Who Is That?

My father and I were watching television when an old clip of Sezen Aksu appeared. She was young enough in the footage that I did not recognize her immediately, so I asked the room, “Who is that?”

“Sezen Aksu,” my father said at once.

I turned toward him, genuinely surprised. “How did you know?”

He looked at me as if I had asked a much stranger question. “Are you supposed to know everything?”

That was the whole exchange, and it required nothing more.

What amused me then was that my father had identified someone before I did. What interests me now is the surprise itself. Children can grow into adults and still carry the quiet assumption that their parents somehow began life already as parents.

An old television clip briefly corrects that idea. My father had known songs, faces, streets, jokes, and years that existed before my own memory began. He did not need to study that past because part of it had once been his present.

He offered no story about the singer or the period. There was no explanation of what he had listened to when he was young. He simply knew the face immediately, and then enjoyed the small victory.

The television continued.

For a few seconds, however, the direction of knowledge had reversed. I asked the question, and my father already had the answer.