A very special day in my life was the day my family and I got to Chicago. I was 7, maybe 8 years old, yet I can still feel the wind as if I were, once again, on one of those double-decker buses without the ceiling that people generally associated to the Windy City back in the 90s.
It was a bright, joyful, sunny day. I remember the bewilderment before the titans of steel scraping the sky, thousands of people crowding the streets like ants, the labyrinthine web of traffic lights, the Sears Towers hulking over anything else and finally, that unmistakable sensation climbing up through my back that anything is possible in life.
But how long can I keep my mouth shut? That was a very special day because my father was still alive. And that was the most amazing holiday I’ve ever had. The United States, from the point of view of a European child, was like Mecca for Muslims, back then. I remember that my brother was talking my father’s head off with the Football World Cup. How will we be able to watch the match? Will it go on the air on the free-access television? How long before the kick-off? And all sort of questions along the lines.
By then my parents were both in their forties. My dad, he was a doctor and he would have gone in the US that summer anyway - he had business there - so he decided to take us to visit Uncle Sam with him. Surely the most amazing holiday I ever had. My mom, she was spending the afternoon reading a novel, preparing sandwiches, and taking care of us - my brother, my sister and I. She was a doctor and still is, but very different than my father. My father was all into doing research, publications, and stuff. He was also a doctor in the most common sense - curing people meant something for him. At the time not a single gray hair he had. His young mind was bursting to taste a slice of the world’s pie, and his hair seemed to be aware.
Who was my father? I wonder about this all the times when I scrap the bottom of the night and can’t get asleep. Even when I do not formulate this thought it still floats around like the thick smoke in my room. Men are Möbius Strips, yet sometimes in those days, when we were all happy in the US and the world was an orange, I feel like I penetrated the crust of phenomenological reality and took a fleeting glimpse at who my father truly was, as though smiles and wrinkles may tell what’s underneath.
My father was an adventurer. He did not explore the jungle nor the pole, but the tortuous intricacies of the heart, its fallacies, and harmonies. He was the son of a craftsman who decided to study medicine when he was in high school. He met my mother at the university, they fell in love and get married after graduation. My father never stopped traveling the world. Each year, two or three times a year, he had returned from a place far, far away, with a big chest of stories. To me, those stories were something of legend.
Then some years ago my father was diagnosed with cancer and died in a couple years. That holiday in the US, that was 1994, the most amazing holiday I’ve ever had, the most special day of my life.
Thank you, dad, for everything.
Thank you for being my father.