tavie.com

I found something on the internet that made me sad. (I left the Google cache for easier reference.) It's some story some old sci-fi nerd is telling about my dad (another old sci-fi nerd), something that happened 40 years ago I guess, but it's a story that pretty much illustrates my dad's place in the social universe. And it made me really sad. Because they don't know him like I do-- no one does. Maybe three people in the world really understand that my dad is actually wonderful underneath the annoying. (That would be me, my sister and my mom.) Then perhaps three or four people outside of that come close to understanding him. (Tante Joan, Andrew, Stephanie, and Eugene Soberman, his oldest friend.) And that's about it.

I guess this story makes me sad because there's no untruth to it:

...most of them didn't so much -dislike- Fred as feel
uncomfortable around him. He was ... off-putting
and strange. He'd memorized every routine
Jonathon [sic] Winters had ever done and, worse,
would break into one of them with little or no
prompting. He wasn't a bad guy, really, but he
was guilty of -always- Trying Too Hard.

I read the story out loud to my dad and he just laughed. That's good, I guess.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 4:30 PM | shower me with attention