Excerpt from Old World, New Me
from a new memoir in process, subtitled Struggling with Fitting in & Standing Out: An Introvert's Memoir
I was raised in the children should be seen and not heard era, and it sunk in like this dictum was a primary rule of survival. Don’t interrupt the grown ups was the message I got early in life. Speak only when spoken to. Having quiet, out of the spotlight children seemed a rule for social acceptability for my mother.
Showing off was the ultimate no-no, my father would scold. Ich kann lob stinkt, his mother had warned him, which loosely translated meant self-praise stinks. Showing off was akin to thinking you merit attention. Such an immature thought went against that essential directive to shush.
I don’t have cherished memories of my father. Other than levying rules like don’t contradict your mother, and don’t make noise when I’m working, he was fairly disengaged from direct parenting of his only daughter.
Looking back on it, he took up little emotional space in my life, except for when he took a belt across my bare bottom for sassing mom, or denying to her I’d eaten the cookies missing from the package despite their gummy residue in my teeth.
When I think of him now three main memories arise. In one he’s sitting in the recliner at the edge of the family room, his black rimmed glasses perched on the edge of his rather large nose, not really watching Lawrence Welk or Bonanza on the TV across the room. National Geographic, Life Magazine, or US News and World Report among other publications within his reach in a beaten copper kindling bucket absorbed his attention. He read vociferously, like it was required to know what the magazines told him about the world.
His ability to lose himself in the adventures of other worlds, achievements of featured communities, and politics of the day was impressive—particularly for then never being discussed with the family. He lived so tucked away in an inner life that I never really got to know who he actually was beyond the disciplinarian mother demanded he become when I displeased her.
In another memory, it’s the sound that stuck with me. Most workday evenings he barricaded himself behind the pocket door separating the family room from his study where he worked on client taxes, fingers flying on the manual adding machine.
That’s the sound I remember, the click click click of entering numbers, and the shuuck kwuck that came when hitting the button that made the machine sum up and spit out a paper trail, like a cash register receipt. He could do it without looking, like touch typing, or me playing the piano without keeping my eyeballs on the keys. It was the kind of solitary activity that he seemed to like best.
The final prevailing image of him is how he was more often in a suit and tie than any other clothing. There must have been three dozen or more neckties hanging on a rack over a door inside the hall closet that also stored his suits fresh from the dry cleaner. He never left for work without wearing a fedora and calf length overcoat on the colder days. I don’t think he actually owned a pair of jeans, or a sweat suit. At least, I don’t remember him wearing those.
And when he cut the grass on the riding mower, he did so with his light colored plaid cotton sport shirt tucked into khaki slacks. I know he went fishing and hiking on summer vacations in the mountains, but since I wasn’t included but once that I recall—on a torturous day long walk downhill on the Old Fall River Road in Rocky Mountain National Park—I don’t remember his wardrobe for those activities.
He neither smoked nor drank, and if he used after-shave at all it was so sparingly that there is no smell I can associate with him. Rarely did he smile. So seldom did he laugh I can’t remember what his laugh sounded like.
I write that and think, how sad to have not made a more vivid impression.
A rather insular workaholic, it’s fair to say he had only two real friends, and neither of them lived in our local community, not even in the state we did. He took leadership roles in church, mostly out of a sense of obligation, but never parlayed that into developing a social circle.
He hated to be asked tax or legal questions outside his office, so when people tried making a friendly connection that way, he would direct them to making an appointment. It was one of his strongest ethical dicta not to socialize with people he did business with. So he belonged to no clubs, played no golf.
I can’t recall him ever hosting parties for the dozen or so people he employed. Likewise, he didn’t socialize with the neighbors, either, unless mom dragged him to the progressive dinners that happened a couple years for the holidays.
I don’t know if he thought of himself as an introvert, but he certainly acted like one. Perhaps this is where I got it. Perhaps this would argue in favor of the so-called nurture theory, the train up a child in the way they should go principle, given that I was adopted.
Or, maybe I would have been an introvert, regardless of this stellar example.