:44:02
My father, you should know,
was a very successful doctor in Boston.
:44:07
A member of the Harvard Medical Faculty.
:44:10
He was a widower, and I was his only child.
:44:13
He was not an especially religious man,
a sober Methodist.
:44:16
One evening, seven years ago...
:44:18
he attended a Pentecostal meeting
at Harvard...
:44:21
and found himself speaking in tongues.
:44:23
He sank to his knees at the back of the room
and began to talk fluently...
:44:27
in a language which no one
had ever heard before.
:44:30
This sort of thing happens frequently
at Pentecostal meetings...
:44:33
and began happening regularly to my father.
:44:36
It was not unusual to walk into our home
and find my father sitting in his office...
:44:40
utterly serene, happily speaking to the air
in this strange, foreign tongue.
:44:45
I was, at that time, 20 years old...
:44:48
having my obligatory affair
with a minority group.
:44:51
In my case, a Hopi Indian,
a postgraduate fellow at Harvard...
:44:54
doing his doctorate in aboriginal languages
of the Southwest.
:44:58
One day, I brought the Indian boy home...
:45:02
just as my father was sinking to his knees
in the entrance foyer in one of his trances.
:45:06
The Indian wheeled in his tracks,
and he said, "I'll be a son of a bitch!"
:45:12
You see, my father
was speaking an Apache dialect...
:45:15
an obscure dialect, at that...
:45:17
spoken only by a ragged band
of unreconstructed Indians...
:45:21
who had rejected the reservation,
and gone to live in isolation...
:45:25
in the Sierra Madre Mountains
in Northern Mexico.
:45:27
What do you say to that?
:45:31
What the hell am I supposed to say to that?
:45:35
I'm sitting here boozing,
and you come in and tell me...
:45:38
some demented story
about your father's religious conversion.
:45:41
You miss the point.
Not my father's conversion, mine.
:45:45
You see, I'd been hitting the acid
pretty regularly at that time.
:45:49
I had achieved a few minor sensory
deformities, some suicidal despairs...
:45:54
but nothing as wild
as fluency in an obscure Apache dialect.
:45:57
I mean, like, "Wow, man!"
:45:59
Here was living afflatus
right before my eyes!