College essay: Autobiographical

In a way, it’s all my father’s fault.

When most fathers were teaching their sons how to work on car engines, dunk a basketball or tie fishing lures, my father was teaching me how to incapacitate an attacker with car keys or a ballpoint pen, how to turn a rolled-up magazine into a makeshift knife and what to do in the event of an attempted carjacking.

I grew up an Army brat and, later, a Foreign Service brat, moving every one to two years for most of my life. I’ve lived in four foreign countries and multiple locations within eight states. Forever the new kid in town, smaller than most of my classmates until late in my high school career and armed with a smart mouth that I had trouble keeping shut, I found myself on the outside looking in as a general rule.

In my experience, there are two reactions to growing up a nomad: You either put down roots as quickly as you can and never leave or you never put down roots, and continue rolling along like a tumbleweed. I fall into the latter camp, bouncing around the country, over to Egypt and back in the 15 years since graduating from Virginia Tech.

To this day, the longest period of time that I’ve lived any place was the six years I spent in Blacksburg, Virginia, where I went to college and then worked at my first newspaper, the News-Messenger in neighboring Christiansburg.

In addition to the self-defense lessons taught by my father — inspired by a synagogue bombing in Vienna, a car-bombing of an embassy support building in Brussels and other events too obscure to make the headlines stateside — I learned something else from Dad: How to speak to everyone on their own terms, without obvious prejudice or judgment, and get them to open up to me. My father did this for a living in the Foreign Service, but it’s part of his basic nature, and is something I picked up as part of my own.

My upbringing and his example imbued in me an insatiable curiosity for people, places and sights unknown to me. I’ve attended exorcisms held by the Cairo superintendent of schools, flown in a blimp over RFK Stadium and tromped through what remains of Bosnia.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone in government service his entire career, my father taught me to have a healthy skepticism for those in authority. Living overseas, in the era before the World Wide Web or even English-language television available via satellite, my brother and I read whatever we could get our hands on. And what filled our home were stories of rebels and scoundrels, from Huckleberry Finn to Slippery Jim diGriz to Harry Flashman.

This skepticism even extended to the dinner table: Asserting a fact in my family, no matter how mundane, meant being able to back it up with the dictionary or the almanac (always the current edition) or newspaper.

There are things that I wish I had gotten from him that I didn’t. Dad has an easy way with languages, and taught himself functional Portuguese before a trip to Lisbon simply by listening to Berlitz tapes in the car on the way to and from the Brussels embassy for several weeks. Instead, I know a smattering of Austrian German, a smattering of Belgian French, a smattering of Egyptian Arabic and a smattering of American Sign Language. Nor do I have his ability to play music by ear or to pick up a musical instrument and teach myself to play through an hour or so of experimentation. But having gotten so much from him, it hardly seems fair to complain.

My father didn’t set out to mold me into becoming a journalist — there were years where the government bureaucrat and I didn’t see eye to eye on my profession and I was held to account for everything he disliked about CNN, for instance — but that was the net result.

As much as if he had set out to do so, it’s my father’s fault that I became a journalist.

2 Comments »

1. I went to South Lakes High School with you. We hung out quite a bit. I have to confess to being somewhat reluctant to tell you who I am considering how bitter you appear to be toward your experience there. I hope none of those negative feelings are aimed at me considering I tried to be your friend although you were often very rude toward me. Just so you know I am an actual former classmate:

   Beau-hica!
   Seth, rugs, and diet coke
   Orange cafeteria

   Curious? Email back and maybe I will give you further clues to my identity although you will probably be disappointed.

   By the way I’m really glad to hear how well you’re doing for yourself. You have a beautiful little boy and have found the love of your life. You seem to have a good thing going with the journalism thing. I’m also glad that you have settled in California where people are sane.I would actually like to hear from you and we can relive such fond memories as Ms. O shutting the lights off on Shannon and the time you got beaten up on the golf course. Maybe you can also help me learn the art of paragraphs:)

   Being an investigative jounalist you should be able to uncover my identity, or just email me and ask. If I don’t hear from you I’ll take it as message sent and not bother you again. Ta-ta.

   Comment by Gess Hoo — January 15, 2008 @ 21:10

2. Ha, I wrote that essay 10.5 years ago, immediately after the 10 year Class of 1987 reunion. I bear no lingering animus toward South Lakes, Reston, or anyone associated with any of it. (Well, I still think I should have written something obscene on Mrs. O’s lawn with salt, but I got talked out of that one.)

   I’ll e-mail you with my guess in a day or two.

   Comment by Beau — January 15, 2008 @ 22:25

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>