Thursday, June 14, 2007

My father

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

—Mark Twain

My father's birthday would have been today.

I’m afraid my experience was rather the opposite of Mr. Twain’s. When I was 14, I watched as my father completed the Sunday crossword in about half an hour. In ink. Then he’d toss the paper in the trash. I boasted about my father at school, and my schoolmates suggested that he hadn’t really solved the crossword, so I surreptitiously fished a few out of the trash and checked. He’d gotten them all right!

I tried, but I couldn’t even get started. I couldn’t figure out a single word on the Sunday crosswords. I asked my father how he did it, and he just said to study hard in school, and he’d show me when I was a little older. Now I’m older, and I still can’t figure out a single word on the Sunday crossword.

My father read the financial newspaper every weekday. About four times a year, he’d say, as he finished, something like, ‘United Necktie is going to double this year.’ I’d check, and, while United Necktie wouldn’t go up exactly 100%, it would go up somewhere close to that amount. Sometimes he would say, ‘Amalgamated Widgets looks overvalued,’ and, sure enough, Amalgamated Widgets would drop by quite a bit during the year. My father never talked to me about money in any detail, so I don’t know if he actually bought United Necktie or shorted Amalgamated Widgets, but, if I could have picked even one stock a year that I knew would go up or down, I’d be a wealthy man now. I’m not. I ride busses or walk, rather than driving a car or taking taxis.

I asked my father to teach me about stocks. ‘When you’re older. Now you need to study hard in school. The one thing I will tell you is, never listen to anything a broker tells you. If a broker recommends it, it’s never going to be any good. You have to read the newspaper and make up your own mind.’ But he never taught me how. Nor did business school, for that matter.

When I finished school, I tried to get my father to show me how to work the Sunday crossword, but he’d stopped. My mother told me he’d been doing the crossword in competition with a close friend who’d died, and, after his friend’s death, my father never did another crossword, and was unable even to talk about crosswords.

My father kept postponing the lesson about investments until he was quite elderly. Finally, he said, ‘Son, it’s time you learned about investments, I’m going to take you with me to the brokers.’ When we went, my father just asked the broker, ‘What do you recommend?’ Then he bought what the broker recommended. Which proved just as bad an investment as he had told me it would be half a century earlier. Fortunately, his mind had retreated back to the days when £100 was a lot of money (and when sterling was the world’s currency), so he didn’t lose very much.

So, when I was 14, I knew my father was one of the smartest men on the planet. And I had proof. But senility strikes the sage, and I had the pain and agony of seeing my father in his old age stripped of all the wisdom I had once witnessed.

As a consolation, my father never knew he was old and near death. The week before he died, he thought he was young, vigorous, and had many years left to live. He asked me to call the travel agent and book him on a world tour, and I promised him I would.

Then I left him at the nursing home, went home, and cried.

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