26 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
through my parents’ discussions of peo-
ple nicknamed Mussolini, Idi Amin,
and Ceauşescu. He had gentler nick-
names for my friends: the Huguenot,
Pennsylvania Dutch, and, for a friend
with a Greek dad, Kazantzakis.
I
said that I was never involved in the
household arguments, but I do re-
member one fight with my dad. He told
me a story about something he’d done
that day, and I was appalled. He wouldn’t
tell a student of his what a herring was.
It was a problem on an exam, about
herring and water currents. The course
was in fluid dynamics. Many of my fa-
ther’s students came from China. Their
English was excellent. But apparently
this particular student was unfamiliar
with the word “herring.” A deceptive
word: it looks like a gerund but isn’t.
My father, who learned English as
an adult and would put a little “x” in
our home dictionary next to any word
he had looked up, and whose work an-
swering-machine message promised to
return calls “as soon as feasible,” was, at
the time of the herring incident, unfa-
miliar with the word “cheesy,” having
recently asked me to define it for him.
He was also accustomed to having stu-
dents complain about his accent in their
teaching evaluations. All that, and still
my dad expressed no sympathy for this
student. “It’s part of the exam,” my fa-
ther said that he told the student, as if
the line were in the penultimate scene
of “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” My
dad had a weakness for narrating mo-
ments in which, as he saw it, he dared
to speak the truth. One of his favorite
films was “High Noon”; this paired well
with another favorite of his, “Rasho-
mon.” In one, there’s good and evil; in
the other, a tangle of both that can never
be unravelled.
I now see that he must have doubted
himself in this herring incident, though.
Otherwise, why was he telling me the
story? I said—with the moral confi-
dence of youth—that he should have
told the student what a herring was,
that it was an exam on fluid dynamics,
not on fish. And I told him that I
thought what he had done was mean.
We had a pretty long argument about
it. But my father stuck with his guns.
He said, “When you go through life,
you’ll understand that, if you don’t know
what a herring is, people don’t tell you.
You have to know it yourself.”
I should say that I have, through
the years, received notes now and again
from students who loved my father.
One woman wrote me that his encour-
agement saved her career when she
was thinking of giving up. Some of his
students were Chinese dissidents, one
had been a journalist, and my dad had
helped these students get visas to come
over. Shortly after my father died, a
student of his from Brazil invited us
to his home for dinner. He wanted to
tell us how much my father had meant
to him. What I really remember about
that dinner was the man telling my
mother and me that it was difficult for
his wife to live in Norman, because in
Norman no one tells you that you’re
beautiful. “Not at the grocery store.
Not at the hardware store. Not on the
street. Nowhere! So that is hard for
her,” he concluded.
Students complained not only about
my dad’s Tzvinglish but also about his
handwriting. His accent was very heavy
in part because he couldn’t hear well, so
his speech was more like what he had
read than like what he had heard. But
his accent could have been managed if
he had had decent handwriting. He was
a lefty, from an era before lefties were
celebrated, and maybe this had some-
thing to do with his terrible handwrit-
ing. When he wrote on a notepad, he
pressed down with his ballpoint pen so
hard that you could see the imprint
clearly even several pages beneath, and
I often stared at those indentations,
which for me had the mesmerizing
power of hieroglyphs. Maybe this was
what he didn’t want to, or couldn’t, trans-
late for his students—something of
making your way in the world when
you are, by nature, not really the kind
of person who makes his way in the
world. Maybe the herring was a red her-
ring. When I went to college, I always
praised my foreign grad-student T.A.s
to the moon and back.
O
ne fight I remember, because my
father did not enjoy it, was about
what kind of car he should get when
the old one broke down. For years, he
drove an enormous used beige Chevy
Caprice Classic, which fit all of us plus
relatives for long road trips. My dad
wanted to replace it with a Jeep with
no doors. He had always, he said,
wanted a Jeep with no doors. We got
a Subaru station wagon.
At about 7 p.m. or so, most nights,
I would hear my father pull into the
driveway with the station wagon that
he wished were a Jeep with no doors.
It would then be about forty-five min-
utes before he entered the house. What
was he doing out there? He said that
he was organizing. He took seriously
all the dials and indicators in the car—
the mileage, the warnings, the details
of the owner’s manual. He was often
going through his hard-shelled Sam-
sonite briefcase again as well.
But also forty-five minutes was, I
think, his atom of time, the span of
shortest possible duration. It took
forty-five minutes to brush and floss
his teeth. Forty-five minutes to shave.
And forty-five minutes, minimum, to
bathe. Forty-five minutes between say-
ing, “I’m almost ready to go,” and going.
He, and therefore we, were often late.
These forty-five-minute intervals
were because, I think, he did every-
thing while thinking about something
else. He lived inside a series of dreams,
and each dream could admit only one
pedestrian task into its landscape. He
often spoke of the life of the mind.
He wished for my brother and me that
we could enjoy a life of the mind. But,
as with many phrases, I think my dad
used “the life of the mind” in his own
way. He never, for example, urged us
to read Foucault, or Socrates, or, re-
ally, any books. Those forty-five-min-
ute blocks of daydreams were, I think,
closer to what he meant by the life of
the mind. They were about idly turn-
ing over this or that, or maybe also
about imagining yourself as Marco
Polo. They were about enjoying being
alone, and in your thoughts. That’ll
slow you down.
It also took my dad a long time to fall
asleep. He managed this by watching re-
runs of detective shows that came on late
at night. He sat in a dining-room chair,
close to the television in the living room,
not while reclining on his three or four
or five pillows in bed. I would sleep
on the sofa in the living room, rather
than in my own bed, because I didn’t like
going to sleep in my room alone. My
dad particularly loved “Columbo,” with
