My Dad
January 26th, 2010I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad lately. I’m a bit surprised at myself. He was a man I didn’t know, and someone whom, when I was young, I thought didn’t want to be known. He said little to us during the course of the week. If he was on the night shift, he’d sleep most of the day, then read the paper when he got up, have a cup of coffee, make us dinner during those years when my mom worked, and then go off to work. Sometimes he’d work two shifts in a row. Sometimes three shifts. 24 hours. The summer I got out of high school I took a job at the same factory. You got 2 fifteen minute breaks and a half hour for lunch. The temperature inside the place never dropped below 90 in the 4 months I worked there.
There was not much talk at home. No conversation. This was remarkable when you consider the great social upheavals that were taking place: Kennedy elected, the Beatles, Kennedy shot, Vietnam, MLK, Lyndon Johnson’s social programs, the Beatles again, then along came Yoko and it was all over. Beatniks and the Chad Mitchell Trio had become pudding and John Denver flying an airplane into the water. But my dad never said anything about any of it. He did suggest to my sister that she become a doctor, which she almost did, and to me that I do something with computers, which I sort of did. I don’t know if he ever suggested anything to my brother, but he turned out ok too.
He never told us how he felt about anything, and was the only father I ever saw that was like that. Silence. Some dads had a silence that covered a smoldering anger, a rage at their lot in life, a fury born of looking forward and seeing thousands of reflections of today, seeming to fade into the distance like the infinity point of a renaissance painting, somewhere in the middle of the picture, where these dads saw a gravestone instead of just nothing. But his silence wasn’t an angry silence. It was just silence.
He had an eidetic memory in the short term. Sometimes, not very often, when he came home from work, we would get him to amuse us by reading to himself some article from the newspaper, and then handing us the paper and reciting what he had read, paragraph after paragraph, while my older brother checked for any errors and my sister and I looked on, not knowing whether to be astonished, or proud, or curious. He never made any mistakes.
He was born on Mott St. in Manhattan in 1898. At the time it was a cultural mishmash of Italian, German, Jewish, Russian, and Chinese immigrants, who shared only poverty. The “culture” part was just the occasional piano or violin you could hear from an apartment as you walked the streets of lower Manhattan in those days. Culture used to isolate, to separate, to hide in public. As a child he spoke all of the languages of the neighborhood, although he could only read Italian and English. My guess is that he didn’t finish high school. I never asked him. He’d have told me if he wanted to. But not just because I might have wanted him to.
I know that at 16 he lied about his age and joined the army. His first job in the army was taking care of horses. But after a short time in uniform, his appendix went bad on him, and during surgery it broke. This gave him peritonitis, which he survived, and a medical discharge from service. Other than that he would likely have died somewhere in Europe still in his teens.
He did the entire “get a job, get married, have three kids and raise ‘em” thing twice. I was in the second bunch of three kids. I grew up without knowing about the first wife and bunch of three kids until I was almost thirty. My mom, who was Catholic, lived with a lot of guilt all those years, even though she was tricked into marriage. But we never even guessed. That’s how smart we were. Had I known, and explained to her the canon law concept of a putative marriage with respect to bigamy, she would only have felt worse.
I never understood the isolation, of course, and that’s some of what’s behind this piece. My mom had no friends, and we didn’t know why. My dad had no friends, and we didn’t know why. We had no contact with relatives we knew we had, and we didn’t know why. We didn’t entertain, and we(kids) didn’t know why. Had we been wealthy, or concerned about the cost of entertaining, that would have been something. But in our social strata, entertaining meant a few burgers, a few beers, soda for the kids. We could have chipped in our allowance.
So one thing that happened was that we, the kids, never got socialized properly. I know that school’s supposed to do that for you, but when we came home it was as if coming through the door rubbed off any socialization that stuck to us when we left the school. We saw each other, and went back to being “the kids.” We developed strange senses of humor, which are unmodified by time. And we never developed an interest in being successful, in the usual sense of the word. We had no interest in participating in the world. In being the next Albert Schweitzer, or Albert Einstein, or Albert anything. Unlike most kids growing up, we were happy when the phone didn’t ring. We all had Latin, and that was a good thing. You have to be able to think in another language to feel the plurality of the world. And the world is a very plural place, for now.
Writing this piece has confirmed for me the strangeness I still feel at being here. I could feel its source and power as I wrote. It feels at once natural and unnatural. So let me tell you now of how this has settled in my mind. My dad got up each day and went to work. He worked a hard job, physically hard. Sometimes he came home injured, but every day he did come home, and once a week he brought his paycheck with him. Unlike myself, he has a place in the cosmos of Albert Schweitzer, who once said that a man can only do what he can do; but if he does that each day, he can sleep at night and do it again the next day. My dad worked as an unskilled laborer until he was 78. He died at 92. He didn’t fish or hunt. He never went off to India to find himself. I believe he knew himself more thoroughly than any man I’ve met.