Dear Old Dad

My father—whom I loved, and who loved me—never read a word I wrote or, if he did, never mentioned the fact. It was like an embarrassing secret we shared, of a creepy proclivity I had, something that we couldn't discuss without awkwardness. And what was odd was that from 1967 until his death in 1995, I published more than thirty books and hundreds of essays and magazine pieces. He would have had to go out of his way to avoid reading them, actually to step over them, since many were in his house. It was not that he didn't read. He enjoyed history, especially local history—of Boston, New England and his ancestral province of Quebec. The Lewis and Clark expedition fascinated him to the point where he would declaim the hardships the team faced, with the stout-hearted Sacagawea, the bad weather, the plagues of wasps. ('They were taw-mented!' he would cry, in his characteristic way.) He read the newspaper every day, he read his Holy Missal the way a Muslim reads the Holy Qur'an—and his missal had the thickened and thumbed look of a Wahhabi's Qur'an. He read Usher's dense and very dry History of the Town of Medford, he read about whaling and could tell you what flensing was, and the composition of baleen; the Gloucester fishermen, the Civil War, the Battle of Lexington, the works of Edward Rowe Snow, all of that, but no work of mine.