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My grandfather once sat me down to explain how to become a millionaire. He brought out a chunky printing calculator, the kind that unspooled figures on paper like receipts at the grocery store, and demonstrated compound interest to me. I was intrigued by the possibility that I, too, could grow up to be a millionaire like him, that his path of steady, clinking accumulation could also be mine. But my youthful avarice was tempered by mixed feelings about a man whom I had not seen at all in the first decade of my life. When I did at last meet him, at around the age of this first wealth-building instruction, he was gruff and remonstrating, forever disgruntled with the workings of the world and the possibility that I might be contributing to that dysfunction already, even as just a small child. So, while I was an apt pupil for his savings lesson (not least because there was no one else in my childhood to teach it) I did balk a little at its price. Would growing up to have a million dollars have to mean growing up to be just like him?

For my mother, solo parenting four children while leading a life of medical service in Africa meant that money was frequently too tight to mention. So, when her estranged father came back into our lives in my early teens, I paid attention to any Santa Claus signs among his eccentricities, even though I had been prepped by my mother’s cautionary tales to be on my guard. When he reappeared, he did so with a lot of firm opinions. Opinions about what kind of cars to drive (domestic, never foreign). What food to put in your body (vegetable oil, never butter, ancient grains not commercial wheat). How to live a useful life (be an engineer like him). The lesson in compounding interest was intended to teach a child like me — I struck adults as equal parts hyperactive and dreamy — to buckle down and focus on matters of long-term consequence. It was meant to reveal the dynamo of engineering, and my grandfather had several patents, technical papers, and even a book to his name, as I would learn well after his death. Knowing none of that as a child, nor what it could possibly mean, I could only intuit the presence here of vast systems, working on timelines outside my conscious awareness, that would nonetheless determine my life.

Grandpa T was also a real-estate investor, a proverbial self-made “American dream” man, although his manner of living was so crotchety and abstemious by the time I knew him — in his third bachelorhood — that he seemed to me to deny himself all the pleasures of the flesh that I imagined should come with American bounty. Our home ran according to a “live simply so that others may simply live” ethos that my mother drew from Quakerism, but that quietist faith was filled with a kindliness I never discerned in my grandfather’s stoicism. There was no television in his house any more than there was in ours, but somehow that absence meant different things to those domestic spaces. Twice-divorced, grandpa’s dining room was lined with shelves and shelves of vitamins and supplements. It struck me even as a young child that his motives for extending life were suspect, since his drive to accumulate wealth, design cars, and command others had ultimately cost him the hugs and tickles that I imagined, then, were the reason for existence. It had also driven him to a level of paranoia, I would learn shortly after he died, that had extended to bugging his own home. Even before I knew about the Nixon-esque surveillance system he had installed, my youthful antennae were out against this anxious, ill-tempered man whenever he was near me. But despite it all, it never occurred to me to hate him.

It also never occurred to me to inquire too closely as to why I, among my siblings, was given a computer (for what reason? A birthday? I do not now recall), the first such device to enter our home. I took the computer home, plugged it in, and proceeded to attempt to teach myself programming. I can’t recall the make or model (was it a Texas Instruments?) or the programming language (was it BASIC?), but I do recall spending several frustrating hours over several days at the command line, trying to submit to the unforgiving logic of a code that would crash at a single error. To quote Truman Capote, I wasn’t coding, I was typing, and the lack of results showed. I was trying to write a program that would draw a picture of a balloon, or something like that, but I was coming up zero.

The large device stayed in my room, however, across several international moves. Even non-functioning, it retained a talismanic, ornamental place on my desk up through my teenage years. In Kenya, where we lived, I believe I was the only boy in school with a personal computer at home, perhaps the only person of any age. I would occasionally admire its shape and pride of place on the adult-sized desk, next to a stack of impressive instructional books I would pore over as if they were grimoires. Even though I never used that PC, I projected a future for myself in which I would. My grandfather's lesson took, in the end, though not in the currency he had in mind. The interest, it turned out, was compounding in me.

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