The New Yorker

My Last Conversation with My Father
By Robin Wright 

As my sister, Jana, tells it, my father and I had one long conversation that spanned thirty-four years. “From the time I remember, you and dad were always talking—about the world, about sports, about everything,” she told me recently. My dad often told us that he assumed that he would have sons, but he ended up with girls. He eventually adjusted. I was his firstborn; I became his mission.

My father, L. Hart Wright, was the son of conservative Baptists in Oklahoma—his father was a bank president and his mother a snob who boasted of having descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He became an agnostic, a liberal, and a law professor at the University of Michigan who ironed his own clothes. He wore bow ties most of his life. My mother made them. He ended up with four hundred, kept in boxes marked “Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Fall.”

He taught his children and his students with ferocious passion. My mother was an actress and my father could be a stage-door Johnny, doting on her performances. But he rivalled her for theatric flare. “For him, a class was a dramatic piece,” his colleague Douglas Kahn once told a campus publication. He made his classes into morality plays, full of flawed characters and human drama and life lessons—often a bit of mischievous humor as well. Sally Katzen, one of his students, wrote about being perpetually late for his 8 a.m. classes—until the day Dad greeted her with a tray of eggs, bacon, toast, juice, and coffee.

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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-last-conversation-with-my-father