Only One Thing Counts

“Your family is its own religion,” a therapist once told me, “complete with saints, martyrs, demons and apparitions. You seem to have a shared record of acts and pronouncements that are still being debated and interpreted, a roster of the most egregious sins, and an ongoing need for some sort of personal absolution. It’s powerful stuff, and it owns you.”

I bridled at the comparison, although I had to admit there was some truth to it. Itormented myself constantly with a litany of the ways that I had let down the saints, who had become terribly silent, elusive, and all the more saintly since dying. But the hard part in therapy was when I was asked to look at them with some level of balance and objectivity and perhaps even speak a word in my own defense. I was unable to do this. I felt that the therapist did not grasp the level of suffering that they had endured, or their monumental efforts to survive and in my father’s case, to carry us all.

No doubt about it: Daddy was the top saint in this religion that was my family; you might even say he was its god, and I was not about to critique him posthumously, which I suppose proved the therapist's theory right there.

But love trumps all, and all I have for my father is love, and even now, more than thirty years since he died, I occasionally get a brand new pang of missing him so sharp and sudden it almost makes me gasp. I have written about him elsewhere in this blog and in every place throughout my life where words collect, so much so that I have nothing new to say here. He was Italian, and he looked it; he had black hair and strong hands and a deep dimple in his chin. On the day he died, he was still working hard, and I cannot even imagine him as an elderly man. He used to tell us he was a fighter, a fighter tied up, and if only he could free himself, he could fight some more. He saw his life as a battlefield, and he tried to protect his children but knew that we bore the scars. The clock is ticking, he always said, and time indeed did flee, but the promises of domani never came. He spoke poems and stood straight, he rode a tiger metaphorically, made us soup literally, painted peacocks on the walls, yes. He was the galaxy in which hope lived.

He was born in New York on March 29, 1911. He belonged to a different world, and he left us in the 1970s. I wonder sometimes what he would make of the way things are today.

On this, his birthday, I confess we didn’t do much to celebrate his birthdays while he was alive; he was busy, not prone to sentimentality, and he never made his own birthdays seem as important as ours. Holidays, too, were for kids, not adults. I do wish we had made an effort anyway, but he was a giver, and seldom recipient.

When I was very little, though, perhaps about four, I celebrated him with this ridiculous ditty: We love our Daddy/He's the nicest man we know/He has big brown eyes/and in the dark they glow/Yes, we love our Daddy a very lot/Some men are mean, but he is not.

"Do my eyes really glow in the dark?" he asked.

Years later, when I was living in some inexplicable place like Binghamton, I bought him a shirt  that got lost in the mail. I don’t know if he even believed that I'd sent something, but it was a generic, cheap, and inadequate birthday gift anyway. I wonder why I was so meager in gifting the man who devoted his entire life to us and shelved his own dreams on our behalf? Could it be because I sensed my paltry offerings would be unworthy? Or was I just that self-absorbed?

Once, when I was floundering, as I so often was, he sent me a note (with a money order enclosed) and here, in his writing, are the closing words:

The last time I saw him I’d already said good-bye but I’d come back to help with some mess my mother had gotten herself into. I was being noble, I suppose, and my reward was to see him one last time, though I never imagined it would be the last. He pulled up the driveway in his work clothes, and seeing me there, he looked pleased and surprised, and said, Jeez. Then, because I was leaving -- always leaving -- he hugged me good-bye.

He would have been 99 today. It’s impossible to picture him at that age. He died at 67, only 8 years older than I am now.

Only one thing counts - who loves you, and how well.