This Really Isn't About You Read online

  According to my father, people said to him: Don’t go to Glasgow! It’s too dangerous there!

  My father went to Glasgow, where occasionally Glaswegian men who’d had too many pints of lager would try to start fights with him. My father only ever had one pint of lager, at the most, so he’d look at them, bemused.

  My father told me that he’d loved Glasgow. In photographs, he wore a lot of tweed and had long sideburns. He was tall and dark and handsome: when Scottish friends told him of the Hogmanay tradition that a home’s first visitor in the new year should ideally be a tall and darkhaired man, he was delighted to oblige.

  In Glasgow, my father joined a choir. He loved to tell the story of the time he was apprehended by some Glaswegian police on his way home one evening, how they believed him to be a suspicious character, how they demanded that he tell them what was in his bag. Choir music! he said. In Glasgow, in the building where he lived in a bedsit with a shared bathroom off of Byres Road, my father met my mother, Fiona. She was from Dumfries, a small town a couple of hours south of Glasgow. My mother was working as an educational psychologist, driving her orange Mini around the city to visit schools and homes and hospitals. Before my father, my mother had only had British boyfriends, but she and my father fell in love.

  My parents married even though my mother was not Jewish, which some people might have thought would have mattered to my father’s family. And my parents married even though some people would have thought that my father being Jewish might have mattered to my mother’s family, who attended the Church of Scotland. But the families did not mind. Maybe because my mother was thirty and my father was thirty-two, which were quite old ages for people to be marrying in 1977. Maybe because my grandparents were very kind people.

  More than twenty years later, my grandfather, my father’s father, told me:

  When your dad told me that your mom was not Jewish, the night before their wedding we were sharing a hotel room and he told me in the dark, and I said, ‘I know that she’s a good one because you picked her.’

  I thought this was such a moving story! Such love and acceptance from my grandfather, who did (it was true) adore my mother, and vice versa. But when I repeated this moving story to my father, he snorted (my father had a distinctive snort) and said: That never happened.

  As far as I knew, the ways in which my father was Jewish were mostly food ways: he ate briny fish and cold beet soup from jars. Pumpernickel bagels, grainy dark breads. My father drank little alcohol – Jews don’t really drink, he’d say, which was maybe less of a fact than a rumour – and he avoided pork products. When pressed, he claimed it was less a fear of God than a fear of trichinosis. One time, when my brother ordered a pork chop at a restaurant, perhaps to be rebellious, my father sent it back to the kitchen to be cooked again, not once, but twice. I never saw my father send anything else back in a restaurant. At Chanukah my father cooked latkes and sang the Hebrew to bless the menorah, but at Passover he read the English texts.

  After they got married my parents moved north of Glasgow, to Aberdeen. My father had a postdoctoral fellowship in medical physics, a post that he acquired in part because Aberdeen was small and remote and cold, which limited the popularity of the opportunity among postdoctoral physicists. My father called it ‘winning the scientific lottery’. My mother gave birth to Arthur in the hospital where my father worked. After visiting hours, my father wore his lab coat so that he could pass as a doctor and go to see them. My father joined a camera club and developed his own black-and-white photographs. When my father’s fellowship ended, he got a job in Schenectady, in upstate New York: it was a coincidence that it was the town that he’d lived in as a child, where his sister had been born, the last place he’d lived with his parents before his mother got sick. It was a coincidence that he loved. And so, in 1980, my father and my mother and my brother emigrated to America.

  In 1981 my parents’ second child was born, and that was me. I was born in the same hospital where my grandmother gave birth to my aunt, when my father was four. It was the biggest hospital in Schenectady, and I think it may well have been the same hospital where my grandmother was first treated for cancer. My sister, Elspeth, was born there, too, five years after me.

  Twenty-five years after they had moved to America, my father and mother went on a special visit to Aberdeen, for a celebration. I was living in London, then, so I travelled up the country to join them.

  What’s the celebration for? I asked my father, when I arrived.

  Oh, said my father, it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the time we built the first full-body MRI scanner.

  I didn’t know you did that, I said, and my father shrugged. I knew that he’d worked on MRI for most of his career, but I did not know that the machine in Aberdeen was the first one to take pictures of whole people. That was what my father meant when he said he’d won the scientific lottery: to work on that project, at that time, in that place.

  Is the person who had the first scan invited to the celebration? I asked my father.

  No, my father said, we tested it on a patient who was definitely going to die, just in case.

  In honour of the celebration there was an article in the city paper, the Aberdeen Press & Journal, with a photo of my father in 1979 or 1980, standing by the machine, looking tall and dark and handsome. Inside the machine was his colleague: you could just see the top of his head. The article called my father a ‘Scottish scientist’ and my father thought that was both funny and wonderful.

