When My Father Wasn’t Driving Trucks, He Was Reading

The following essay is adapted from a talk originally given at SUNY Geneseo in December 2016.

For 30 years my father was a truck driver for Wegmans, a family-owned grocery chain based in Rochester, NY. A proud, reserved man, he rose each morning well before me and my siblings, and he would be gone until mid-afternoon or later. Like so many Americans, he worked a lot of overtime, in the evenings or on weekends, to provide for his family. I don’t remember him ever calling in sick. But in spite of the long hours he spent at work, my father remained a voracious reader. I’m not sure how he found the time or energy to read, but somehow he did. His den—a narrow cubicle carved out of my parents’ bedroom—was lined with a desk and two walls of books jammed in tight. When Stephen King published a new novel, he was quick to buy a copy. King was his favorite, but there were others: Dean Koontz, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Stephen R. Donaldson, to name a few. He didn’t just read popular novelists, though; he kept a wide range of books on his shelf, from Doris Lessing to Vladimir Nabokov.

While he was working and helping my mom raise us four kids, Dad spent his G.I. Bill money taking night classes at Monroe Community College, in Rochester. In the morning he drove his big rig to stores in Binghamton or Utica or Syracuse, but in the evening he read Marx and Heine and Goethe; he memorized words and conjugated German verbs. He did all this because he wanted to learn German, because it interested him, and because he had been stationed in Landstühl, Germany in the army and regretted not learning the language then. He did all this while being a great, caring father to his kids. He made the time to educate himself; he made the time to read books; he made the time to do the intellectual labor required to get an associate’s degree.

I am my father’s son, influenced by his passion for learning, by his curiosity, and by his love of Germany and the German language. Even as a little guy I tried to emulate him, plopping down on the living room floor with his big fat volume on Albrecht Dürer, the great German Renaissance artist whose drawings in the book, particularly “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” and “The Knight Death and the Devil,” absolutely enthralled me.

As we enter an especially frightening phase of American history, one in which our very democratic institutions are imperiled by anti-intellectual thinking, those of us who read and cherish books and literature owe it to future generations to do what my father did for me. When my senior year of high school was winding down, he handed me two books that he’d read while at MCC: Beowulf, the great 7th century epic poem, and John Gardner’s novel Grendel. In his typically laconic way, Dad said, “Read these books as a pair. I think you’ll get a lot out of them.”

I started with Beowulf because he suggested I should. I definitely appreciated the poem, even enjoyed its weird old style and its kennings like “spear-din,” “battle-sweat,” or “whale-road.” And when I read Gardner’s Grendel, I understood why my father had asked me to pair these books. Grendel is comprised of the brooding philosophical musings of the monster from Beowulf,from whose point of view it is told. What struck me most about Grendel—besides the fact that Gardner was also a native western New Yorker—was the way that it allowed me to look through a different window into the old poem and understand it better. I gobbled both books up, then moved on to others Dad suggested, from Ibsen to Aeschylus to nearly everything John Gardner wrote.

But my father was not a teacher, and didn’t try to be one, so we rarely discussed the books I read other than in broad strokes. What he wanted to do was to prepare me for college by inviting me to read the books he’d read at MCC, to silently share his connection with them. The experience changed me from being a ho-hum reader to one who read constantly, and widely. Since then, not one single day has passed in which I wasn’t reading one (or multiple) books.

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Every summer during college I worked as a “casual” at the Wegmans’ Brooks Avenue warehouse in Rochester, a forty-five-minute drive from our house in rural Livingston County. Since I didn’t own a car, I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to hitch a ride with my dad. We didn’t talk much in the mornings, preferring the sacred silence we kept underneath the bubblegum pop of the oldies music we listened to—the only music we could agree on—like The Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup” or The Guess Who’s “These Eyes.”

