Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

Maybe It Is Just Math: Fatherhood and Disease in Academia

 p a r t t h r e e Forging New Fatherhoods ambitions altered and transformed 03 Part 3_Manu 7/1/2010 5:30 PM Page 157 Everyone wants the good news, so here it is: I was the doomed kid born poor and raised in violence who worked his way through school, earned his PhD, and got a good job. In the history of my family, I was the first and only. I read consistently; I read a lot. We moved a lot; I had few friends. We were dirt poor; I had a library card. I never dated, never went to a dance. I spent a lot of time with my dog, Prince. The local private college sponsored a bridge program for high school students; in one year I was accepted to the school on scholarship. In five more years I had a classics degree and a Fulbright. Two more years and an MFA. Several more years and a PhD. Now I’m an assistant professor and new father. It’s supposed to be easy now, because I made it. Summer 1990 The Summer Scholars program was about to be oªcially over, and in three short weeks I discovered that I was a poet, having fallen in love with a girl from Egypt. Of course I had to go back to high school, to junior year, but I had some college credit under my belt. To celebrate, my first professor, Dennis, had me and the TA, Rob, over to his house. We drank beers and talked. I timed it at four and a half hours: my longest adult conversation. I looked around the tidy four-bedroom, the wall art, bookshelves, and real furniture, and I knew: I wanted to become a professor. I didn’t think about my home life then, the seven people living in the three-bedroom house in Hilltop, Tacoma, my miserable clothes. I only saw a future with this present sheen, where smart people read books, ate well, and talked deliriously. At seventeen I saw what I wanted. It was not my mom’s two roommates and two returned adult children sleeping on couches; it was not the laundry room I was living in, with my thrift-store bookshelves and cold bus Maybe It Is Just Math Fatherhood and Disease in Academia jaso n t ho m pso n 159 03 Part 3_Manu 7/1/2010 5:30 PM Page 159 mornings at the corner of Twelfth and K, where that year two tourists were gunned down for asking directions. Now I was in Parkland, o¤ the college campus, in a professor’s home. Gerald Michael Gerald Michael was the name of my father, a maintenance man whose parents both died of colon cancer when he was a child, an orphan who was raised for a time by either a relative or friend of the family named Ms. Ruby, and then sent to a work farm. I know he had brothers and sisters, and that all but one of them died of colon cancer. My parents divorced in 1974; I was one. My father, a lifetime smoker, died of heart disease, though probably the cancer that resulted in a partial colonectomy would have gotten him, or diabetes. He did not finish high school, he did not go to college, and often in his life he would admit that he had only ever read one book all the way through, Robinson Crusoe. My father and I met in 1980, when I was seven. He didn’t have time to do it on the water, and so in the front of our tiny house on an abbreviated lawn he tied an empty beer can to the end of his fishing pole and taught me to cast. Back and throw. I am reaching into the past. I am the sound of success that day: the can going out to the gutter, to the broken street in front of 11 California, to myself at seven, and to my father, who was the age I am now, thirty-five. He dies in 2007. What weighs us down enough so that we may properly fly? What casto¤s do our eyes settle on, and why, and how do we know what will carry? Why do we settle for some grass when the ocean waits exactly ten miles west? What is it that makes a father the ache...