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years of work, Dr. Bassett talks like this:
    frnd1: tell me about john perkins
    drbas: john perkins is five foot two and squat as a hedge
    Laughably primitive, except that it’s not: we’re at the absolute forefront of talking
     computers, way out in front of the competition. But what talk it is. Exhaustive minutiae—what
     my father ate, who he talked to, what he thought about what he ate and who he talked
     to. He recommends a precise soil mixture—half loam, half cow manure, which was his
     uncle Jack’s recipe for raising tomatoes, and rails against the flavorless versions
     from California. He confides uplifting bromides about the patients in his clinic.
     He debates the virtues of ingestible versus injected antibiotics. The very existence
     of my father’s diary was unexpected, but its size—five thousand pages over the course
     of twenty-plus years—was an absolute shock. And yet it contains nothing acutely revelatory.
     Page after page of opinion and detail, and somehow the whole accumulation hides the
     man as much as it reveals him. There are a few surprises—my father’s worry about my
     older brother’s “effeminacy,” for instance—but no clues as to the man behind the man,
     except to reinforce that there was none. The journal is thorough, scrupulous, buttoned
     up, nearly drowning in its own Southernness, and blithely impersonal; so was the man.
     For all the mentions of young people this and young people that, there’s little about
     my brother or me. My mother gets more ink, but only as a cartoon of Southern female
     virtue. Strong, sharp, the perfect belle. Exactly the kind of nonsense that sent me
     fleeing for California and its flavorless tomatoes (which are actually delectable—so
     there). The only people who really come alive are the local color, especially my father’s
     friend Willie Beerbaum, who had a mouth that could peel paint from the wall. There
     are times I wish we could have based the program on Willie.
    When the historical society published an excerpt and proclaimed my father the Samuel
     Pepys of the South, I was still in college and this sounded hopefully grand (though
     I hadn’t heard of Samuel Pepys). My father, I knew, would have been thrilled. The
     diaries are a kind of love letter to the traditional and old-fashioned. He had suffered
     in the contemporary world. I think he needed a good nineteenth-century cholera epidemic,
     where he could heroically aid the poor and sick, assuage their beatific suffering.
     Instead, he got Medicaid and billable procedures, people eating themselves to death
     on Cheetos. The excerpt, however, failed to inspire even a single letter to the editor,
     and there’s little wonder why. It’s full of paragraphs like this:
Sold the nag Blazers to old John Perkins, who owns the farm off the Chambersville
     Road. I have no idea what he plans to do with it. He’s five foot two and squat as
     a hedge—Blazers is half Tennessee Walker. Will Perkins dare to mount such a steed?
     I’m afraid to watch him bouncing down the highway, like a rubber ball on a paddle.
     But he offered a fair price and Man must be allowed to follow his passions, foolish
     or not. Les Roark says Perkins came into the Grand Leader last week asking about Stetson
     hats.
    This is an entry from 1983! Michael Jackson was dancing in a rhinestone glove. The
Challenger
was orbiting the Earth. Pepsi was for sale in the Soviet Union. Why does it sound
     like Old Hickory is still in the White House?
    When I took this job I didn’t tell Livorno that I’d never known my father was keeping
     a journal, that my relationship with my father wasn’t twined too tight. Instead, I
     thought of packing up my Giants pennants under the watch of two security guards, and
     said I’d be happy to come on. I was probably the best choice. My mother knew my father
     better, but she had no interest in moving to California and taking up full-time office
     work. And my brother was (is) too