Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other. ~Joseph Joubert

I am reading Mary Gordon’s The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for her Father, a book about her father, who died when she was seven. I’d been thinking of writing a post about my dad for some time now, but this book, despite our fathers’ differences, inspired me. Last night I dredged up the Neiman-Marcus box that holds the little history I have of my dad pre-marriage, pre-us-kids.

[These are his handwritten captions on the back of each photo. On an island down Konigsee. Statue of someone.]

My mom was always happy to regale us with side-splittingly hilarious tales of her Depression-era childhood, growing up the youngest of eleven, daughter to immigrant parents who were very poor but worked hard and raised an admittedly wacky yet loving and close family. But my father rarely spoke of his childhood. I know his parents’ names, John and Thecla; I know that his father died of a heart attack the year my older brother was born. We only have maybe one or two pictures of them. They were also immigrants, but family rumor has it that they were landed gentry back in the Old Country. Here, however, they lived on the wrong side of the tracks and my dad attended vo-tech school because there was never any possibility of him being sent to college.

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My mom once told us that my dad’s mother didn’t want him, that she’d kept him in a play pen until he was five. His older brother Anthony wanted to be a priest and wound up in a sanitarium after a nervous breakdown. I vaguely remember Tony as a frail old man in a cardigan who lived with his mother. My dad’s sister Catherine married, and my dad carried a little photo of her daughter in his wallet, even though we never met her. When my mom met my dad, she thought he was afflicted with Saint Vitus’ dance, he was so high-strung and nervy.

[First pair of skis I ever had on.]
He had been in the army, the occupational forces post-WWII, in Germany, and had done very well, gaining several promotions and commendations. He’d learned to ski (in the Alps!), and ride horses, and seen some of the world.


[Extra copy.]

He wanted to re-enlist but his mother would not let him. I don’t know if I really remember this or just remember being told this (I was maybe eleven at the time), but my dad sat at the kitchen table the day his mother died and cried and asked, “Why didn’t my mother love me?”

[Just passing the time of day away. The guy I go around with. His name is Pescrillo. Down in Konigsee.]


My dad was by no means a saint. He had a flash-quick temper, he shouted and stomped and yelled, he would even occasionally take off his belt and whale us one. Once, when my mom was in the hospital having kidney stones removed, we three kids turned off all the lights in the house while he was cooking dinner. He chased us all over the house, swinging his belt indeterminately – we found the whole situation wildly hysterical, or at least we did until we got smacked. He was sometimes incredibly crotchety, yet he befriended all kinds of people; he was truly colorblind in the largest sense of the word. Homeless people, the lunch cart vendors, people who rode his bus, all manner of co-workers, folks he’d met on his marathon Sunday walks – they all showed up at his funeral to tell us what a kind and generous man my father was. They cried, some brought flowers, they all knew our names, they all told us how much he would be missed.


[Elsie and Sam New Year's Eve 1960, celebrating Dec 25 engagement.]

I remember that he and my mom fought like crazy (in direct contradiction of all popular child psychology theories, the D-word was constantly bandied about our house), but there was no doubt in our minds that he positively adored her and thought he was the luckiest man alive, to be married to her. Yet, one of *her* favorite stories is that she said to him on the way back down the aisle after their wedding ceremony, “Sam, I’ve just made a terrible mistake.” (One of *our* favorite stories, straight from my Aunt J’s reliable mouth, is that she made him shorten his very-Eastern-European, all-consonants, very-few-vowels last name because it wouldn’t fit on her Saks charge card.) She would say maddening things to him, like, “For God’s sake, I just *told* you I loved you. Now leave me alone, I’ll let you know if it changes.” And once she threw his engagement ring at him from their second-floor apartment and he had to sift through the gravel driveway to find it. (On second thought, perhaps he was indeed a saint in some ways.)

[1965. My mother was pregnant with my older brother in this picture, taken in my paternal grandmother's house.]


But he worked two pretty thankless jobs to support his family, he played catch with us in the backyard and put up a little swimming pool for us in the summer. He built us a sandbox, and rubber-band guns, and taught us to ride our bikes. He took us fishing and ice-skating at the little pond down the street. He taught me how to bait my hook with a live worm – yuck. He found the money somewhere to send us to private Christian school because he thought it was important. He had converted from Catholicism to Baptism when he married my mother; his mother disowned him.


[No caption. We gave my dad this Walkman for his birthday; here he is doing a dance my older, college-age brother taught him, the Oak Tree. As you can see, my father had an excellent, very dry, and self-deprecating sense of humor.]


He used to get up very, very early in the morning to read his Bible and listen to his religious radio programs (Harold Camping of Family Radio was a favorite. Like most converts, he was much more zealous than any of us in his religious beliefs). He always gave my mom little precious gifts for Christmas – Boehm porcelain figurines (I still have the rabbit), and a pretty, sentimental card, and Godiva chocolates, and money for her to spend on herself.
And for my high school graduation I received little diamond stud earrings that he’d saved for and bought, well before he died.

[No caption. This is me, age eight-ish, and my dad.]


My mother encouraged him to go back to school, but I guess there never seemed to be the time or the money. He was really good with numbers – his job at RCA was as a “timekeeper,” which turns out meant he dealt with payroll and hours and such. He was so smart in many ways – but not well-educated at all. Yet he read Ovid and Plato and Francis Bacon for “fun.”

[Took this myself in the mirror.]


He swore he didn’t like animals but my cat was devoted to him. I am not making this up, I swear – she walked up to the corner every day at five o’clock to meet him when he got off his bus. And she would sit with him in the mornings and he’d scratch her head and he’d tell her how pretty she was and what a nice cat she was– and that her white bits of fur would make him a lovely toupee. Then when we would come down for breakfast, he’d dump her out of his lap and say, much to our amusement since we KNEW he was lying “That animal! She wants to be fed! I kicked her right up against the refrigerator, but she still wouldn’t leave me alone!”


My younger brother looks remarkably like my father, right down to the way he stands, the expressions on his face, the attitude and inclination of his head.
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In 2004 my dad had been dead as long as I’d known him alive - he died the summer before my senior year in high school. Now, more than seventeen years later, he’s blurred to a montage of images, a few expressions I find myself using (Nucleus, 1,2,3,4,5; After laughing comes crying), a handful of photos, a folded American flag. My oldest son is named for him. He would have been pleased as punch.

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