Now on weekends when he was around, my father came over to take me skating, my mother waving goodbye to us as we set off. I was nine.
By this time he’d been kicked out of his company, Apple. He was in the process of starting a new company called NeXT that would make computer hardware and software. I knew he also owned a computer animation company called Pixar that made a short film about two lamps, a parent and child.
He called me Small Fry. “Hey, Small Fry, let’s blast. We’re livin’ on borrowed time.”
I assumed small fry meant the kind of
french fries left at the bottom of the bag, cold and crusty; I thought he was calling me a runt, or misbegotten. Later, I learned fry is an old word for young fishes sometimes thrown back into the sea to give them more time to grow.
Lisa with her dad in San Francisco (Photo courtesy: Lisa Brennan-Jobs)“OK, Fat Fry, let’s go,” I said, once my skates were on. Sometimes he worried he was getting too thin. “They say I need to gain weight,” he said. “Who?” I asked. “People at work,” he said, standing in the middle of the room with his skates on. “What do you guys think?” Other times he worried he was getting a paunch, and asked us about that, too.
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We would head for
Stanford University. On this day the road was still wet from rain.
The palm trees that gave Palm Drive its name grew in the dirt between the sidewalk and the road. We looked up at the hills beyond the university — from far away they appeared smooth and unblemished. The neon-green blades shot up through the dirt clods two or three days after the first heavy rain and remained through winter. “I love the green hills,” he said, “but I like them best when they’re yellow, dry.”
“I like them green,” I said, not understanding how anyone could like them when they were dead.
We reached the Oval and then the Stanford quadrangle with its covered, shaded pathways made of diamonds of cement in alternating earth-toned colours, like a faded harlequin costume.
“Want to get on my shoulders?”
He leaned down and grasped under my armpits — I was small for my age – and hoisted me up. His weight tilted and bobbed. We did a loop around the square, under the arches, past the gold numbers on the glass doors. He held my shins in his hands, but let go when he started to lose his balance. He tripped, tripped again, struggling to stay upright — I swayed, terrifyingly high up. And then he fell. On the way down I worried for myself, for my face and my knees, the parts of me that might hit the ground. Over time I learned he would always fall. Still, I let him carry me because it seemed important to him. I felt this like a change of pressure in the air: this was part of his notion of what it meant to be a father and daughter.
We got up and brushed ourselves off — he wound up with a bruise on his butt and a scrape on his hand; I got a skinned knee — and headed for the drinking fountain at the side of the quadrangle.
On the way back through the campus, on the sloping downhill on the rough cement, I was a tuning fork for the road, flying out ahead of him. “Ah AH!” I sang, my throat vibrating with the stones. “You’re all right, kid,” he said. “But don’t let it go to your head.”
“I won’t,” I said. I’d never heard the phrase before: Let It Go To Your Head.
“You know, I didn’t go to college,” he said. “Maybe you won’t go either. Better just to go out and get into the world.”
If I didn’t go to college, I would be like him. At that moment, I felt like we were the centre of the world. He carried it with him, this feeling of centre.
“They teach you how other people think, during your most productive years,” he said. “It kills creativity. Makes people into bozos.”
It made sense to me. Still, I wondered why he always wanted to skate around Stanford, why he seemed to love it, if he didn’t believe in it.
On University Avenue he pointed to a bum crouched in a nook with a cardboard sign. “That’s me in two years,” he said.
****When my father and I got back to my block, kids were out playing in the yards and on the sidewalks. We stopped across from our house, and a few men who lived nearby gathered around my father — three fathers holding three babies. They wanted to know what he thought about this or that. The mothers chased after the toddlers to give the fathers a chance to talk. I stood nearby, proud that it was my father they wanted to talk with. They discussed people I’d never heard of and companies I didn’t know.
The babies began to fuss, squirming, letting out little cries and yelps.
My father continued to talk — hardware, software — the same discussions that seemed to come up over and over with all the men we saw in Palo Alto those days. Soon, all three babies began to wail and the fathers had to stop talking and take them away.
****This was around the time, my mother would say later, that my father fell in love with me. “He was in awe of you,” she said, but I don’t remember it. “You know she’s more than half me, more than half my genetic material,” he said. The announcement caught my mother off-guard. She didn’t know how to respond. Maybe he said it because he’d started feeling close to me and wanted a greater share.
“You gotta stop and smell the roses,” he said, on another skate. He said it urgently, then stopped and put his nose deep in a rose and sighed. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was only an expression. But soon I got into it anyway, and we looked for the best rosebushes in the neighbourhood, crisscrossing the streets. I noticed good ones he’d missed behind fences, and we trespassed across lawns on the toes of our skates to get to them.
(Excerpts from ‘Small Fry’ with permission from Penguin Random House)