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My Father, My Children, and Richard Wright’s Haiku
Poetry as a fence and as a bridge
My father was not a poet, and my love of poetry was just one of a thousand braids of barbed wire that kept us apart. Neither of us able to cross over into the other’s country.
The written communications Jay, my father, sent my way were either sparse and emotionless or passive-aggressive rants.
As a younger man, I felt I had more in common with writers and poets I had never met than the man who had raised me.
Jay McBride wasn’t an internationally admired writer, but he was one of the best integrated-circuit layout design engineers of his generation. An integrated circuit layout design engineer is a kind of architect of microchips.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Where an architect would work to maximize airflow and natural light with window placements, Jay and his colleagues would move resistors and capacitors around on their drafting tables (and later computer screens) to optimize circuits for speed and memory while minimizing energy consumption.
He was a narrow kind of genius, and for me, that’s part of what made him a difficult father.
He expected his children to be efficient. Life was something to tweak and optimize. There was no room for joy or whimsy in his…
