I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: January 4, 2024] “Who Will Fight with Me?”

Rivka Galchen was one of the writers whose essays and stories in the New Yorker I made sure that I read.  This essay is a non-fiction piece about her father.

I enjoyed the very first line:

Recovering from a happy childhood can take a long time.

It made me think about how we seem to glamorize hard upbringing–college essays are based on overcoming hardship.  People love to complain about their parents and how tough they had it as kids.  But isn’t it wonderful to have had a happy childhood?  Isn’t that what parents strive to give their children?

I had a happy childhood and I am nothing but grateful for it.

Galchen’s father died when she was a teenager and it has taken her many years to process the incident and the impact.  She says that when she was growing up she thought of him as intelligent and incapable.  He was clearly an intelligent man, but he also “ate ice cream from the container with a fork and also he never sliced cheese, or used a knife in any way.”

Her father was very tall and had physical ailments–he couldn’t see or hear very well.  The hearing loss led to a pronounced accent. But he didn’t shy away from speaking.  He loved arguments and he was, in fact, a college professor.  Students complained about his accent, but he paid it very little mind.

He also had strange idiosyncrasies.  Like it took him 45 minutes to do anything.  Like it was an atom of time for him.  Probably because when he did something he was always thinking about something else.  It took him 45 minutes to brush and floss his teeth.  Forty-five minutes between saying “I’m ready  to go” and actually going.  They were often late.

She started reading the New Yorker as a young child because the magazine was advertised on “the fighting shows” that her father watched on Sundays.  Rivka said they should subscribe.  He said he didn’t have time to read it, but she could read it and tell him anything interesting that she read.  One day he taped an article to her door.  It was by Calvin Trillin called “Messages from My Father.”  He told her that she should write something like that about him one day.