But the springboard for my next memory is really what Esteban said in his e-mail. I hope he doesn't mind my posting this snippet:
"I took a look at your blog, and it occurred to me that you might be interested in the book You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. Pretty hilarious book about traveling. I really enjoyed it."
I'll bet it is. I haven't read Eggers in a long time. The only novel of his that I have read in its entirety is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It was okay. I liked the first hundred pages or so. After a while it got self-involved and I thought the humor ran dry, but the story still kept me until the end.
Then last Christmas, someone gave my father What is the What. It seemed an appropriate present -- the story of a Sudanese refugee given to a Sudanese refugee. Christmas morning, my father read the first chapter and laughed, laughed, laughed. "You have to read this!" he says. And he is very excited.
After hours of urging, Mom is the first one to realize that Dad needs to share something. So she picks up the novel and starts reading aloud to my brother and me. After A Heartbreaking Work, I assumed Eggers would narrate with his witty cynic's voice. I expected to giggle 'til I cried, the way my father had crowed over those early pages.
Alas, no. The first chapter, the fragment that Dad loves, is the story of a refugee who was robbed and severely beaten by two ignorant African Americans. Maybe other readers see humor like my father does, but to me, hearing the story was just painful. Here is my kinsman, this poor Sudanese immigrant, smacked about by strangers and robbed of basic furnishings donated by his church. Here are my other kinsmen, the African Americans, beating the snot out of a poor man for personal gain. I feel ill on both counts, as if I am the abused and the abuser. And my father, peace be upon him, is still trying to laugh off the pain.
By the time my brother and I figure out that there is no comic reprieve on the horizon, Mom has fully hurled herself into the recital. So we did what we always do. We tuned out. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep on the couch. He lowered his head and pretended to play with some electronic gizmo. If we could have let our actual feelings touch our faces, we both would have been locked in a grimace. But some code of ethics -- I am not sure where it comes from or how we know, but we do -- some unspoken understanding keeps us both stoic. We sit through the pages, until Chapter 1 is over. Mom closes the book. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to my father's staggering pain.
To my grandfather's pain.
To my grandmother's pain.
To my uncles' pain.
To my cousins' pain.
To Valentino Achak Deng's pain.
Merry Christmas to the country I will never know.
To the Lost Boys and the nameless ones before them.
Merry Christmas to sixty years of suffering.
I don't know. I might try to read another book by David Eggers. He's a perfectly good writer. It's just that right now, I'm not sure I have the heart.
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