Dad’s shift began two hours before mine, so I would head straight to the cafeteria, buy a tall Styrofoam cup of coffee, and sit reading at a corner table by myself. It was exhilarating. In this position I read Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Mann’s Death in Venice, O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, a collection of de Maupassant’s stories, and Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, among many others. As I followed the travails of Gustav von Aschenbach, or obsessed along with Joseph Knecht, workingmen and women came and went, eating their breakfasts and gabbing away.

The majority of the books I read during those summers were classic works in translation. In the army, my father had traversed a world far beyond our limited boundaries—Fort Benning, Georgia, Hawai’i, Germany, Vietnam—and he piqued my curiosity with stories of far-flung people and places. At the time, the farthest I had ever traveled from home was on a family vacation to Tennessee. Although I longed to do so, it would be another few years before I could physically journey to Europe; until then, I had my books to take me there.

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In an age when a bullying reality TV star can become president of the United States, books and literature, the very act of reading itself—and the empathy for others the best stories inspire in us—are more important than ever. They serve as a bulwark against ignorance and intolerance, especially with an administration that openly mongers Americans to fear and distrust foreigners or anyone perceived to be different from “us.” But pick up any translated (or untranslated) book from Africa, Asia, the Middle East—or anywhere—and you’re apt to learn more about another culture than by thumbing through your social media feeds. All it takes is a measure of curiosity, an interest in other people and cultures (including fellow Americans with different racial, cultural, socioeconomic, or ethnic backgrounds). A nation that elects a demagogue as president is a nation that, in too-large a measure, does not read or think critically.

It can, of course, be difficult to make time to read. You’re constantly being tempted to look elsewhere. Your Facebook page, with its endless stream of rabbit-holes, beckons. Your Twitter feed looms. Netflix has so many great shows to watch. And, of course, most of us must work long hours to make ends meet.

As a 17-year-old in a remote western New York town, I never imagined myself translating novels, but once I immersed myself in the study of foreign cultures and language, it was a very short step to becoming a translator, and one that I eagerly took. Today,  I have translated 11 books and numerous stories and essays from Danish or Norwegian—languages I learned thanks to the Danish woman I met in graduate school who would later become my wife.  I estimate that I’ve translated more than 500,000 words in the past 10 years. With the exception of the past three, when I was lucky enough to be a freelance writer and translator, I did all of this translation work while holding down increasingly demanding full-time jobs. That meant that, for years, I would rise early in the morning just like my dad—at 4:00 a.m.—so that I could get some reading done and contribute my tiny portion to the vast bulk of world literature by translating 10 pages a day. Then I would have breakfast with my wife and son before schlepping off to work from 10 to 6. By the end of the day, I was ridiculously exhausted. But I had found an outlet for my creative writing interests and my passion for literature, and as a result my life had greater depth and richness.

Creativity is a kind of fuel for those who can make use of it: it keeps your engine running. It can also gives you life added meaning. I couldn’t imagine a life for myself in which literature was not a vital part, and yet so many people I know hardly read the newspaper let alone crack open a book. What does that say for the future of our country, especially in an age in which many Americans get their news from reading clickbait articles of dubious merit and intent?

Now more than ever, we owe it to the world to use our critical faculties to question everything, to take nothing at face value, to be creative thinkers and to explore new ways of addressing challenges—of which there are plenty. Fake news, deliberate misinformation, alternative facts: we’ve entered a dystopian future. It’s up to us to parse the truth out of lies. This is no small task. Good books help us exercise our thinking muscles, preparing us for the hard, important work ahead.

I know that you cannot change the world as a translator or writer alone, though the very best writers can move people to empathy and kindness, to feeling the burden of our common humanity—and the responsibility that brings. My son is six now. At night when I sit down to share a book with him, especially now that he’s begun to read to me, I see his eyes light up with the thrill of discovery. Through his eyes I’m reminded that words are magical. With them writers produce entire imaginative worlds to which my son travels each night, his curious mind exploring and charting unfamiliar territory as it expands and grows. His own literary journey has just begun, and it’s a beautiful thing to witness. As for my own, it would not have been possible had my father not valued books enough to encourage me to read them.