Tonight I sat down and watched Tim Burton's “Big Fish.” Watching the film is a meditation for me. It makes me think of fathers and memories and my need for fables and legends, rather than facts and figures. I felt inspired to write a valentine and tall-tale to my father. I suppose there might be some truth to this sketch, but not a whole lot.
My father was born during the Second World War in Germany. His childhood was difficult but he found solace in the world of molecules and chemical interactions. As a young man, he knew that the small villages where his family had raised him were not big enough for him and so, like many young men, he set out on his great adventure. He went to Munich.
School in Munich was challenging. He had done reasonable well in his tests leading to the university and his chosen career of Chemistry appealed to his desire to grow and experience life in the big city. The city was full of people, interacting like covalent bonds, sharing electrons and moving in magnetic packs. He had a small circle of friends, but it was this larger world that excited him.
His work in the lab paralleled his observations of the people in the city and he felt that his work should reflect one singular human condition. His mind wandered as he fiddled with his chemicals and he thought about how large objects attracted other smaller objects nearer to this. Now, technically, this is not a chemical process, but he was never one to quibble with such details.
My father worked day and night in the lab. His friends rarely saw him and he poured over large tomes of chemical wisdom from the library as he ate his pretzels and drank his beer at the taverns. Eventually, inspiration struck and he found he had invented a solution that, when drunk, would make him larger than a normal man. He would grow and grow and grow and then, the physics of the situation would kick in and he would find himself as a new sun, orbited by many people.
On the morning that he chose to drink his potion, my father looked around his laboratory and stopped to look out the window. The sun was shining on pavement outside and the world was starting to wake up. The streets were being swept and stores were opening up. My father saw an old bookstore owner as he extended an awning over the front door of his store. The bookseller saw him through the window and waved. My father drank his solution.
No one was more surprised as he at what happened next. Nothing. Nothing at all. My father wracked his brains at what might have gone wrong with his formula but he could think of nothing. He was interrupted as his colleagues arrived at the laboratory, he acknowledged them and felt disappointed that months of hard work had gone for naught.
The day lingered on and since no dramatic changes occurred, my father felt obliged to pick up his abandoned studies and work towards a stable career. He was not going to dwell on his failure and besides, who needed such a product besides himself? As he went from class to class, my father learned about the ways crystals form in the natural world and how chemicals could affect them. This became his new passion and he studied it with all the vigor that he once put into his failed growth formula.
His studies began to wind down and my father started to feel that the streets of Munich were no longer a right fit. He would sit with his friends at the bars and laugh and talk but he felt pinched. My father was reminded of the shoes he had when he was growing up. Money was tight after the war and he could not always have the right sizes. The streets of Munich that he rode on his bicycle every day had become so well known to him that he felt trapped.
So he did what any young man with an eye for big things would do. He moved to Texas. That was a place where a man could make his fortune. A chemist would not be far from people who needed him. It was a place of industry and a place of adventure. There were men who still wore guns on their belts when he stepped off the plane in Dallas. My father knew that a post-doctorate degree in Chemistry might not be the wildest frontier in the west, but like most men, it was a land that he felt he could tame. A land that he could settle on and build a home and a family. Best of all, he didn't need to speak the language very well. Those frontier men didn't really speak English all that well themselves.
He did all these things. He had become larger than life. My father had moved from a small village and found himself in America. He found himself with a job and a wife and a daughter and a son.
My father was still a giant when I was born. In one of my first memories, he took me to Burger King for a Whopper sandwich. “Whoppers are better than Big Macs, Eapen,” he said through his thick, Bavarian accent. “They just taste fresher.” We stood in line and I looked around the store. I grabbed his leg and looked up to see a strange man looking down at me. I started to cry, wondering where my father had gone. A few steps away, I saw him and I ran to him and this time wrapped myself around the right leg. His leg was huge and he laughed as he saw what had happened and he lifted me up into his giant arms to comfort me.
And then, instantly, his potion stopped working. As the time went on, he didn't exactly shrink, but he stayed the same. The years went by and I started to think I was just as tall as him. I certainly was not. He was still that gentle giant, come over from distant lands. When I saw him last, we were the same height. I was moving to the big city and I looked him in the eye as we said goodbye to each other. I got in the car with my wife and started off to the big city where I could begin my family and my adventures.
From my window at the top of Clinton Hill, at the top of a high-rise apartment building, I look out over a vast city. It is as wide as my window and the Empire State Building seems to be at eye level. I feel as giant as my father after he drank his mysterious potion and left for that larger world. A world where my father found adventure and excitement, a family and his future.
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