Daddy

I know the blogosphere is going to be rife with Father’s Day posts, today, and I suppose this one will probably pass unnoticed. That’s fine. I rarely talk about my father, because, well, frankly, I don’t know why.

Daddy passed away almost 35 years ago (on the 3rd of July, so you can imagine how that colored celebrations of the 4th for awhile). I was 17, he was 74. Do the math – you want to talk “generation gap”? He was a Survivor of the Holocaust – the concentration camps of World War II – as was my mother. We were his second family, as he lost his first wife and two daughters in those camps. A photo of them hung on the wall next to our front door for as long as I can remember. My brother and I were his second chance to leave a legacy to the world. No pressure.

He made the best freaking potato salad and cole slaw ever – a flavor-memory-imprint, if you will – by which I judge all potato salads and cole slaws, especially my own. This was a man who was unafraid to cook, back in the day when men didn’t do that sort of thing at home.

Daddy drove me to school every morning, when I was a kid. One morning, he got up very early and left the house before the crack of dawn. He came back just in time to take me to school. When I got in the car (a yellow and white 1956 Buick Special – awesome!), I noticed that the back seat was filled with crates and burlap sacks. That were clucking. He had driven out to a farm and bought live chickens that he was going to take to our butcher after he dropped me off at school. He got a deal.

When we’d driven maybe 3 or 4 blocks, the chickens – who had apparently been quietly conspiring a jailbreak up to that point – decided that now was the time to make their move. Several of the chickens in the sacks had managed to loosen whatever tied the sacks closed, and burst into the air! They went flying at the windows, flying up to the back of the front seat, flying in my hair – all the while cackling wildly and getting the others to join in the riot. This was not terribly amusing to a 6 year old, I promise you.

I was completely traumatized and refused to eat chicken at home for an entire year. Not roast chicken, not fried chicken, not even chicken soup. I was going to make damn sure that not a single one of those chickens that had shared my ride to school that morning, were still in the house. In any form. Period. To this day, I cannot eat anything (excluding veggies, of course) that I had known personally. Even in passing. I would die on Survivor. He never went back to the farm again. At least, that I’m aware of.

Daddy loved pro wrestling on television (I know!). He thought it was real. He would split a bottle of Schoenling beer (it’s an Ohio thing) with my mother, sit on the edge of “his” chair, and forming imaginary head-locks with his arms, shout advice to his favorites. Big Bro and I usually stayed waaayy clear of the living room, when wrestling was on TV. He had his first heart attack when I was 7. His doctor told him that he couldn’t watch wrestling anymore, because it was too exciting for him. So, no more Schoenling. He waited for times when my mother wasn’t home, and watched it anyway. We were sworn to secrecy.

I was a teenager, and he was an old man. He suffered from what we now call Alzheimer’s, and his faculties steadily declined. He was hyper-emotional and had a terrible temper. Mom said it was because a German guard hit him in the head with a rifle butt. I know now that it was part of the dementia. Back then, we didn’t know anything. They didn’t talk about this shit on TV like they do now.

One afternoon, a few months before he died, he had one of his increasingly rare moments of complete lucidity. I had just come home from school, and found him sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me. “Have you gotten your driver’s license, yet?”, he asked. I’d had my learner’s permit for 2 years, I told him, but Mom only took me driving a couple of times in the school parking lot, and I wasn’t allowed to go more than 5 mph before she became hysterical and started slamming on an imaginary brake pedal on the passenger’s side. I was 17 and still didn’t have my “adult” license. It was embarrassing.

“You’ll never learn to drive if you wait for your mother,” he said. He pulled out his wallet (Mom always made sure he had money in his wallet, even if all he ever did was walk down to the fruit stand a few blocks away, and bought some peaches) and handed me a twenty-dollar bill (a fortune in those days – okay, maybe not quite a fortune, but still a lot of money). “Call one of those driving schools and buy a couple of lessons. They’ll take you to get your license. Don’t tell your mother.” At that moment, I loved my father more than a teenager will ever admit.

When I do talk about my father, these are the stories I tell.