| 摘要 | My father never tossed a softball with me. He never took me hiking. He never taught me how to start a campfire.
Thank goodness.
Had he been the type of person to do those things, he wouldn’t have been the exceptional force in my life that he is. My father was the 14-year-old kid who spent his allowance on a record player and classical LPs, making him an outcast and bona fide nerd. Later, despite looks that put Cary Grant to shame, he was still a loner, swimming against the tide, devouring records and books along the way.
Since I was little, we listened to music together, and do so to this day. My father opened the glorious world of classical music to me, but that’s not the only music we listened to. It was not at a party at a friend’s house, but on the sofa in our living room, sitting next to my father, that I first heard Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, and The Alan Parsons Project.
Our huge living room was essentially a library with a couch, television set, and a (superb) hi-fi set-up, including a sub-woofer that my father built himself. The walls were lined with the bookshelves and record cabinets that my father designed. My friends were in awe of the sheer volume of books and records that filled the room, and I pitied them when I thought of their barren homes, with not much more reading material than a TV guide and the perfunctory Bible.
At our house, my atheist father stocked the library with multiple Bibles, one of his many intellectual pursuits being Biblical scholarship. Always one to share the delights of his mind with his daughter, he read me bedtime stories from the Old Testament.
When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to go to Sunday school, and my father drove me every week. He once told me, as a thought experiment, to consider that there are two things God cannot do: He can’t make a square that’s round; and He can’t make an object so heavy that He can’t lift it. I blabbed that witticism to my Sunday school teacher, sweet-hearted Mr. Hall, who worried for my soul, convinced I was repeating those words from someone who was trying to keep me from God.
If only he knew. I thought my father was God.
As an adult, both my parents continue to watch over my welfare. When my mother visits, she brings my favorite wine, cleans my apartment, and inspects the fridge to make sure I’m eating right. My dad brings books and magazines bulging with Post-It notes marking the pages he wants me to read. He wouldn’t notice if I didn’t eat for a week, but makes sure I have excellent stereo equipment and that I don’t run low on CDs.
One might call my father decent to a fault. A chainsmoker, if he finishes a cigarette and there’s no trash can nearby, he puts it out on the sole of his shoe and puts the butt in his pocket, leaving his pockets full of burn holes and loose tobacco. When he goes shopping and fishes for change to pay the cashier, he ends up strewing bits of tobacco on the counter with the coins. Am I embarrassed when this happens? Bite your tongue. I’d be embarrassed if he threw his butts onto the sidewalk like everyone else.
My father is an imperfect man. He stores newspapers in his kitchen cabinets, doesn’t clean his house, and hauls home bags of books and magazines from his regular Barnes & Noble excursions, adding to the ever-increasing piles of brain food in every room in the house. He can be difficult and irritable and, by his own admission, selfish.
My father is also the man who made up a special lullaby for me, which he sang to me every night, year after year, until I turned ten and felt too old for such things. My father is the man who always pushed me (and still does) to think critically, to strive for knowledge, and to settle for no less than truth. It’s because of my father that I love Stravinsky and Civil War history and Star Wars. I can’t catch a softball, but I know how to shop for loudspeakers and solder speaker wire together.
A daughter’s life doesn’t get better than that.
Karina Rollins is a TAE senior editor, but will always remain her daddy’s little girl. |
