My recollection of the one time I met Arthur Miller was likened to the prose of Vladimir Nabokov. This was very flattering indeed.  I’ve read and admired everything Nabokov has ever written, most especially the novel Lolita; and, of course, his wondrous autobiography, Speak, Memory!

My account of the brief encounter I had with Kurt Vonnegut was said to be reminiscent of none other than…Kurt Vonnegut!  I’m not sure what to think about this comparison, since I am definitely not a Vonnegut fan, except perhaps for a couple of short pieces in Welcome to the Monkey House.

My story about Robert Anderson’s reply to a letter I wrote him when I was a teenager in the Philippines, asking him about possible interpretations of  his play Tea and Sympathy, was tagged as something William Gibson might have written.  Only problem is, there are at least two William Gibsons who are writers.  There’s William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist; and there’s William Gibson, the playwright who wrote The Miracle Worker.  Surely, it must be the latter, because I’ve seen many of his plays, and because I know the former only by reputation.

One of my many entries about Sarah Palin was decoded and identified with Dan Brown, whom I’ve never read.  I did see the movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, which bored me to death, so I’m baffled by the link.  But, now that I’m thinking about it, I do see some similarity between Sarah Palin’s self-satisfied smirk of a smile with that of Mona Lisa. I may be the only person in the world who thinks that Ms. Lisa looks like a balding, overweight man in drag.  I’m sure this is what Sarah Palin will look like after the 2012 election.

My retelling of what happened the night I got the long-distance telephone call from Manila that my father had died, was, to my surprise, compared to the work of Stephen King.  In truth, though, my father did have a dog once who had rabies and was Cujo-like before it had to be put down.  And, I do like Stand by Me–the novel, the movie adaptation with River Phoenix, and also the song written and originally performed by  Ben E. King.

I tried three more entries from my website—one about my mother’s laughter, and two about my various encounters with William S. Burroughs.  Remarkably, all three entries identified me as another David Foster Wallace. Unfortunately, I had no idea who David Foster Wallace was, nor what he might have written. So I looked him up on the internet.

It turns out that David Foster Wallace was a novelist, short story writer, and essayist who was also a creative writing professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California.  He was the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.  The Los Angeles Times named him “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years,” and his 1996 novel Infinite Jest was included by Time magazine in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923-2006).

This is great.  It’ll give me a good excuse to catch up on contemporary fiction. I’ve been immersed too long in theatre and dramatic literature.

By way of trivia, I also learned that David Foster Wallace was close to his two dogs, Bella and Warner, and that he had talked frequently about opening a dog shelter.  His friends said that “he had a special predilection for dogs who had been abused and were unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them”

It gets better and better.  I really like this guy.  I’m going to buy and read all his books, see if we really view life and approach writing the same way. And then, suddenly, his name rang a bell.

According to a September 14, 2008 article in The New York Times, David Foster Wallace “died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif.  He was 46.  A spokeswoman for the Claremont police said Mr. Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself. Mr. Wallace’s father, James Donald Wallace, said in an interview on Sunday that his son had been severely depressed for a number of months.”

Oh, God.  Now I’m depressed.

Keith Olbermann has already pointed out  on MSNBC that grizzlies eat their own young.  To that, I’d like to add the following information which I found on the internet:  ”Grizzlies are subject to fragmentation, a form of population segregation. Fragmentation causes inbreeding depression, which leads to a decrease in genetic variability in the grizzly bear species.  This decreases the fitness of the population for several reasons.  First, inbreeding forces competition with relatives, which decreases the evolutionary fitness of the species.  Secondly, the decrease in genetic variability causes an increased possibility that a lethal homozygous recessive trait may be expressed; this decreases the average litter size reproduced, indirectly decreasing the population.”

How Sarah Palin identifies with all this, I’m not sure.  But, wait.  At the end of her new television commercial, Sarah shapeshifts yet again.  ”Look out Washington,” she warns, “cause there’s a whole stampede of pink elephants crossing the line, and the E.T.A. for them stampeding through is November 2, 2010.”

So what happens after November 2, 2010?  What specious subspecies is Sarah turning into next?

I’m hooked on MSNBC, which bills itself as “The Place For Politics.”  But why is it that, whenever HARDBALL with Chris Matthews, COUNTDOWN with Keith Olbermann or THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW aren’t on the air after 10 PM at night, or on weekends, the programming inadvertently turns to something called LOCKUP, a prison documentary about hardened criminals?  Is this a portent of things to come in politics?  Is it just a matter of time before LOCKUP starts featuring senators and congressmen who ought to be in jail for defending oil companies because they get Big Payments from them?  Or for sexually  practising in private what they condemn sanctimoniously in public?  Or maybe just for sheer insufferable incivility towards the rightfully elected President and Commander-in-Chief of these United States?

