Incongruence

Just when I finish describing my father as deliberate and risk-averse I‘m remembering how he would go off, now and then, to bet on the horses at Roosevelt Raceway where they ran the harness-racing. If he was lucky his two-buck bets paid for the Long Island railroad fare to get him home.  

He was a man of enormous equanimity, a mild-mannered pharmacist who was quick removing a cinder in an eye but otherwise weighed everything as over a torsion scale tapping powder on one side and a scruple or grain on the other.

He could settle an agitated crowd by his demeanor alone. One August night a million gnats gathered on the storefront of his pharmacy covering the Ex-Lax sign and window display of empty pinned boxes. To my eight-year-old eyes it seemed like an invasion out of a comic book. He was a shaman with an assurance on his face which sent the neighborhood dozens home unafraid of an alien landing.

I think of the garden of herbs whose scent he carried on his body as if some healing tonic was brewing in his coat pockets.

I never saw his temper erupt yet he would grind fascists to dust (as I imagined) in his Wedgewood mortar and pestle. My father who swallowed his vehemence was the model of a law-abiding citizen, so I thought.

Seventy years later I was so glad to be proved wrong. Among old photos and letters, was an official document from the court citing his violation of the Volstead Act, better known as Prohibition. Evidently, he had been cited for dispensing four ounces of ethyl alcohol without a prescription.

Before repeal of that law pharmacists could legally fill prescriptions for absolute alcohol for medicinal purposes, of course. He must have defied that stipulation on one occasion. For that I applaud.

In the broader sense I take it to mean we cannot wrap up a person as someone to be fully known. There are always parts dangling out that don’t fit. Deal with that, AI.