Remembering My Father

With Father’s Day coming up I find myself thinking about my own father who died 34 years ago. He is very much alive in me, still, as I suspect he is in my three daughters.

If Google had been around in his lifetime I doubt if his name would have registered on it at all. The mark he left on people was something almost beyond measure or even articulation. His achievement was not of the sort that could be enumerated by membership or citation. He won no medals, wrote nothing quotable nor did he achieve immortality through any self-promotion of his name.

Yet he remains an enduring model for me of how to be in this world; deliberate, quiet, almost imperturbable, enabling and attentive; all qualities toward which I can only aspire.

I never knew my father to raise his voice. His displeasure was conveyed through his eyes and a furrowed brow. His instinct was to resolve differences through empathetic listening. He seemed to know in his bones when to push me out the door and when to pull me back in or at least let me know the door was always open and he’d be there with a listening ear. It’s called trust. He trusted me so that, over time, I could trust myself.

He was not a big reader. In fact he read so slowly that my mother had to tutor him to get his high school diploma in order to be accepted into Columbia School of Pharmacy which was, at that time, a two year course. The only books we had in our house were those left behind by students in the private school across from his drugstore.

With all his equanimity and impulse toward reconciliation he held some radical convictions born out of compassion. His politics was an extension of this caring. I imagined him with his mortar and pestle crushing fascists into dust.

His own childhood provides no paradigm for his evolved parenting. His mother died in childbirth and his father was a hopelessly impoverished alcoholic. My father was handed over to an uncle who raised him also in much-reduced circumstances. My grandfather was so out-to-lunch he went on to re-marry and have four more children all of whom were brought up in an orphanage. In his inebriated haze he named two of his sons, Samuel. One of them was my father. My Dad, Sam, loved his brother, Sam.

My father was a man who lived his days unheralded but beloved, famous in the circle of family and friends for those moments that halted time. His presence, alone, could settle your own agitated life and you knew the world was safe enough to push on through.

Scrimmage

An article in the newspaper last week told of an autistic teenager who correctly picked the first 24 winners in the NCAA basketball tournament against odds of 30 million to one.

He reminded me of me.

In 1949, when I knew everything, I was also a part-time sports savant. I became big news in one particular newspaper when I predicted 18 out of 20 college football games one weekend. Forest Hills Prognosticator, the headline shouted.

I walked around beaming like Nostradamus for week or two but couldn't talk about it or show anyone. Why?, I hear you ask.

Of the dozen newspapers in New York City I had to choose the Communist Party's one, The Daily Worker. This was no coincidence.Along with the N.Y. Times (A.M.) and Post (PM) the Daily Worker was frequently read under our roof. And, yes, they had a Sports section in which the achievements of Black athletes was regularly celebrated. Maybe they thought overtime meant time and a half, as if I was to lead workers out of the class struggle.

My father was a quiet, self-contained man who radiated equanimity and abhorred confrontation. He was also among the minions whose compassion for the down-trodden resulted in his joining the Communist Party. He had no violence in him, no conspiracies. He was incapable of overthrowing anything, including my mother.

Politics and sports can not be separated. Certainly not in those days. I knew it then but never expected the two to converge the way they did. Who knew when I nailed Fordham over Syracuse and other upsets I would open a page in the FBI files.

Two of them, suited, clean and after-shaved came knocking on our door one day. Was it my breadcrumbs that lead them here? If they knew about my football feat it was because half the readers of the paper were FBI agents probably reporting on each other.

My father didn't give an inch in that scrimmage. He stiffened like a goal line stand and wouldn't let them cross, closing the door on their badges. They did an end run, went to his boss and had him fired but my father seemed taller after that day. His silence was his spine.