Download PDF of this full issue: v45n2.pdf (18.2 MB)

Memories of Dad

By Zoe Michaela Curry

So here's a Dad story. My Dad, David Curry, was trying to help me set up a new monitor for my older desktop. I was trying to put it together myself, but I didn't really know what I was doing. And of course, my dad, tech genius, in the middle of writing a zillion articles for a zillion conferences and grading a zillion papers and writing a zillion grants, agreed to help me. He had the monitor facing the wrong way while he was monkeying with it, so I thought he was putting it in incorrectly. I thought a part I saw on the desk belonged on the monitor. It didn't. I was harping at him the whole time. Dad, you're doing it wrong!!, knowing I was really just mad that he knew more than I did. At age 11, when everything your parents do is definitionally mistaken from beginning to end, I picked up the piece, dashing across the study, Dad! It's right HERE, it goes to the...face-plant. I no doubt tripped over the box with the directions in it.

He could have said What a dork!!!, or Zoe do you have any self-control?!!, or, tragically, are you ok??????. Or the classic Robin Williams, we're not laughing at you; we're laughing next to you. What he said was "Yeeeeees. You were saying?"

Part classic Dad annoying passive aggression: it seemed to allow a certain saving of face, not a full-force so now who's the wrong one, not over-played. Even so, as tweens do, I filed it instantly in the dis category. We both knew he knew how to fix the thing, he knew he knew it. It was also part funny in a warm way. Yeeeeesss.

This is how I think of my dad, and most of our VVAW friends. No one is more cruelly/hilariously ironic when it's called for, especially when they are all together. But his temper was so controlled, so often. Not everyone can go through what he went through and be as stable as he was. How did he not lose his brain? How did he not lose his heart. Just now that I'm old enough (21) to get more about that, I'm on my own.

Zoe is David Curry's daughter, and fellow West Virginian Co-Conspirator. She is majoring in psychology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.