On Dad & Dada

My father was a small town general practitioner. I remember him taking his black bag on house calls and leaving in the wee hours of the morning to deliver babies. Combined with rounds at the hospital, office hours, etc., Dad always felt he was giving his children a short shrift. To alleviate this, he would organize excursions to occupy his horde of hellions as he bonded with us.

One of my favorites was the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Dad let us wander the halls trying to keep his eye on us - more for the museum's welfare than our own. I think he felt any transgressor would go the way of the kidnappers in O Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief.

At first I spent my time in the Armory among halberds, claymores, scimitars and muskets. Eventually I began to roam through other exhibits. At age 11 or 12, I became fascinated by a bicycle wheel bolted to a white stool aptly titled Bicycle Wheel. A bored docent noticed me and asked why my interest. My response was something erudite like "I don't know. It looks cool." He proceeded to explain Dada and show me the work of Duchamp, Arp, Ernst and others.

Excitedly, I ran to my father, dragged him over and professed my love of Dada. "It's anti-art. It ridicules the meaninglessness of the modern world." As he shook his head, his face revealed a mixture of feelings. Pride in my newly acquired knowledge; relief in my attraction in something other than weaponry; dismay over my embrace of the absurd.

I would see that look many times in subsequent years as I expanded my interests. In art from the surreal to the abstract, in music from the psychedelic to free-form jazz, in literature from the Transcendentalists to the Beats. I delighted in anything different and bizarre.

Through it all Dad would relish in my boundless curiosity and take solace that I had a sister and three brothers whom he deemed more conventional. As ever - BB

"It is a wise father that knows his own child." - William Shakespeare