My mother handed me a yellowed sheet of paper, a resume typed in 1959. The first item, “Personal Details,” listed my father’s name. It said that he was 22 years old, and said he was exactly the height and weight I’ve been most of my life.

Why he put his height and weight on his resume, I don’t know. I can’t ask him. Eleven years after he wrote that resume, at the age of 33, he died from complications from a brain aneurysm.

I was 10 when he died. I knew my father as a kid, and I know him now through stories and photographs that live on. But I really understand ridiculously little about the man. This resume was like finding an artifact at an archaeological dig — telegraphic clues, straight from that moment in time, that lead to a handful of new insights, a bunch of guesses, and a lot more questions like: how is it possible that I came from someone who was good at math and accounting?

In one page, he tried to describe who he was in a way that would make someone hire him, and I tried to imagine him at 22. I have a daughter older than that and a son almost that age. They’re barely getting started in life. By the time my father was 22, his resume shows, he was married and had a short stint in the U.S. Air Force. He’d worked in two factories — one that made shoes and one that made the earliest flight simulators — and sold Ford cars. I had known before only about the car salesman job. My relatives said he wasn’t very good at it. He lasted a year. I wonder if it’s genetic — if I and my two brothers would’ve made lousy car salesmen, too.

My father came from rough beginnings. His alcoholic and abusive father couldn’t hold a job and spent most of his time, I’ve been told, getting kicked out of the hordes of bars that lined Clinton Street in our hometown, Binghamton, N.Y. An uncle or two had gone to college, but most of my father’s family didn’t make much of their lives, and probably weren’t expected to. And yet, as his resume shows, after spending a couple of years in factories and on car lots, my father entered the local community college.

At Broome Tech, as the college was known, he majored in accounting. More than that, the resume gives hints of a man who dove headfirst into his new and foriegn environment. He listed that he was president of the Broome Tech Business Club and president of a school singing group called Tech Tone-Masters. I only vaguely knew my father could sing. In my foggy childhood memories, I can picture him belting out “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah!” when The Beatles were first exploding in America. I don’t remember whether he sounded like John Lennon, but I imagine that if you’re the president of the singing club, you must be able to sing.

Reading the resume, I most felt my father’s absence in my life when looking at what he liked to do. Clearly, he liked performing music. I do, too, but I only figured that out later in life, and I’ve long wished I would’ve gotten into it earlier. If he’d have been around, would he have pushed me toward music? Or provided an example that I’d have emulated? A father often exerts so much influence on his sons. The way he lives his life is a gravitational force that his sons are either drawn toward or push against. I did neither because the force wasn’t there. It was the lack of it that shaped me.

Where the resume lists “Other Activities,” my father wrote that he enjoyed golf, softball and basketball. When I was a little guy, he started me on those sports, but before they could take hold, he vanished. I was the oldest of three boys. Within a couple of years after he died, I found new sports that would’ve been foreign to my father, soccer and ice hockey. I became crazy for both and still play them today. My two younger brothers followed me and took up soccer and hockey and still participate in both. It makes me realize that I became a little of that gravitational force for them. With my father gone, my brothers were pulled into my orbit, even though it was entirely unintentional on my part.

Once in a rare while, I might play golf, softball or basketball. I suck at them all.

The resume only makes it harder to understand how my father wound up where he did by the time he died. From his start as an accountant, he morphed into, of all things, a speechwriter for executives. When he died, he wrote for the CEO of Agway in Syracuse, N.Y. I was too young to see the transition or know much about his job. There was no gravitational pull toward writing or creative work in our household. Yet where he left off, my brothers and I picked up. In one way or another, we’re all writers and creative types today. Genetics prevailed. Just as it did with my height and weight.