Travels with My Father

My father died in 2006, and I still miss him. There are times I want his opinion and times I want his counsel. There are times I want to tell him about his grandchildren and times I just want to chat with him. When I dream about him, I wake up feeling lucky that I got to spend some time with him.

We had a good relationship, one that got better the older I got. When I was young, I think he often wanted to have more important conversations, ones that I was unwilling or unable to have. Because he was an adolescent psychoanalyst, I think he was used to having unusually earnest discussions with teenagers. I do remember being annoyed that he frequently knew what I was thinking, usually before I did. When I weighed a decision, he always knew what choice I’d ultimately make. Near the end of his life, I came clean about three lies I had told him. He let me know that he had seen right through two of them.

In retrospect, he was a remarkably intentional parent. There was a period in middle school when we would drive to our weekend house alone on Friday afternoons. My mother would take a train to meet us on Friday night. It was not until years later that I realized that this schedule existed so that he and I could talk. Sitting next to each other, in the front seats, staring straight ahead, he could get me to answer almost any question.

His intentionality meant he never let distractions get in the way of points he wanted to make. Once, he found NoDoz boxes in my room. I had gotten in the habit of taking the pills so I wouldn’t get sleepy while out with friends. I kept the boxes because I liked the design. He wanted to caution me about getting into the habit of using pills to solve problems.

As I remember the conversation, he apologized for being in my room but said that he had found my stash of boxes. Like a normal teenage boy, I responded, “They’re not mine.” Instead of being offended by this bald-faced lie, he replied, without missing a beat, “Be that as it may, I wanted to talk to you about something…”

A highlight of his intentional parenting was a trip we took together during the summer of 1982.

My father spent 5 years in school in Italy in the early 1950s and got a taste for the place.¹ Because of this, almost every trip we took, starting when I was 6 months old, was to Italy.² At the time, the ’82 trip seemed like “just another trip.” In retrospect, the trip was memorable for what it taught me about my father.

By this summer, my father had realized that the years traveling as a family were ending. He must have thought that I could use some preparation before embarking on a lifetime of my own travel. My mother had a regular job where she could get a week or two off in August. My father routinely closed his practice for the whole month.³ Thus, we set off for a couple of weeks together in Italy. My mother would meet us at the end. What did I learn?

It’s your trip; don’t be afraid to change your plans.

I should have realized this trip’s greater purpose right after we arrived. Instead of staying at one of our usual haunts, we arrived at a small pensione, the Hotel Elite. It was probably the type of hotel he could see me staying at while traveling on the cheap. I’m sure it is nice now, but at the time, the place was a dump. We climbed to the 4^th floor, entered a room deeply perfumed by dust. My father looked in the bathroom, sat on the end of the wafer-thin mattress, and announced, “We can’t stay here.”

Schedules are for real life, not vacations.

As an intentional parent, he may very well have had a schedule in mind, but the impression I got was that every night, at a restaurant we found wandering around the neighborhood, we plotted the next day's adventure. Even within a day, any distraction was welcome. For my father, the most tempting distractions in Rome were shoe stores and cafes.⁴ We’d be speeding along in a cab, he’d see a café he’d frequented during medical school or visited once with my mother, he'd tell the driver to stop the car, and we’d head in for a couple of espressos.

(I had just gotten a taste for coffee and decided to take advantage of the summer to drink good Italian coffee. On the first couple of days, I went cup for cup with my father only to find myself tachycardic and trembling by noon. It was decades later, while teaching my Critical Appraisal of the Landmark Medical Literature course, that I discovered my problem. A student presented a paper on the effect of caffeine on pregnancy loss. The researchers had taken great pains to control for tobacco use. Besides the obvious reasons to do this, they explained that chronic nicotine exposure enhances the metabolism of caffeine. My father was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day at this point.)

Share the things you love.

Although we’d rent a car for most of the travel, we took a train from Rome to Florence. The unspoken reason for this was to teach me that you could walk into a station, buy a second-class ticket, and be on your way. The explicit reason was his contention that one needed to see the Tuscan countryside on the way to Florence. This way, you’d recognize the landscapes in the paintings at the Uffizi.

(This ride was memorable for more than the vistas. We sat in a compartment with an older woman and her grandkids. My father wanted to ride with the window shade up and the window open. The nonna felt that was unhealthy; she wanted the shades drawn and the window closed. She and my father discussed this for much of the journey.

There is always an unwritten curriculum.

My father crafted a curriculum for this trip: to enjoy travel, you need to be relaxed, adventurous, and committed to what you honestly enjoy. Yet, as any educator knows, students learn more than their teachers intend. Spend three weeks with a 15-year-old, and he will learn some things you hadn’t planned.

“Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.” (Andrew Solomon)

Some odd recommendations were made on this trip, ones that I can’t help repeating to my family whenever the situation arises. My favorite came out one day when we were racing around some truly nausea-inducing, cliff-hugging, coastal roads. At some point, my father turned to me and instructed me to unbuckle my seatbelt. I thought he was either nuts or had had enough of me and intended to push me out of the car. When I asked why, he insisted that if we went over a cliff, it was safer if we were not buckled in.

I also learned that my father was not a detail guy. We constantly left things behind in hotels. We once walked away from a café, leaving his camera hanging on the back of a chair. When we eventually met my mother, a clothesline hung in the back of the car, our underwear, still damp from the previous night’s wash in a hotel sink, drying.

There was no reason for me to learn the language.

My father’s father immigrated from Italy. My mother was Sicilian on her father’s side. They were fluent in Italian, though my mother insisted hers was “school-girl Italian.” They were dyed-in-the-wool Italophiles. Yet, never was there any interest in my learning the language. Late in the trip, I asked my father if we could work on my Italian. He agreed, on the condition that we only proceed after I had mastered the pronunciation of the word carabinieri. To his ear, I never did.

When the summer ended, I was a skilled and committed traveler. Two summers later, I traveled with friends around Europe. We survived a memorable adventure. Five years after that, I traveled from Milan to Capri with the woman I’d eventually marry. She and I still have not yet satisfied our wanderlust. Though not all of my father’s lessons stuck, there are things that we do and enjoy on the road that I trace directly back to him.

1. He developed a taste not only for the place but also for the food. This taste was so strong that we seldom traveled in the US because he argued there was no good bread in America.

2. Yes, I was incredibly lucky and privileged; I know it.

3. I am pretty sure there is a Woody Allen quote somewhere about all of New York going crazy when all the psychiatrists go on vacation in August.

4. Especially any Fratelli Rossetti store or Tazza d’Oro.