For John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
I long to see your face. The wrinkles mapping your odyssey. The scar where you lost your right eye in a car accident. The scar where the Curtiss Robin monoplane clipped your head on a beach in Australia. I long to hear your voice—a rich ragu of accents simmering since childhood. The Virginia genteel gleaned from fox hunts through riverside forests of loblolly pines, tulip poplars, and red cedars. French learned in the chocolate district of Brussels, where you floated in the aroma of eclairs, brioches, and hot cocoa. Pompous British English of the Edwardian era, absorbed at a boarding house in the London suburbs. And above all the broad Harvard “A” that trumpeted respectability (“if the hedgehog cant be cultured at Harvard the hedgehog cant at all”).
I long to hear you ramble about the boom times, the way grandfathers do. Not about la vie littéraire—that can wait for another day. Instead, let’s hear the glories between novels. Let’s hear about the time you lost your glasses plunging down the Coney Island rollercoaster with Mom, and the boardwalk and the beach raced by in a blur of primary colors. Taking whiskey and water at Sardi’s and admiring its wall of caricatures after whooping it up at Oklahoma! on Broadway. Eating too much spicy Pakistani food and wiping happy tears and immediately wondering where to go for your next meal. Awe, inspiration, and pride shook in a dizzying cocktail as you watched Apollo 10 confound gravity and climb the skies above Cape Canaveral. Enjoying the theatrical debut of 2001: A Space Odyssey from your balcony seat, feeling like an astronaut adrift among the stars. And at the end of it all, telling Mom, “There is more to life than just chemistry.”