A Tale of Two Fathers
Most of you have shared your fathers' stories with me. Good men, caring men for the most part with staggeringly different life trajectories. Some lived through bombings. Some survived the worst concentration camps. Some had mentally ill wives. Some found love on the second or third try. Some are widowed and never found love again. Some are supportive and good listeners. Some are stingy with their time, their feelings, their money. Many deal with the indignities of decline by checking out. Others are courageous and face death head on - but without any solace.
Today the screed is about William (Bill) Donnelly, my father-in-law, who's ninety, and Richard Liscia, my dad, who's eighty-eight.
They say that for men, your dad is the template for who you will become. I'd argue that's true in my case and I'll mention why in a minute, and why Bill also remains so influential in my life.
On the surface these two men could not be more different.
Bill was born in Oklahoma to a lower middle-class "WASP" family. His own father was an abusive drunk who had his moments of brilliance, but did his darned best to ruin the prospects of the family. After the war, in a variation on the the "Grapes of Wrath" theme, the Donnellys landed in Santa Cruz, and Bill took the abuse until one day he slunk out of the house and joined the Navy before anyone could stop him. He was stationed in Puerto-Rico during the Korean War, and didn't see one minute of combat. He spent most of his time getting an education in physics and radio-communications (when he wasn't partying in the Red Light District of San Juan), and was so gifted he eventually landed a job as a tenured professor at San Jose State.
By then he had found the love of his life, Lois, whom he proposed to in a matter of weeks. Lois was an attractive, kind and whip-smart girl from the farmlands of Newman. She had the legendary common sense, no-BS approach of the Central Valley people. They made an excellent couple and had five kids, one of whom was to become my wife. Had they known they would have moved back to Oklahoma. Just kidding. Besides supporting his family, Bill took care of his mentally ill brother Walt.
I knew Uncle Walt. At the Donnelly household in Fremont, I would sit on the beat-up white couch with Walt and Max the slobbering Boston terrier. Walt would stare into the distance and I'd listen to him breathing. From time to time Max would fart himself awake, give a little whine as if the smell bothered him (which I'm pretty sure it bothered us way more), and go back to sleep.
The turning point in Bill's life was his decision to start a precision instruments company called Microspec (where Lisa was a draughtswoman and circuit board assemble for a short period of time). With his partner Dick Wolfe, he built an X-Ray dispersive spectrometer, a machine capable of scanning fragments and determining their nature by analyzing the scattering of X-rays. It's used in forensics and other applications to this day. And it was the Rolls-Royce of its kind. This was back in the day of the first Silicon Valley wave, the one started by two gentlemen named Packard and Hewlett. I went to visit Bill and Dick's plant once, and was so taken with it I decided then and there I too would have a business of my own. Me, the literature scholar. If it hadn't been for Microspec, I don't think I would have ever started Webmotion with my partner and friend Mikael Grave. Eventually Bill sold Microspec for good money - but not the kind of money that would be generated by the eventual rise of the software titans. Still, enough money to have a good retirement.
Now let's fly a few thousand miles east and set course for the northern tip of Africa. We land in a semi-arid, sun-beaten blue and white city called Tunis. My dad was born there from a long line of Jews who in all likelihood go back to the legendary Kahina, Queen Dihya of the Berbers who converted her tribes to Judaism in the eight century and ruled the northern lands until she was betrayed and murdered. Not that this genealogy matters much to me, or to my father. As a child, he lived through the Nazi invasion of North Africa and the Allied bombings. He told me he was constantly terrified and would sometimes wet himself in terror. To top it all off, his sister Simone died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He was so shocked he couldn't even cry. His mother (my grandma Cecile) and his older brother Georges interpreted his absence of a visible reaction as callousness.
When the Allied soldiers came just before the Germans started deporting Jews, they didn't bring just chocolate with them, but also their wild music, in particular, jazz. My dad became a diehard fan of Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, and a lifelong admirer of Black culture. This, I think completed the process of making him a stranger in his own family. Here we're starting to see similarities with Bill. My dad couldn't wait to get away from the stifling Jewish Quarter. He wanted a taste of the real thing, of Paris and its enchantment. He was away for a couple of years, but things didn't quite pan out, and he had to return to Tunis, where life was much more affordable. He was as clever as they came and though he was young, he soon became editor-in-chief of the main French-speaking newspaper in Tunisia, La Presse de Tunisie. He met my mom under insanely weird and romantic circumstances (that's a story for another day), and there was soon another war to impact the area: the Algeria Independence War. My dad was enlisted on the French side. Like the previous war, this one revealed anew the ugly depths of the hearts of men. He wrote a beautiful novel about it.
