Half My Nerdishness

I met another alternate universe version of myself a week ago, which is to say, I met my father. (Words are such tricky things. I’ve always resented the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” because it inherently devalues words. I think it’s equally true that a word is worth a thousand pictures. Just that one word, “father,” conjures up a hundred expectations and a hundred emotions, and a hundred images, and a hundred memories, and a hundred of six other things, some of which apply to the way I’m using the word and some of which don’t.) In meeting him I got the slightest sense of the Eowyn that exists in some parallel dimension who has always known him.

I was headed through Charlotte on my way to New Orleans and I knew through information passed along by an old mutual friend my mother had reconnected with that that was where he was living now. After some amateur internet sleuthing I found a phone number for his wife. And then weeks later, after two calls where I wasn’t brave enough to leave a message when the answering machine picked up, I managed to leave an extremely cursory one.

He called back that night and after a few false starts–somehow it doesn’t seem appropriate to ask “How are you?” of someone when you’ve never once known how they are, but how else do you start a conversation?–we landed on a topic we both could talk about, and wanted to: books, particularly those of the fantasy genre. Which Harry Potter book was the best? (Prisoner of Azkaban or Half-Blood Prince, depending on how you look at it.) Why were the two most recent A Song of Ice and Fire books such disappointments? (Because that entire section of Westeros history probably could’ve been skipped over, as first was planned.) That this is the topic we landed on only makes sense. It was him who gifted me with the name Eowyn; my mother’s only contribution on that front was wanting something gender neutral. A half hour conversation slipped by incredibly quickly and if I was shaking a little when I hung up the phone, I was mostly elated.

A little over a week later, as I waited for him in the Starbucks closest to the Megabus drop off in Charlotte, I wasn’t nervous exactly. I was pretty sure that I was going to like the person I was about to meet, and that he was going to like me. I read Don Quixote and scribbled down a few new scenes to a story I’d just started re-editing, and didn’t let my brain dwell on worrying what this day was going to be like.

I’d left Durham at 3:55am and arrived in Charlotte at 7:15am. I’d manged to sleep, if fitfully, for those three hours and I got an extra shot in my latte because I was worried about appearing alert and clever and witty and everything else in the eight hours until I left Charlotte again.

So okay, maybe I was exactly nervous.

I got a text saying he was almost there just as my overly-anxious brain was starting to convince me that he might not show, a thought that hadn’t even crossed my mind until about fifteen minutes previously. Then I started thinking about how I was sitting. There was no way I was focusing on which metaphors Sancho Panza was mixing when every other moment I was readjusting my shoulders or changing the curve of my spine.

The Starbucks was crowded with people in business attire getting their morning fix and I tried not to look at them over the top of my book and assess whether they might be the person I was waiting for. I tried to appear disinterested. A figure plopped down in the seat next to me and said, “Ms. Randall” and I looked over. He had a beard. Somehow I knew he’d have a beard.

I don’t remember quite how we got to hugging–except that he asked if we could–but it was a good, solid hug. The kind that’s hard to find these days. I wondered if any of the people in slacks and blazers with their skinny no foam vanilla lattes gave us a second glance, long enough to ponder what this one story taking place in the middle of all the others crammed into that Starbucks was.

The rest of the day went rather like that first phone conversation. Stories of the fictional and non-fictional variety were shared and recommended and it was all over far more quickly than I would’ve liked.

He told me about the dilemma he’d had in choosing between t-shirts for the occasion (he went with a shirt memorializing the classic Monty Python bit about nobody expecting the Spanish Inquisition) and I told him about the dilemma I’d had in narrowing my nerdy t-shirt collection down to the essentials to carry in a duffel bag. I told him about the brief ways he’s touched my life: the postcards my mom had come across on a stop in Cleveland depicting life in Coventry that featured him clowning, how one of my favorite t-shirts as a teenager had been the one from the production of Frankenstein he’d done with a deaf theater company. He told me about those years he’d spent clowning and the discoveries he’d made through it; how children of a certain age don’t understand that clowns aren’t real, are just people in make-up.

Walking to the Megabus stop after eight hours of trying to learn all the salient facts we could about each other and continually getting distracted by our opinions on how the movie adaptation of Watchmen differs from the comic or the chance to swing Anduril around (calling it Narsil by accident might have been the thing that embarrassed me most during the day) I was surprised at how un-momentous the day had felt. It had been nice, and pleasant, and interesting, and a lot of other positive adjectives but it hadn’t been life-changing or earth-shaking.

Eventually I decided this only made sense. Growing up it had never felt like a big deal that he wasn’t part of my life (if it had I probably would’ve contacted him earlier), so why should it feel hugely important that he is now?

Even if it hasn’t changed the way I view the world or understand myself I’m very glad to have finally met him. It’s nice to know where the other half of my nerdishness comes from and I look forward to continuing to share and recommend fictions in the future.