“They don’t make that color anymore,” he said flatly. I was confused. Why not just make it another color, then? But if it couldn’t be the original color, he’d rather it not be any color at all.
He was incredibly patient with the Porsche, spending hours with it, believing deeply in its exotic beauty and high performance. It was very cool and chic—a soft-top convertible with two seats. He loved the freedom of putting the top down and the intimacy of only having room for one passenger. We would go on long drives without much chatting. If the radio was on, it was tuned to the news (“1010 Wins—you give us ten minutes, we’ll give you the world”). Every now and then we would sing one of those funny, folksy songs that go on and on, like “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.”
There’s a wart on the frog, on the bump, on the log,
in the hole in the bottom of the sea
He also liked to sing “John Henry,” a folk song about a Black man who worked as a “steel-driving man.”
John Henry was a little baby, sitting on his Daddy’s knee
When he would sing “knee,” he’d hit an impossibly low note that would always make me laugh. I liked singing those songs because they would help the time and the miles go by. Back then I thought just driving was such a bore. But now, oh, what wouldn’t I do to sit next to him, one more time, in those leather seats, on the open road, with just the hum of the engine and the swishing of the wind as our accompaniment. My mother, the opera singer, taught me scales, but my father taught me songs that made me laugh.
Thank you for the mountains
The Lake of the Clouds
I'm picturing you and me there right now
As the crystal cascades showered down
—“Sunflowers for Alfred Roy”
Occasionally we would go to Lime Rock Park, a racetrack in Connecticut. It was a slightly more glamorous experience than a typical NASCAR venue. Paul Newman had a team there, and world-class drivers like Mario Andretti were regulars. I found the racetrack pretty boring, but going to the races was a favorite activity for Alfred Roy, and he made all of his kids join him. This was one rare thing we kids all could agree on: cars going around and around in a circle wasn’t high entertainment.
When we were on our drives or at the racetrack, I was often just around while he did regular adult things. While he listened to or watched football (which he loved, and which I found extremely boring) I would be close by, quietly reading or drawing—observing the ways of an adult.
My father did have a few books just for me in his house. The one I remember most distinctly was about a little Black boy who was blind. The cover was white, with large red, orange, and yellow circles. It was full of colors and told the story of a boy who saw the world through touching and feeling shapes, rather than through color.
When I think of that storybook, I think of Stevie Wonder. Reading it, I wondered if this was the reason why Stevie Wonder could create such vivid worlds and emotions through his songs: he was seeing without eyes; he was seeing with his soul. Stevie Wonder is by far the songwriter I respect and love the most. He is beyond genius; I believe he writes songs from a holy place. I think that having this book about the blind Black boy was one way my father attempted to introduce the concepts of racism and perception to me, because we really didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about the shades and the shapes of us.
Perception was also very important to my father. Once, while drawing alongside him on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I made what I thought was a very clever cartoon. It was a picture of our family with the caption, “They’re weird. But they’re okay.” But when I showed it to my father, he got really upset.
“Why would you say we’re weird?” he demanded. I was shaken by his stern tone, and I had no idea why the idea made him angry.
“I don’t know. I probably heard it somewhere,” I said. In my cartoon I had also added, “But they’re okay,” which I thought was optimistic. It was a little tongue-in-cheek.
With an absolute seriousness that chilled me, he said, “Don’t ever say that.”
I never intended to offend him, in fact, I’d wanted to delight him. I felt really bad that day. But the heavy load he carried, his deep desire to be accepted as a full human being, was something I wouldn’t learn about until much later—something I am still trying to make peace with.
At the time, I didn’t have the language to tell him that weird was how I felt. I didn’t know how to say that was how I felt other people saw us—as weird. I thought everything was weird. My hair was weird; my clothes were weird; my siblings and their friends were weird; my mother and all the shabby places we lived with her—they were all weird.
I thought the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship was a weird church. We had started attending when the family was still together. The five of us would go to this old medieval-style stone castle with thick walls and a tall tower, filled with a congregation of what looked like every odd person on the Island. To my little-girl self it appeared like the Church of Misfit Toys at a Renaissance fair. The pastor, who was formerly Jewish, had