And then, a bolt out of the blue: Voice of America find out about him and asked him to be its French voice for all of Africa. He agreed and we lived in DC for two years when I was four years old. Life was decent, but the job wasn't, and he gave in to the siren call of the French press, not the kind that makes coffee, the kind that publishes quality newspapers. He became a very well-known journalist and newspaper manager, one of the top ten in the country. At the height of his career he ran the largest newspaper, period. My dad is a newspaper man through and through. The way some of your dads are married to the Law, or dyed-in the-wool engineers. He knows every stage of the print process, and he's seen newspapers decline from their print days to this weird digital age where bloggers (not me!) think their drivel is actual news. Investigative reporting costs money. This is my plug for you to support your local paper. And help democracy in the process.
Imagine the sound of whole rivers under the bridge.
Present day: these two men are on the last few miles of their journey. Bill is blind, nearly deaf, has a host of elimination and vascular issues, can't shuffle too far even with a walker, and has very little short-term memory left. Even his legendary optimism, which carried him through a tough childhood, the loss of his wife, and the passing of his firstborn Ellen, is starting to wear thin. He doesn't smile as much anymore as he sits there and reminisces. I pat him on the back and watch Lisa love him up.
Richard is sharp as a tack, but his back is so bad he can barely walk or carry anything. His bladder causes him so much pain he often says her can't take it anymore and wants to throw in the towel. I watch him with a sense of total helplessness. His go-to used to be rage. I remember him as a constantly erupting volcano, one best seen from a (long) distance. Now, it's more of a crabbiness with the occasional, and sometimes epic flare-up. Your failing body will do that to you. These two men's paths are winding closer together, unbeknownst to them, through the force of what the Buddha called inevitable suffering.
Because you're astute, you will have read between the lines and guessed at unspoken parallels between these formidable men: a shared love of democracy, generous, liberal views, an ethic of constant work and achievement, a positive view of what humankind can do if it gets out of its own way, and, perhaps closer to their vest, a notion that people aren't particularly good or kind or reliable, but do deserve not to be judged off the cuff; and more importantly, the that love trumps everything, although their version of love is old-school.
I think sometimes Bill and Richard look at us and wonder, how did these beings come out of me? Lisa and I have always valued our time more than our careers, had more academic success than job satisfaction, are into exotic kinds of spirituality, live in a Podunk-style suburb, in a cookie-cutter house that says almost nothing about who we are.
But they do recognize many of their values in us. In fact, Lisa and I see them in each other, and long ago acknowledged that our fathers were from the same generational mold, despite the oceans separating them. While I've shifted some of the less desirable patterns I was exposed to as a child, the moral backbone I formed in my household remains the same. I am a reflection of my dad; just like Lisa is a reflection of hers.
And something those men do know without a doubt is that we love, and know them deeply.
Here's a special shoutout to Dave Donnelly, Lisa's older brother, who's been honoring both his sisters, the late Ellen, and Lisa, by participating in the MS Society Bike to the River fundraiser. What Lisa says about it: "It's a two-day bike ride covering about 160 miles to raise money for the MS Society. This is the second year in a row Dave is doing this. He feels strongly about supporting the MS Society, having seen first-hand how helpful they have been to me on my health journey. I think he likes that it happens to fall on my birthday usually too (thanks Davey – best present ever!)."
Many of you have already contributed, thanks so much. If you're so inclined, here's the link:
https://mssociety.donordrive.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=261852
And now for some levity, and interdubs culture.
- From Dana: "I know y'all are quite the Japonophiles, and in my lil "Good News" weekly (actually known as Future Crunch, highly recommend if you're not already tuned in), I saw this -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VrMgtr5MTc . The champion is amazing, but I also just love the communal awe-filled cheering from the Japanese audience."
- From Lisa, her latest "Water-Bearer" charcoal:
- From me, a couple of musical treats for you. We were watching the first episode of "The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart," transfixed by the show's brutal outback beauty, and its tender, magical gaze upon the vicissitudes of childhood, when I felt I recognized the soundtrack. Sure enough it was from Polish prodigy Hania Rani, one of the top composers of ambient (or any kind of) music of her generation. See her improvise on KEXP:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3EuiU1qdpE
Mind-bending ... She runs in the same circles as more famous Max Richter, whose "On the Nature of Daylight" you probably know:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_YHE4Sx-08
I love the little smile, and "here we go ..."
- And finally, my story Lucy On the Vine in the Evening, if you want to spend some time with some reasonably fun sci-fi dealing with AI, genetic manipulation and climate change. Or just to check out a bunch of digital art.
Love y'all.
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