My old man and me

There you go, you’re gone again…

I was listening to the old Johnny Cash tune the other day while I was thinking about how I would mark my father’s 100^th birthday.

I always perceived my Dad as kind of elliptical. He was there, but not quite. Not ‘available’ there. You didn’t go to Dad with problems because he’d likely refer you to Mom, who usually was the problem…

As a kid, I thought he ran the family business, but the older I get the more certain I am that he was the guy who worked in the butcher shop and counted the money at the end of the night, and my mother was the one who ran the kitchen and called the shots. Mom was at the center of the action; Dad’s butcher shop (and the front counter, which he also manned) was at the periphery.

Elliptical.

But his accomplishments were vivid. He served in WWII from before Pearl Harbor to after VJ Day (look it up, kids). He was shot down over the English Channel and was awarded a Purple Heart. Then he came home, married a well-connected, stunning beauty and took off in pursuit of the American dream he had fought so long and honorably to ensure.

He sold lacquer thinner (but not well because he could never take advantage of a rube and sell the rube something didn’t need, or more than he could use); opened business after business to modest success, solidly establishing himself as a Job Creator through the decades; and most impressively, became an adoptive father to four orphans, taking up the responsibility for the last two after his 50^th birthday.

He was a Knight of Columbus and he worked charitable events. He started his own charitable organization in his 70s when he saw a news report that people in his city were going to bed hungry. His organization consisted of him, collecting non-perishable food outside of church all Sunday, every Sunday, then driving the food down to a mission on the south side of town.

And although he never talked about the war, on any other topic he was a well-regarded raconteur. I can recall many times my Dad regaling a crowd of friends with a lavishly-performed anecdote or questionably-tasteful joke in our wood-paneled rec room in the basement.

I remember both my parents leaving home before sunrise and coming home after dark, six or seven days a week, depending on the business at the time.

And my Dad liked to smoke. Loved to smoke. He didn’t die until they took the Tareyton out of his hand. Seriously.

He took us with him bowling sometimes, and it was always very exciting. It seems like it was on a school night, so being away from home and up late was especially enticing for me as a kid. SO much more potential trouble to get into. And more importantly, the Ben Franklin’s in the same strip mall that housed the bowling alley also sold comic books. Comic books in our house went back and forth between being objects of derision, hostages held in exchange for my improved behavior and all too often, casualties of combat. So any time I could get my hands on a couple new ones was a big deal. Back at the bowling alley there was a lot of laughing and swearing and smoking and drinking. Everybody had a great time on bowling night.

Today we would probably describe most of my father’s generation of combat veterans as victims of PTSD, when to themselves they were just the grocer, the gas station owner and the guy who ran the cleaners. The shit that should have been eating them alive, they ate instead. Ate it for breakfast, most of them.

But like I said, my Dad didn’t talk much, not in front of us anyhow. Maybe I was too young and he was too old. What exactly did we have to talk about? And I was kid number three of four. Typically kid 3 gets a brief moment in the spotlight, then the final kid arrives and she’s an infant and proceeds to suck up all the emotional oxygen in the room.

(Sorry. My issues.)

But I tend to think my Dad’s reserve was a stoicism born of growing up during the Depression, surviving the horror of WWII, and watching helplessly as start-up business after business went by the wayside. And I was too damn young, then too stoned, to think about asking him about his life; his childhood spent hopping tenement rooftops in downtown Chicago; later, hauling cases of Coca Cola up and down those same tenement stairs; the girl down the street he grew up with, then courted and married after the war.

It was a rich vein that I failed to mine. Don’t know how much he would have shared (for instance, he refused to take me to see the movie “Midway” when it came out because it cut too close), but I’ll regret for the rest of my life not having asked him anyhow.

He was my Dad. He was born September 1, 1913 and he was a damned good man; better than I’ll ever be. He made the world a better place for having been here, and really, what greater accomplishment can there be?

I miss him.