To my knowledge, my father has always been a renaissance man; I imagine he came out of the womb with a petri dish in one hand and a book of poetry in the other. Jacques’ career happened to be in the sciences, as a medical doctor, but his interests always covered a wider scope and something Dad knew from early on was that he would pass his eclectic mass of knowledge onto his children. He was a lover of the classics: the type of man who would read his children woefully under censored selections of Greek mythology at their bedtimes. He was an advocate of science: the type of man who would gather us to watch as he made a flame thrower out of an aerosol can and a lighter.
I’m teasing him a bit, but truly, Jacques is ridiculously smart. He figured out the basics of calculus on his own in high school by staring at the equations for circumference and area of circles. He continues his studies constantly, always reading a new chemistry book or statistics book. The man is a sponge for information. For such an intelligent man, however, he had one flaw: Dad’s love of knowledge is so great and his desire to share it so encompassing that when one of his kids showed the slightest interest or aptitude in any subject, he would get so excited he would concentrate all of his energies into developing that little iota of ability, and as children, our desire for fatherly affirmation far exceeded the natural human instinct of self-preservation; we would work ourselves to exhaustion trying to keep up with Dad’s energy and drive.
I remember the first time this writhing energy mass of pure willpower and fatherly pride was directed at me. My sister Camille was in eighth grade and had to memorize Mark Anthony’s ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ speech for her English class. She was having a bit of trouble, so my father was helping her practice. At that age, I followed Camille around compulsively, like a baby duck who has imprinted on an understandably relatively unattached teenage girl with her own concerns and life to lead, so I sat the kitchen table fine-tuning my control of the crayon, listening to Camille rehearse. She was still tripping up around the beginning part, and they went over it and over it again, with Camille drifting off at “the evil that men do live after them” and by then I had heard it enough times that I finished the line “the good is oft interred with their bones”. I didn’t know what ‘interred’ meant, or ‘oft’, but my father looked over to me surprised, smiling, a new glint in his eyes. It was reaffirming. It was terrifying. I was barely eight years old.
It didn’t seem like it really mattered in the moment; I went back to drawing and Camille and Dad went back to practice, but for weeks following that he would always try and catch me after I went out to play and get me to go over the lines with him. I obliviously avoided for a decent amount of time but then Summer hit.
My family is pretty big. My mom alone has 31 first cousins and her line multiplies like rabbits as evidenced by her five children, so as you might be able to imagine, summer vacations were pretty big affairs. A whole bunch of us would always try to go to around the same place at the same time so all the kids could play together and the adults could share a beer and responsibility for the hoards of young they brought into the world. A big favorite was a beautiful little town called Highlands in the mountains of North Carolina, and as a child there was nothing better than being there with my cousins. There was a little toy shop in the center of the town and every year we would go with what little money we had scraped together over the previous months and buy something new to keep us occupied for the two weeks we’d spend on the mountains. We bought miniature versions of foursquare balls that year, the size of a tennis ball, and you would be surprised by the number of games you can make up with a few of those, but I didn’t get to play them. Because as my cousins all ran around outside, I was stuck inside with my dad as he made me memorize words I didn’t understand to a monologue that really should have been thought to be above the reading level of an eight year old.
At first I resented having to spend my vacation learning that speech, but the more I recited it, the more I liked it; it had a sort of Stockholm Syndrome effect on me to the point where I was reciting it so much my father began to regret teaching me it.
No one could get me to stop. So my father had to watch in embarrassment after a play as a little eight year old me hounded down the actor who played King Lear in that year’s Tulane Shakespeare festival and made him listen to my monologue from start to finish. I would only refer to him as King Lear even after he introduced himself, so it was probable I believed him to really be King Lear, but after my speech, the man turned to my blushing father, shrugged and said, “not bad.”
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