  My father was not religious, but he had a lot of strong beliefs. When he taught me how to ride a bike when I was five or six years old, he refused to give me training wheels. My father did not believe in training wheels. Instead, he ran behind me as I pedalled down the street in front of our house. He held on to the back of the bike and when he thought I was balanced and ready, he would let go. Several times this caused me to fall over into a hedge on the side of the road. The neighbourhood kids would watch, and cheer. But then one day my father let go and I was just riding.

  One evening when I was around that same age and I was telling a long and complex and fictional anecdote at dinner, my father turned to my mother afterwards and said: She is going to scare the heck out of boys.

  My father did not tell me that I was pretty. He did not believe in this, either. This was because my father did not like the way that many men his age talked about the intelligence and talents of their sons and the beauty of their daughters.

  My father talked about my intelligence and talents all the time and always if I was dressed up for a special occasion then he would take my picture and say that I looked very nice.

  My father took a lot of photographs of his kids. He took family photos with his tripod and a timer. He’d arrange us on the sofa in a tableau with a space for him, and then run back to his seat while the timer counted down. When the rolls of film were developed, half of the photos were of his back, of him bending over into his seat while the rest of us smiled our fixed grins at the camera.

  (These are some of my favourite photos.)

  After my father died, one of his colleagues wrote to me and said that when my father went to radiology conferences to give presentations and discuss the latest breakthroughs in medical imaging he’d say to his friends, distinguished scientists and physicians from around the world: Want to see some great new images? The colleagues would say, Yes, and then my father would pull photographs of his kids out of his pocket.

  On Saturday mornings my father made us all oatmeal for breakfast, in a big pot on top of the stove, which I guess was a way of letting my mother sleep in. When I became a teenager and slept later and later my father would still serve up my oatmeal and then when I got down to breakfast at last he would reheat it in the microwave, which was disgusting, but still it was what I had to eat. On Sunday mornings my father made us all pancakes for breakfast, including ones without eggs and milk for my brother, who was allergic to eggs and milk, and including one pancake for the dog.
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  My father also baked a lot of bread, and once developed a failsafe method for making Jell-O, using the microwave. During the course of its development he produced so much Jell-O, tubs and tubs of it, that he started giving it away to the neighbours. The neighbours seemed a little surprised to receive the gift of Jell-O. My father thought it was a fine gift.

  My father was also a person who would always go to visit people he knew when they were in the hospital, even if they were not his closest friends.

  When I was a teenager and my father helped me with my math homework he would try to show me special ways to do the math problems, ways that a physicist would do them. They were ways that he described as better or easier, but not ways to do problems that my teachers had taught me at school. Dad, I would say, I don’t want to do the math problems this way! Show me how to do them in the normal way! I’m not smart enough to do it this way! and my father would say, You’re smart enough, you’re just not interested! and we would shout at each other across the kitchen table until one of us would storm away in a huff. It wasn’t very nice.

  When I was fifteen and had to make a scrapbook of twenty magazine and newspaper articles about chemistry, with captions explaining the meaning, and the night before the scrapbook was due I had written a caption for only one article about chemistry, my father showed me how to use a search engine on the internet for the first time in my life. He stayed up all night with me cutting and pasting and writing explanations about the articles about chemistry. In the morning my father said: Don’t do this again, and he drove me to school with my scrapbook.

  When I was fourteen and Arthur was seventeen and the brother of the noted home-grown American terrorist the Unabomber was discovered to be living in our quiet and pleasant suburb, my father drove us to his home to join the scrum of journalists so that we could cover the story for the school newspaper.

  My father did not really like us to watch television but he would let us read anything. On weekends my father would often take me and Arthur and Elspeth to the library and let us take out any books that we wanted to take out. But when we got home he would make us write them all down in a list on a special form that he printed on the laser printer, with spaces for the due dates, because my father hated paying library fines.

  My father would sometimes be sceptical of the speed at which I read my library books and so he would test me by picking one up and opening it to a random page and reading the beginning of a sentence. I would complete the sentence and my father would say that I was amazing. Then he would tell me that I should read Ivanhoe (I never read Ivanhoe).

  When Arthur and Elspeth and I complained that our father had bought us generic Cheerios instead of the superior big-brand ones, my father helped Elspeth to design a project for her school science fair: a double-blind taste test. One evening the family sat around the table and tested Cheerios and Coke and other branded food products against their generic alternatives while Elspeth collected the data, and from that day forth we were never made to eat generic Cheerios again. But we agreed that we all preferred supermarket brand Pop-Tarts.

  My father did not really approve of children playing sports with coaches, which he called ‘organized sports’, because he thought that we should play outside and have a good time, not get yelled at by other kids’ dads (my father never volunteered to be the dad who yelled). My father’s favourite anecdote of his children’s sporting career was of the time my brother joined a local recreational soccer team made up of all the kids whose dads did not want to yell at them. They did not score a single goal all season! my dad liked to recount, to illustrate his point about how organized sports were bad.

