"My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago"

A sparse, almost ledger-like statement compresses a life-altering loss into two facts: death at a child’s age of two, and a trade practiced in a particular city. The emotional center is absence; “I never knew him” admits a void where memory should be, a relationship defined not by lived moments but by the impossibility of them. What stands in for memory are identifying tags, barber, Chicago, signifiers that offer contour without intimacy. An occupation and a place become the scaffolding for an identity otherwise deprived of paternal narrative.

The word “real” carries quiet complexity. It suggests a family structure with more than one paternal figure, distinguishing biological origin from the social father who may have helped raise him. That distinction echoes broader questions of lineage versus experience, blood versus bond. When the personal archive is empty, one inherits instead a profession’s ethos and a city’s mythology. A barber evokes hands-on craft, neighborhood familiarity, the intimacy of touch and talk, the rhythm of small stories; Chicago conjures migration, hustle, and the polyphony of urban America. Together they confer dignity and a working-class heritage, a pride rooted in labor and place rather than in shared memories.

There is a stylistic restraint to the admission that mirrors its subject. No melodrama, just the fact of absence and the facts that remain. Yet the understatement intensifies its resonance: a life can be permanently shaped by what it never had. For someone who would become known for studying origins, this early rupture hints at a lifelong tension between what can be reconstructed and what is lost forever. Identity forms around fragments, names, and traces, as much as around presence. The father becomes an outline, profession, location, through which the son reads his own beginnings. Mourning here is not only for a person but for an unlivable past, a relationship that only exists as a map point and a craft.