Letter to my father

In modern English, the word ‘eulogy’ is inextricably associated with funerals. In Ancient Greek, though, the word simply means ‘praise speech’, usually directed towards someone still living. It’s my father’s birthday today. This is my εὐ λογος for him.

Dear Tousan,

It’s your birthday, several hours away across the Cyclades and the snow-capped Alps. We’re apart: I can’t remember the last time that happened on your birthday, not even the year we didn’t give you any presents except the origami elephant.

You still have that elephant in your desk.

Here I am in Mytilini, listening to the old man at the next table click his worry-beads, chasing the ghosts of dead historians and vanished female poets. I have you and Okaasan to thank for that: you raised me not to be a smart girl and marry an academic, but to be a smart girl and be an academic. You also raised me to question authority and do unfamiliar (read: stupid) things with gusto, which I’ve tried to do during my sojourn here. (Although I haven’t inherited your ability to catch the waiter’s eye.) I’m looking out over the fishing boats in the harbour, drinking my coffee, and my mind is drawn back to being a little kid and going fishing with you. You taught me how to bait the hook with bread or worms, flick it out and reel it in.

Years later, you instilled in me that it was wrong to kill another living thing for fun.

There are books piled on the table next to me, some in Greek, one in German, one a battered phrasebook. You’ve given me the most wicked education I could ever need, in books which have been banned in libraries across the world, in books which people claim ‘aren’t for girls’, or when I was six, ‘are too subtle for children.’ You gave me The Onion Eaters and Bored of the Rings and Stranger in a Strange Land. You serialized the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy when we came home to England from Misawa, reading a chapter every night to a rapt audience of two small children and a dog (funny voices and improvised dialogue along the lines of ‘Go snort nettles, you old fart!’ a must). You and Okaasan read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats so many times that the pages are firmly sellotaped in. Now at twenty I talk grandly of Eliot’s presentation of the Other, Eliot’s postwar arriviste reading of the Aeneid, Eliot as classicist, Eliot as anti-Semite, Eliot as problematic queer writer – but when I’m alone and bored, to pass the time I still recite Macavity’s a Mystery Cat / he’s called the Hidden Paw / for he’s the master criminal / who can defy the law... It was your gift for rhyming and teasing that convinced me, until I was fourteen, that Shakespeare really did write Like fire and powder / which as they kiss, go boom!

Looking for the Baroque Cycle, I found instead on a study shelf your copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It has your highlighting in it, fresh from the year you bought it, the kind of thing you lived on at Santa Cruz. I read it now and it's as if I have a line directly into your mind as it was thirty years ago, one part of it, when you were still the young man who wasn't yet my father.

I got my musical taste from you; I got respect from my schoolteachers and complete incomprehension from my classmates for liking Smokey Robinson and the Eagles and Fairport Convention. 'Who's that singing?' you asked me once, and when I didn't know, you looked at me incredulously and said 'That's Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul!' Except, due to an amusing combination of your intonation and my partial deafness, I heard the last three words as one word and spent the next few years thinking that Franklin was her middle name: Aretha Franklin Queenasoul.

You let me futz about with your twelve-string guitar, a constant in my life since I was three years old, when my memory more-or-less begins, and I used to curl up inside the guitar case with its gold plush lining and your pink pick. (You’re my counter-example for anyone who says ‘real men don’t wear pink’.) ‘Sing the song about the white room with the black curtains!’ I demanded, every time you played, and you would oblige. I grew up with that song and had no idea at all about the men who wrote it, about their band’s intense and insane heyday, sixties counterculture, acid trips and the mad sprawling chic of the London of your adolescence.You played duets with me, drums and electric guitar.

You pulled me and my brother out of school to go see the Cream reunion concert in London. I keep my entry ticket in my desk drawer to this day, five years later. You ruined me for all other concerts and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

You told me important things. People who sell drugs don’t have your best interests at heart. It’s always better to ask forgiveness than permission. Clare Bloom was a babe in the sixties. God is female if They’re anything. I love you, you little shit.

I love you too, daddy. Happy birthday.

With love,
Your daughter. xx