I had an ongoing debate with my father about how much people can really change our fundamental natures.  It was one of several ongoing debates we had over the years.  Since his death I’ve come to see his position more clearly and understand the reasons for it better than I ever could while we were arguing about it.  Nuance was missing from our debate, and empathy.  I can see and feel the nuance of his argument now where I couldn’t before.

The matter of contention was how profoundly one can change.  I took the position that great personal changes are possible, if enough effort is expended.   His position was that by the time we are two we are pretty well set in our behaviors and can only change superficial aspects of how we react to the world.  

That this contradicted his insistence that childhood must be left behind when we grow up and take responsibility as adults was not lost on me.  None of us are models of consistency, and if we look for logic in human affairs we will often come up empty.  If I had seen that he was talking about his own life, frozen in the emotional reality of being an abused two year-0ld, I might have understood it differently.  If I’d learned earlier of the unthinkable abuse he was subjected to as a young child I’d have had much more empathy for him all along.  We might have actually been able to help each other.

They have recently identified a genetic predisposition for happiness, after having long known of the genetic link to depression and other emotional maladies.  Surely there are genes that make one more or less predisposed to every emotion.  Nature versus nurture, again.  

The baby born with a sunny disposition, the easy baby, will have an easier time of it, being easier to deal with.  The snarling prick baby will be treated accordingly, and so we have the intricate dance of nature and nurture.

A child raised in an angry home will become much more sensitive to the tones of voice preceding an outburst.  They have brain scans of children who experienced childhood trauma showing changes in the brain itself.  It is a long and fascinating subject and my time and focus are waning at the moment.

I am making notes here for a book about my father.  This is an online first draft I plan to work over, pound into a book.  This debate over how much and how profoundly one can change is central to the book, to grappling with my father’s life, to appreciating his early optimism about change for the better and his increasing pessimism about anything good coming of anything.

My sister asked her brilliant ten year-old son, shortly after our father’s quick death from undiagnosed liver cancer, if he’d noticed grandpa seeming particularly unhappy lately.  “How would I know?” said the boy, and my sister nodded at how profound the young poet-to-be was.  Irv was not a happy camper in those golden years.  How could he have been?

It gratified me greatly when, once during this ongoing argument, my mother chimed in that she had seen great changes in me.  She had seen me increasingly master my temper over the years.  I’ve made difficult, conscious strides in becoming a milder person.

And yet, my father’s position has a lot of truth to it too.  Things that would not get a rise out of most people make my blood instantly boil.  How do I know they don’t make other people’s blood boil?  I don’t.  I just know they seem like small things, things that should not produce such anger, but they can set me off instantly.  I react better than I did, most of the time, but am still subject to these lightning strikes of temper.  I wax Tourretic when the computer has a little fun with me, for example.  Not everybody has this reaction to a device being a little playful, or corporate voice menus that insist they are serving you better than a human could, or obtuse low-level bureaucrats saying “I know you are, sir, but what am I?”.

“I rest my case,” says the grinning skeleton of my father from his underground bed not far from the haunted little town where he was traumatized as a boy.

It is not so simple, dad.   Few things are.  We will get back to this.  The Book of Irv will not inevitably wind up on the pile of promising ideas I’ve started to work on and later abandoned.  Unless, of course, it will.