February 03, 2008
Between thought and expression lies a lifetime
My dad died five years ago, just after Christmas of 2002. The best piece of advice anyone gave me was this: You never stop mourning a parent. And it's okay.
That has certainly turned out to be true. A couple of years ago I went with Francis to an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History called Totems to Turquoise: Native North American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest. After looking at the first few displays, I thought to myself, "Oh wow, I have to get the catalog to send to Daddy." Francis noticed me missing and came back to find me sitting on a bench, crying. For a moment I'd forgotten my father was dead, and then suddenly the knowledge of his death came rushing over me there in the museum. I know he'd have loved the exhibit; it was beautiful, and so well-curated, and about parts of the Southwest that he'd loved and known well.
He's been on my mind a lot lately, too. The anniversary of his death came while I was in Berlin, at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress. I spoke twice at the congress, once on geek culture and once on the history of guerrilla knitting (though I wish I'd called the talk "the guerrilla history of knitting" or "the history of (guerrilla) knitting" -- it's especially postmodern if there are parentheses in the title of your talk, right?). I had a wonderful time, and the talks were well-received, especially the second one, but one thing was extremely dissatisfying for me: I couldn't manage to explain to my mom what I was doing in Germany in a way that made any sense to her. She understood that I was giving talks, and she told me she was proud of me, and of course she is proud of me -- I don't mean to discount that. I think maybe she thinks I was teaching knitting; it's hard to say. When I was talking to her, though, I kept thinking to myself, Daddy would get it. He'd love this. It's just his sort of thing.
And then a couple of weeks later I found myself standing in a Radio Shack, looking at a rack of soldering irons, and a blur of memories came to me, of being a little girl tagging along after my daddy, fooling with packets with indecipherable labels while he bought whatever he needed for The Machine. Of course I was with him, because I was always with him. Any time he said he was going out to run an errand I begged to go along "for a ride in the car". When I was little he talked to me all the time, about the machine he was building, about what I'd read in his newspaper, about what I had done in school.
When I was six or seven years old he tried to convince me that I wanted a remote-controlled car from Radio Shack. He told me over and over how cool it was, and all the things it could do, and showed it to me when we were in the store. I eventually told him that I didn't want one, but maybe he should get one for himself. He laughed and laughed and told my mother what I'd said when we got home. I understood that I'd said something incredibly funny, but I didn't really get the joke.
I never really understood the machine, either, although Daddy had given me Isaac Asimov's introductory books on physics and electricity to read. I knew it was an engine, and that it ran on magnets, and that it took a little bit of electricity to start it but that then it would run forever. I understood enough of what I'd read in the Asimov books to ask my father about the 2nd law of thermodynamics but I didn't understand his explanation about why the machine wasn't breaking it. At the time I assumed that I just wasn't bright enough to understand, and that when I got older and learned more it would make sense.
The real mistrust between us didn't come until later, though, and it was my fault.
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