my father in several places, including in my book Downstream. If you want to see some more of what I've written about him on this blog, click the "my Dad" link, below.
