Dad, Beethoven, etc.

My Dad for the most part expresses very little emotion. He can be extremely hard to get a fix on. But I was thinking this morning that his favorite music, the classical pieces he loved and that I grew up hearing in the house, was the most frankly emotional stuff in the canon: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninoff No. 2, Chopin, lots of Beethoven. It’s like my father’s emotional life has always been in plain sight, but invisible to me. More and more as I get older, I see that so many things I thought he was withholding from me—expressions of love being the big one—he was actually broadcasting loud and clear, but I was oblivious. Sometimes I think wisdom is wasted on the old. This bit of insight would have been more useful to me at, say, 12.