In December of 1969, seventeen months after I left the Philippines for the United States, my father died.  I wrote about those first seventeen months away from home in a short story called “Flight.” The story was published in 1970 and has been included in a number of anthologies, but I must admit that I haven’t read it, not since I wrote it, until just moments ago.

Here are bits and pieces from “Flight.”  It begins with my family seeing me off at the Manila International Airport.

I kissed my mother goodbye and told her to stop crying….Then I turned to my father.  There were so many things which I had wanted to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come.  They never do, when you most need them.  And then they sound false.  Luckily, my father understood….He grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously.  The strength of his grip surprised me.  I realized with a start that I had never shaken his hand before!  I withdrew my hand quickly, but he grabbed it again.  And this time he pressed his calendar-watch and amethyst ring into the palm of my hand.  The actual physical contact was brief, but his touching me like that brought back a load of childhood memories, many of them unpleasant as well as embarrassing.

Again I did not know what to say.  I could not imagine my father without his old calendar-watch and amethyst ring.  He had worn both for as long as I could remember and now he was giving them to me!

The calendar-watch had hands which glowed in the dark, so you could tell the time all the time.  It made no difference whether you were in your bedroom at 12:00 midnight or inside a darkened movie house at 12:00 noon—you could still tell the exact time because of those big luminous hands.  As for the ring, it seemed almost too large and ostentatious for anyone’s hand except my father’s.  The enormous purple birthstone was flanked on both sides by tiny white diamonds, and the whole ring sparkled with life every time light fell on it.

I fastened my father’s old calendar-watch on my right wrist and slipped his ring onto the ring finger of my left hand.  I wanted to embrace him, to tell him that I loved him, but I checked both impulses as I disappeared into the departing lounge that hot and humid day at the Manila International Airport. I vaguely heard my father’s voice ringing after me.  ”Don’t forget to reset the calendar date on the watch when you get to America!  Be sure to turn the hands back. You gain a full day when you cross the International Date Line!”  Those were his parting words.

They were also the last words he ever said to me.  My mother called me the night of December 6, 1969 to tell me that my father had died.  He had not been well for a couple of years, and now he was gone.  It was Sunday afternoon halfway across the world.  My father had died ten minutes past midnight on Sunday.  Mother said many of the people from the church were at the house.  They were a great comfort to her.  No, she didn’t want me to come home for the funeral.  She said my father would have wanted me to stay in school because it was the week of final exams, so I can graduate after just one more semester. “You can come home in May, after you graduate.”

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a Scotch-and-water.  Back in the living room, I remembered with a start that, seventeen months ago, my father and I had been drinking Scotch-and-water at the bar in the airport.  It was the first time we had ever drunk together.  I thought it ironic that the first time also turned out to be the last.

The living room was uncomfortably still.  Left to myself, I decided that I wanted noise, clatter, music, life.  I looked through my records—flipping through Liszt, Chopin, Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart—rejecting one and all until I chanced upon the “Farewell, Angelina” album by Joan Baez.

Joan Baez.  Her voice has an airy quality about it which reminds me of lofty rooms and high ceilings, rainy mornings and windy afternoons, snowy evenings and cold December nights.

“You must leave now—

Take what you need you think will last;

But whatever you wish to keep,

You’d better grab it fast.”

 I poured myself another drink in the kitchen and turned off the lights in the living room when I came back.  The house plunged into eerie darkness.  I looked at my watch.  Its hands glowed luminously in the dark.  It was only 11:30 P.M.

Then it dawned on me.

I realized with a start that I had been staring at my father’s old calendar-watch.  I was wearing the watch he had pressed into my hand the last time I saw him!  What had I done with his amethyst ring? Why wasn’t I wearing that, too?  Again I stared at the watch, my eyes following the voyage of the second-hand as it overtook the minute-hand and then the hour-hand.

I remembered my father’s parting words at the airport:  ”Don’t forget to reset the calendar date on the watch when you get to America!  Be sure to turn the hands back!  You gain a full day when you cross the International Date Line!”

Saturday night was nearly over in Lawrence.  Then I realized with another start that, soon, it would be midnight.  Soon it would be Sunday.  Soon the luminous hands of my father’s old calendar-watch would indicate that it was ten minutes past midnight, in mid-America.  Technically speaking, right here, right now, my father was still alive, and he was going to die all over again, for my benefit–in Kansas!

“Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,

Crying like a fire in the sun.

Look out!  The saints are coming through.

And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

I swallowed the rest of my drink and held back my tears.

Forty-one years later, I still haven’t wept for my father.  Perhaps because I wasn’t with him when he died, perhaps because I did not go home for the funeral so I never actually saw him dead, for whatever reason, there has never been any closure for me when it comes to me and my father.  In my mind, he’s still very much alive, although these days I no longer remember what his voice sounds like.  He never spoke much, to begin with. And now all I hear is his silence.

Today is Father’s Day.  Bless me, father, for I have been remiss.