Questions from My Father

- A derived text sourced from Messages from My Father by Calvin Trillin, 1996

by William Walsh

Was he a Mormon? A health nut? Was he someone who had some rare allergy to coffee beans or caffeine? Does it occur to you that, as someone who has never tasted coffee, with or without milk, you may not be a great authority on this subject? There seemed to be only two alternatives, and what little boy wants to take after people who are nervous? How did this family--a family indistinguishable from thousands of other poor Eastern European Jewish families saying their farewells to the czar, a family that could have been expected to fetch up on, say, Delancey Street--land in Galveston? Could it have been stubbornness? How's Cousin So-and-so? Otherwise, why did I sack all those onions? Well, I suppose you get used to it after a while, don't you? What were we supposed to put in the space marked 'Father's Occupation' on the cards we filled in with block letters at the beginning of each term? Oh, yes, Abe Trillin--the guy with the yellow ties? What brand are these? What's the matter? And who are you--a movie star maybe? Did you check her teeth? What's the name of this store again? Does it have anything to do with Cartier's? Since when did you become such a big defender of the New York Publishers Association? Or could it have been the cowboys? For years, whenever my mother returned from an inspection trip shaking her head, he would ask, 'O. and F.?' What was to keep him in Kansas City? But what if it hadn't? What if, for instance, I had been dyslexic? What if it had become obvious at some point that I wasn't capable of making the sort of high-school grades necessary to get into Yale, even in that more accepting era? What if I had been pathologically shy instead of merely as incapable of bringing up awkward subjects as my father was? Was this really going to happen? If it did, was it really the right thing for me? Now you think I should come back and advise somebody on the tax implications of his real estate deal? That's not the one Stover was in, is it? Passengers on the magic escalator? Was the fact that we had reached the point of having our writing published by prominent magazines or respectable book publishers strongly connected to the fact that we had all gone to the same sort of colleges and universities? And what had lead to the summer job? Could he have been right? What was the point of buying a lot of books and keeping them even after you'd read them? What's the advantage? A dollar a book? Was a newspaperman what he wanted me to be? Did sending me to typing school have anything to do with that? But would that be how you'd steer your son toward journalism--slip the word to him casually when he's three years old and then make sure he knows how to type? Was God hard of hearing? Oh, you just happened to run into Rabbi Hadas on the Plaza and you two fell into another one of your Talmudic discussions? What's the advantage? Would my father think that the Grand Plan had worked out more or less as devised? What more appropriate beat could a real American have?

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