I just liked, and even thrived on, being alone with my own thoughts, reading a book, or watching a movie. At that young age, I had no idea what that meant. Unlike my father, I was a well-defined introvert. He preferred to watch a game and enjoy a beer, and when you’d ask him what just happened, as I often did when I didn’t understand a play in a baseball game, he’d respond in a way that has become an inside joke between my two older brothers and me: “You’re watching it just like I am.” End of discussion. My father was what we might call today an ambivert, having a great need for and being good at socialization, but also, at home, seeming mostly reticent. I didn’t discover this in any intellectual way this was brought to bear on me in 1973 because that’s the year my parents got divorced, and I remember, remember vividly, my father’s packing and then his leaving home, and I remember both my sadness to see him go and my relief not to have my parents fight in the unrestrained way they would fight, which would invariably pour out onto the front lawn or, in slightly better times, just pour out of our windows into earshot of our neighbors.īut I loved my father in a way that an eight-year-old can’t quite make sense of or have the words to express, particularly if you’re a boy and an introverted one at that. When I was eight years old, I discovered what it meant to be of two minds.
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