urine day

The dead father as the family's central misreading. Himself "was revered as a genius in his original profession" — optics — "without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself, at least not while he was alive." The father's actual gift (the films) went unrecognized by the world, by the family, and by the man, surfacing only after the suicide — a genius misfiled during the life it belonged to. And the one child who holds this without bitterness is Mario, for whom it is "ultimately all right, if that's the way things unfolded." The exempted son is also the family's only serene reader of the misplaced father: where the others will turn Himself's death into interpretive war, Mario simply accepts the shape of it. The family cannot see its father clearly; only the son outside the system can look at the misreading and let it be.