My father loved problems. He looked for them in a good way. He was an organic chemist, doing process research in pharmaceuticals for Merck. He worked on the Sinemet, for Parkinsons, which he later took himself, on some of the chemotherapy treatments he later took, on anti-parasiticals, major antibiotics, on and on. He loved the challenge of his work and the satisfaction of doing good, saving lives, improving the quality of life for people he’d never know.
There was appropriate liquid kept in the lab for celebrating victories. He and his colleagues would fill beakers and toast each other with one of their standards: “Man takes another step out of the primordial slime.” Or: “Science once again triumphs over ignorance and superstition.”
He did a lot of hiring, and looked not only for people with stellar academic careers and superb references, but also those who looked for problems, loved problems. One question he asked (probably not PC these days) was about last names if the man (it was almost always a man in the 50’s to 80’s) had an unusual one. “Tell me about your last name,” he’d say, figuring that if a man wasn’t curious about his own name, he wasn’t curious enough to be a good chemist.
My father liked woodworking, especially making small puzzles out of wood. He’d keep them on his desk during the interview and see what happened. In one successful hire, a candidate was asked to describe his dissertation project, which was in fact brilliant. But in the midst of enthusiastic description, my father saw the candidate’s eye constantly move to the wooden puzzle until, unable to resist, the candidate reached for it, saying, “Excuse me, do you mind—” And he was hired on the spot. It was the appetite for problems, the joy in seeing and confronting them, that sold him.
That appetite for problems came in later, when Parkinsons slowly overtook my father. He confronted the progressive disease with equanimity and courage, breaking down its challenges into problems to be solved. Parkinsons is a moving target, of course, so one month’s solution may not work the next, but as he said, there were no end of problems. When he was more mobile, how to get to the middle school where he donated his time, how to write, how to use the computer, and later, how to get from the wheelchair to the toilet, how to carry plate, how to eat, how to confront death. How to triumph over ignorance and superstition with grace and faith.
After years of protesting military interventions, life turns had me unexpectedly teaching literature and writing at a U.S. base outside Naples, Italy. It was my first up close encounter with soldiers, albeit in peacetime. I wasn’t prepared for what I found.
Years ago, I was living in California and my father in New Jersey was diagnosed with advanced non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, likely to be fatal in four months. I flew home and my mother picked me up at Newark Airport. Befuddled and exhausted, she promptly got lost in a sketchy part of Newark, where we ran out of gas. Hospital visiting hours were almost over, but my mother had no useful idea besides: “Stay in the car!
I’m fine with flying reindeer delivering presents to every earthly child in one night. However, Mr. Clement C. Moore has imbedded some serious textual inconsistencies in “Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
In 1929, Robert Graves needed a best-seller to fund his plan of cutting out of England, buying a house in Majorca, and never having to work again in his life (aside from pumping out 120 books). In eleven weeks, he dashed off Good-bye to All That, a memoir of his years as an officer in World War 1. Instant bestseller (and never out of print). Graves and paramour are off to Majorca.
In the summer when I was sixteen, I read great gobs of Anna Karenina with my feet over my head. I had been somberly informed that you retain information better if there is more blood in your brain. This seemed reasonable, so I lay in bed with my feet up against the wall. If the novel hadn’t been so fine, I might have been derailed by the fatigue of holding a big book up in the air for hours, but I actually don’t remember being troubled by this fact of reading gravity.
If you read a lot in private as a kid and listen to Big Issues on TV, life can get confusing, sometimes scary. Here are some examples.
To find whole new chapters in favorite books, as if the pages stuck together on earlier readings were now magically revealed.
Recently I blogged about the time my father as a 
My father grew up in Brooklyn, during the Great Depression, in a house so close to the next one that once, when a spark ignited the shingles, a neighbor simply jumped from his roof to my father’s and stamped out the spark.