  Because my dad did not like organized sports, when I was starting high school I decided to join the freshman hockey team as a display of rebellion. My father said it was OK for me to play – he couldn’t really stop me, since it was free and also the team was no-cut, no matter how bad you were. But he did say that I had to wear eye protection on the field. Losing your eyesight is very serious, Jean! my father said, and then we got in the car to go shopping for eye protection.

  First my father took me to a series of sporting-goods stores to look at squash glasses, and then he said, Oh, I have the solution! He decided that the solution was a pair of glasses from his laboratory with a rubber band, the loop cut, attached to the frames so that they wouldn’t fall off.

  My father took the afternoon off work to watch the final match of my team’s brief, eight-game season. He took photos from the sidelines while I ran up and down a lumpy un-levelled field wearing white knee socks, a plaid kilt and laboratory safety glasses, occasionally whacking at the ball with the j-shaped curve of a varnished wooden stick.

  Afterwards, my father hugged me and said, Field hockey is crazy, it’s like playing golf while running! and I said, I know, and I think we both knew that this was the conclusion of my career in organized sports, though neither of us said it. But then my father said: It’s great that you tried it! and I said, Thanks, Dad, and then he drove me home in his second-hand Mercury Tracer and I felt certain that I was bad at sports but also certain that I was loved.

  Around the same time I was playing field hockey, I became catastrophically depressed. Such was the scourge of my depression that I only went to school about half the time, and on many of those days I would cry hysterically for the entire journey from the house to the school in the passenger seat of the car. My father would park the car in the lot of the supermarket that was next to the school and sit with me, facing forward, quietly, until I stopped crying, and then he would sign me in at the school office so that I wouldn’t get a detention.

  Some mornings he would have to turn around and drive me back home. He did that, too.

  When my parents departed my dorm room after dropping me off for the first time at university, in Montreal, after I’d begged them to take me home so that they could enrol me in the local university and they’d said no, my father kissed me and hugged me and then said: Be careful of boys.

  My father paid my rent for a month in the summer that I turned twenty-six. I had been living in London for a few years, I had decided to try to change direction in my career, to become a writer. I took a risk and quit my job to do work experience at a national newspaper for a stipend of £50 a week, which was not a very robust income on which to live in London. When discussing the decision with my parents, my father – who had submitted a poem that I’d written about grass to the New Yorker when I was fifteen – said he would lend me the money to pay the rent for my room in my apartment that month. This was somewhat humiliating – I was an adult, I felt that I was too old to be an intern – but I was very grateful. For the money, yes, but moreover for the demonstration of belief. (Of course that is a very American thing to say, that my father believed in me, but then that’s what I am.)

  Some months later, after I’d finished the internship and had a couple of pieces commissioned by big-deal editors, my family attended the wedding of an old family friend, a wedding that was very fancy. The morning after, my father and I strolled with the rest of the family through the sundrenched corridor of the very fancy wedding hotel on the way to the very fancy post-wedding luncheon. Dad was quiet and thoughtful.

  Jean, he said at last, remember the money that you owe me from that time I paid your rent?

  Yes, I said. I looked at the very fancy marble floor. I felt guilty that I hadn’t mentioned it myself, but the truth was that though I was working again, I could not yet afford to pay him back.

  Don’t worry about it, my father said.

  Wow, I said, thank you, Dad. That’s very generous.

  You’re welcome, he said.

  My father smiled.

  I smiled.

  I’m not getting a wedding, am I? I said.

  Nope, he said.

  We laughed.

  My father and I had similar laughs.

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  My grandfather, my dad’s father, died in Chicago in April 2010, which was just a month before hi
s ninety-second birthday, if a month is something that matters when you’ve lived so many of them. Grandpa told me he was dying, on the phone, which felt preposterous: if he could say those words, I’m dying, then it didn’t seem like a thing that he should do. It was cancer: what kind didn’t matter, the doctors said, because it was already everywhere, and because he was so old. My grandfather did not have Lynch syndrome: his was the kind of cancer that just appears sometimes when cells have been replicating for nine decades. It was the kind of cancer diagnosis that caused people to talk not about fighting battles, but about accepting the inevitable, and celebrating a life well-lived.

  My father bought me a flight from London to Chicago. I cried for the first hour or so across the Atlantic, and then I dried my eyes and watched some films. I did not know what would happen next. Other people I’d loved, been close to, had died – my Scottish grandmother, my great-aunt Ruth – but I’d never been present for a death before. The hospice nurse called it ‘the dying process’. It was similar to the labour of birth, she explained, a life passage, but with a less happy ending. My brother came from California, where he’d moved for graduate school. Elspeth came from Edinburgh, where she was working on her Ph.D. Together with our parents, we stayed in a mid-priced motel off the highway somewhere between O’Hare Airport and the apartment that my grandfather shared with his wife. Each morning we gathered in the hotel lobby to eat the complimentary breakfast, and then we drove in a rental car to the low-rise condo where my grandfather had lived my whole life, and where he was now in a hospital bed in the living room, dying.