DID YOUR DAD SOMETIMES DRIVE YOU TO DRINK?



The other day I was half-listening to a radio interview with a male celebrity, who was telling about his long-dead father. He explained at great length how his loudmouth, domineering dad had ruined his life and ultimately driven him to drink and drugs. Of late I've heard a lot of stories like that, and I think it's time for a counter example. So to start the new year properly, I'll tell you about my long-dead father.

As it happens, he, too, was a domineering loudmouth. Most of the time he overwhelmed my timid mother into cowed silence. I don't know what they ever saw in each other, but I'm glad they did see something, because I like being here. One of my uncles once told me how my dad tried to learn to play the violin, so he could serenade my mother. Nothing came of that, though. For Korpel men, wooing a woman by music is hopeless, and he must have realized that. But the picture of that brazen, loud, clumsy young man, trying to play "Liebestraum" on a cheap violin, fills me with nostalgic affection.

My father was an amateur actor in a group called "Mutua Amicitia". "Mutual Friendship, "I think it meant; Latin was in then. He played mostly witty, erudite lovers in humorous or dramatic triangles of love and deceit. His acting carried over to his life at home . At breakfast he would complain to my mother, in a tragic baritone choked with grief, about his eggs being runny. If I came home late from a high school party, he would beat his brow and visibly hold back his tears at my treachery.

My teenage years were filled with embarrassment. In restaurants he'd complain about cheap wine in a loud, aggrieved voice and made the waiter take it back. When we went to the opera, he told us what was going to happen next. "Pay attention, mother," he'd say in a voice that carried to the upper balcony, "here is where she goes mad. Listen to that singing!" People hissed and my mother cringed, but he never noticed.

In May 1940, Rotterdam was bombed by the Nazis and we lost everything. After we narrowly escaped from the burning city, my father went back the next day to assess the damage. Our house was gone and so was the printing shop that he had just paid off after a lifetime of work. For the first and last time I saw my dad cry. Then he restarted his life and never referred to his loss again.

Yes, my father was loud and domineering and embarrassing. He made my teenage life very difficult. But what a man I lost when he died.

At Random - Adrian Korpel