Remembering My Dad Through His Lists
A son turns a page after unearthing his father’s notebooks
My father kept lists. He listed the 539 books he read in his last 25 years. He listed every C-Span Booknotes episode he watched religiously every Sunday night for almost seven years (322 shows). Oh, yes, he loved books! He kept shopping lists for his small fridge in his man cave (Pepsi, hazelnut coffee, heavy cream), and long lists of daily tasks.
He recorded them in pocket-sized notebooks kept close by his reading chair. He never stopped writing lists until 5 p.m. on 31 December 2004, when the cancer finally stopped him.
After his death, I scooped all his little notebooks into a box. Besides the book list (recorded in what was reverentially called 'the green book'),
I rarely perused the other notebooks. The pain of his death was too raw, and then the business of living interfered.
Dad was born in 1927 in Lowell, Massachusetts. His father worked in a tannery that turned cow carcasses into leather. His Irish immigrant grandfather rose from the wool mills to a city job as a ‘sparrow man’, cleaning Lowell streets by shoveling horse manure. (To those who disparaged Lowell, he cracked: “You’d never call Lowell a one-horse town if you followed me around on my daily rounds!”)
Dad was smart as a whip. After a summer working in the tannery with his father, he resolved to avoid a lifetime of drudgery. At 16, he graduated from Lowell High School, then moved on to Boston College for a year before joining the Army in 1945, later returning to Boston College on the GI Bill to earn his bachelor of science and master of science in physics, commuting all six years from Lowell.
His first job, in 1951, was as an engineer in the Ballistic Research Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. But soon he became homesick, so when he heard the Watertown Arsenal was hiring, he made a call.
“Oh, sorry, we’re not hiring,” said the woman on the line.
My father kept lists. He listed the 539 books he read in his last 25 years. He listed every C-Span Booknotes episode he watched religiously every Sunday night for almost seven years (322 shows). Oh, yes, he loved books! He kept shopping lists for his small fridge in his man cave (Pepsi, hazelnut coffee, heavy cream), and long lists of daily tasks.
He recorded them in pocket-sized notebooks kept close by his reading chair. He never stopped writing lists until 5 p.m. on 31 December 2004, when the cancer finally stopped him.
After his death, I scooped all his little notebooks into a box. Besides the book list (recorded in what was reverentially called 'the green book'),
I rarely perused the other notebooks. The pain of his death was too raw, and then the business of living interfered.
Dad was born in 1927 in Lowell, Massachusetts. His father worked in a tannery that turned cow carcasses into leather. His Irish immigrant grandfather rose from the wool mills to a city job as a ‘sparrow man’, cleaning Lowell streets by shoveling horse manure. (To those who disparaged Lowell, he cracked: “You’d never call Lowell a one-horse town if you followed me around on my daily rounds!”)
Dad was smart as a whip. After a summer working in the tannery with his father, he resolved to avoid a lifetime of drudgery. At 16, he graduated from Lowell High School, then moved on to Boston College for a year before joining the Army in 1945, later returning to Boston College on the GI Bill to earn his bachelor of science and master of science in physics, commuting all six years from Lowell.
His first job, in 1951, was as an engineer in the Ballistic Research Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. But soon he became homesick, so when he heard the Watertown Arsenal was hiring, he made a call.
“Oh, sorry, we’re not hiring,” said the woman on the line.
Crestfallen and about to hang up, he took a stab and meekly offered: “Ma’am, I’m a physicist.”
Instantly her tone changed, as if Dorothy had shown the ruby slippers at the shuttered gates of Oz.
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” she bellowed. “We’re hiring physicists!”
In the 1950s, he was an early expert in FORTRAN (a computer programming language), then worked a decade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory. He moved his wife and five children from a Lowell tenement to a Boston suburb, and sent his kids to private colleges.
It seemed he had left Lowell behind, but not so. In his heart, despite all the education and success, he viewed himself as simply a working-class Lowell kid.
Alone in his reading chair, he sometimes talked to himself. If you caught him in the act, he was unembarrassed: “I have a rich interior life,” he cracked, borrowing a phrase used to describe contemplative saints like Thomas Merton.
Dad never cared to travel. He preferred reading. Near the end, I asked if he regretted spending (carefully avoiding the word wasting) so much of his life in a reading chair. He did not. In high dudgeon, he justified himself.
“I’ve travelled the stormy Atlantic in clipper ships. I’ve climbed the Himalayas in wild blizzards. I’ve faced down wild animals in Africa.”
“Huh?”
“I read.”
Indeed, for a sedentary man, he had a remarkable skill set. He knew how to survive an avalanche (“swim through it like you’re riding a wave”), a shark attack (“strike them in the nose”), the charge of a 200-kg silverback gorilla (“stand your ground, stay calm!”).
At age 77, surrounded by his large-screen TV, CD players, personal computers—the detritus of progress—he marveled at it all, but returned again to Lowell, on the Merrimack River: a sparrow man’s grandson, a tannery glazier’s son. Like that other physicist Newton, he stood on the shoulders of giants.
He once regaled us with how he had witnessed Lowell’s last living Civil War veteran in a parade. It connected him to a distant past, one link in the long chain of history. Dying now, he reconnected to his own distant past.
And so he pulled up a small, purple notebook and started another list: the Last List. Penned before morphine and hospice care silenced his thoughts to all but himself, the Last List takes one on a stroll back to the bygone days of an ingenious Catholic boy, a mill worker’s striving son, for a final visit to his beloved Lowell.
Part nostalgia, part progress marker, the Last List embodies Dad’s two sides: reader and scientist. No doubt that there is warmth, sentiment, even yearning in it, but there is also dispassionate observation.
On the 20th anniversary of his death, I found the list at the end of the small, purple notebook. A phone number for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston carbon-dated it: The list was from just before he died.
It startled me. In black ink, cursive style, Dad hearkened back to 1930s Lowell: the things lost, never to return, captured only in memory now.
Lost and only in memory—that was exactly how I was experiencing Dad now. Squinting my eyes, I recalled him in the reclining reading chair, both gone. Tears flowed.
Dad never travelled from his reading chair to far-flung places. He didn’t have to. He had a rich interior life. It was all right before him.
From Newsweek