January 28, 2007

• My Old Man

  Note: I keep editing this.  It's a work in progress, it seems.  Something in me is deeply invested in this, and wants to make it perfect.

  **********

  He was 43 years old when I was born.  Because my mother didn’t have time to make
  it to the hospital, he delivered me himself in their Chicago apartment, on the mattress on the floor which served as their bed.  He had absolutely no idea what he was doing.  The umbilical cord was wrapped twice around
  my neck.  It’s a miracle that I lived.

  While my friends’ youthful dads were taking them out to the
  baseball diamond to teach them the fundamentals of baseball, my father was too
  old to run, and when we tried to play catch his elbow hurt him.  I didn’t understand.  He did gamely serve one year as an assistant coach on my minor league baseball
  team, hitting fly balls to the outfielders.  He had a funny hitch in his swing, and he
  missed the ball about half the time.  I
  stifled a groan, embarrassed to acknowledge him as my dad.

  Every weekday he got up at 6:00
  AM and went to work.  I could
  hear his hacking coughs when he got out of bed, from the two packs of
  cigarettes a day that he smoked.   The coughing would sometimes go on for 15
  minutes.  But he never missed work.  And he never uttered a word of complaint.

  My dad worked for the same company for 44 years, spanning portions of six decades, in a
  warehouse.  With his two years of college, relatively rare for that time, he was nevertheless a laborer during the Roaring Twenties; during the Great Depression; during World War II, when he was just barely too old to go fight the Nazis.  At age 19 I got a little taste of working in that same warehouse, unloading railroad cars, lifting an average of  30 tons a day one bag or box at a time.  My dad had not even had the advantage of an electric pallet mover.

  At some point he traded his blue collar for a white one, becoming some sort of low-level managerial
  functionary.  I never quite understood what he did.  In my family my dad’s meager earnings
  were “our money”, while my mother’s small but significant inheritance was “her
  money”. 

  When he retired in 1971, my dad was making about the same
  amount of money that I would soon earn in my first full-time job, and my parents had still
  not paid off their two-bedroom house in the white working class South Side ghetto.  They never had
  a new car until my father’s elderly mother bought him a Ford Pinto as a retirement
  gift.  Prior to that I can remember him
  down on his knees in the cracked driveway, age 55 or 60, applying body putty to our
  cars’ rusted-out metal, and screwing plywood over the holes where the floorboards
  used to be.

  My dad did all of the grocery shopping, and about half the
  housework.  He vacuumed the carpet, and
  washed the dishes every night.  On the
  weekends my mother, who did not work outside the home and had only the one
  child, would hand him a list of chores to do. 
  She would stand at the window and blow him a kiss as he drove away in
  the car to run errands.  He always did the
  chores without a word of protest, even when she told him to paint the white plastic
  lawn sprinkler a bizarre shade of maroon mahogany to match the trim on the
  house, or to install seven locks on the back door.  He was forever painting something at her whim, and laying
  flagstones where there should have been grass. 
  I perceived my father as a wimp for being so subservient to my mother, and I resolved to be nothing like him.

  When my friends and I grew tired of the underground tunnel
  we had dug in my back yard, my father the wimp  spent a weekend filling in the hole.  When we eventually wearied of the cabin we had
  erected, he spent another weekend tearing down the cabin and hauling away the wood in the family station wagon.

  My father had been married before, to a woman who ran off
  with another man and left him with an infant daughter to support and raise.  Unable to raise her without help, he was
  forced to leave her with his parents who lived far away.  Then for the fifteen years before I was born,
  my father was an alcoholic.  He went from
  work to the bar to his bed to work to the bar to his bed.  He had no friends that I was ever aware
  of.  I called that period of his life the
  “blank period”, because he would never speak of it.  My mother apparently got him to finally quit
  drinking by locking him out of their apartment until he could come home sober.

  My mother tried to teach me to drive when I was 16, but she
  was too high-strung, and made me nervous by screaming at me.  My old man sat stolidly in the passenger’s
  seat and never uttered a word, and I learned to drive.  “Phlegmatic” was my father’s middle name, it
  seemed.

  The time eventually came when I had grown taller and bigger and
  stronger than my dad.  I could finally
  beat him at checkers.  Feeling my
  youthful oats, I would punch him playfully on the arm and call him “Old Sis”.  I thought I detected a certain
  sad wistfulness in his face, but he never said a word.

  Fast forward to the time when my second wife left me and took my nine-month-old daughter out of state.  In my anguish I was resolved to lie in bed and starve myself to death, but my parents talked me into staying at their house.  For six months I spent every moment when I wasn't at work lying on their couch, with my face to the wall, like King David after the death of his child.  My father had no words of wisdom for me, but he spent hours playing card games with me, to try to distract me from my depression.

  The only advice my father ever gave me in life was during that period, when I was about
  36 years old.  “Never expect anything
  from anyone,” he said.  “That way you’ll
  never be disappointed.”  But when I occasionally
  left town in the winter, he would go over to my house and shovel my snow on
  his 79-year-old legs.

  When I was 38 and my father was 81 he went into the hospital,
  saying simply that he wasn’t feeling very well, and died.  Lung cancer, the Medical Deities eventually proclaimed.  He was on a respirator in intensive care for
  a couple of weeks, so he couldn’t talk. 
  After several days someone finally figured out that maybe, if they gave him a
  pad of paper and a pencil, he could communicate by writing.  Standing at his bedside, I breathlessly
  awaited the wisdom that I was sure would finally pour forth from him.  “My lips are dry,” he wrote.  He did later scrawl that he loved my mother,
  but he never wrote anything to me.

  After my dad was gone, I cleaned the clothes out of his
  closet and dresser.  It took only a few hours to dispose of all of his worldly goods.  Most of his clothes were too outdated and
  raggedy to even take to the Salvation Army. I could see where he had tried to prolong the life of his work shoes - shoes I had given him - with some kind of glue.  He was forever tinkering with stuff, but never quite succeeded in repairing it.  I kept his little old pocket knife.

  Following his passing, my mother and I got along worse than
  ever.  I realized that, even though he
  never said much of anything, my dad had somehow served as a buffer between the strong personalities of my
  mother and me.

  Now my father has been dead for almost 20 years, and I’m the
  age he was when he was trying to play catch with me.  I can’t run, and I can’t throw.  I have no job, and haven’t owned a home in
  years.  I wasn’t a wimp with women the way my dad was,
  and consequently I have two divorces to show for my pains.  Yet I turned out to be a great deal like him in
  some very fundamental ways.  I now
  understand that life had kicked his ass pretty bad, and his untiring devotion
  to my mother was born out of gratitude for her love in his otherwise arid life, imperfect and incomplete
  though that love may have been.

  The other morning I woke up unexpectedly crying for my dad.  He'd be exactly 100 years old if he was still alive.  I love you, Old Sis.  I miss the hell out of you, you phlegmatic
  old fart.  I wish we had gotten to know one another better, BEFORE you died.

  • 11:19 am
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