A View from A Broad

What you read
When I was a little girl, my dad would talk to me. That was about the time I started keeping a diary, and I was stupid. I didn't want to listen to my dad of all people talk about dead people I had never known and would never know. They had strange names, and people squirmed when he tried to talk about that stuff. That was history. More than that, it was embarrassing history, full of pain and things like poetry. All I cared about was who was mean to me, how I said mean things back, and how stupid boys were. My dad was so old. Who cared about Europe? Who cared about some war? What was war anyway? Was Canada going to invade? And----where was Canada, anyway? Some place north?

Eventually, I came around, but so many things were lost, because even then I didn't write that stuff down. I forgot so much, and I know my da didn't tell the other kids that stuff, just as he didn't read poetry to them and get all red-faced and watery-eyed when he did it. He looked like a bulldog in a tam o'shanter, a squat, frog-faced guy with a Karl Malden nose and a hoarse scratchy voice. When he took off the tam you could see his combover, which fooled nobody---including himself. I think it was habit. He had a big belly and gnarled hands, and extremely emotional eyes. They'd do all sorts of things, express all kinds of emotions, so any conversation with him was a roller coaster. Roller coasters were not popular things in Duluth Minnesota. Minnesota Nice dictated not so much that you were nice, but that you could fake it. ( Read more... )