it's a little strange to think that you could live or be around someone for an extremely long period (decades even) and you still find out things about them that you'd never even suspected. Which is what happened when I took my dad out for dinner on Sunday. He was telling me about his business trips that he took all over the place before I was born, meeting the Shah of Iran and his wife in the 70s, touring Paris, visiting the Philippines. I didn't know he had this adventurous spirit within him to go out and see the world; his current configuration is that of a quiet, reserved, and hardworking father of two. He talked about growing up raised by my great-grandfather who wanted to make him into an educator, but my dad wanting to see the world and also improve the lot of his family. Korea in the 50s wasn't very luxurious. It made me wish very much that I talked to him more frequently, but at the same time, feeling really close to him in that moment.
This sort of tangentially relates to something I caught on the radio about a young woman who was retracing the past of her mother, who had escaped from Nazi Germany with the help of a Polish woman who'd carried her out. As she untangles the string of oral history to track down the family of the Polish who rescued her mother, and in essence rescued the entire family, she finds that there are deeper connections of guilt and shame and remorse than she'd anticipated from the glowing, heroic account she'd been given. I think what got me the most was the years the narrator spent trying to disentangle the conflicting stories she got about what happened, and how strong our own drive is to find out where/who/what we came from. Judging from how frequently my conversation with my dad rings in my ears, it's still something I want to know more about, especially that I now know that there is much more there than I'd assumed.
