No more Father's Days

Father's Day 2024

My father has been dead for over two years. I’ve been in Texas for nearly two.

When I arrived in Texas, I had several dreams that were so vivid and real, I thought I was truly awake. And upon waking, I 100% thought my father was still alive for several minutes.

So that was disorienting.

They’ve stopped now. And I don’t know whether or not I miss having that feeling.

And since father’s day is today, I figured I should discuss him a little.

In the long run, my father was lucky that he turned into a functional, sane human being. His mother, at 17, left high school and married a World War II vet who just got off the PT boat coming back from Europe (imagine coming back across the Atlantic in a speed boat and you get the idea). Dad’s grandmother never left the house she grew up in… so my grandfather moved in with his in-laws. That brownstone in Maspeth, Queens was built new when my great grandparents moved in, and only one family lived in that brownstone for 90 years.

Dad grew up in an abusive household—some of it was physical abusive, but mostly it was emotional. Dad’s father was a drunk who abandoned the household when Dad was 17. Dad’s mother was a narcissist and a sociopath who viewed him as a toy to play dress-up with— and she’d buy clothing that was too small for him, because “her little baby would lose the weight.” He never did.

Dad’s major survival tool was reading. The family library currently contains a one-volume Complete Sherlock Holmes that he received at Christmas when he was 10. As he put it, books have been better friends to him than most people. Honestly, I just thought it meant Dad had met people.

Living with his parents gave Dad ulcers when he was 8 year’s old. And living with only his mother continued the ulcer development. Since children didn’t know from ulcers, he interpreted that pain as hunger, and became fatter … which gave him diabetes… which eventually killed him.

Huh. I guess the old bitch really did help kill him in the end.

Anyway…

The closest Dad had to a father was actually his grandfather, whose body was already failing him— arthritis so bad, morphine was needed. So Dad was the product of one of the first broken homes, really. He didn’t have a sport to get into, no father to toss the ball with, or fix cars with. IE: The things that are considered traditional to do with one’s father.

Dad’s mother didn’t like boys. She wanted a little girl that she could play dress-up with, like a living doll. A few years before her husband left her (she got an annulment based on the fact that if he wanted to be a teenager again at 40, he probably didn't have the maturity to commit to marriage when he was in his early 20s) Dad’s mother adopted the little girl she always wanted.

[This timeline might be wrong— my grandmother told this story framing my father as six. My father gave me the impression he was a teen. So the accuracy of the dates may vary.]

Dad’s mother liked her things. To get even a little distance from her (the front room of the brownstone, set up as a solo apartment), he bought her a dinette set. It was pretty and shiny. She used it exactly once, but it bought him space.

Dad hid. He hid in books. He hid in music (listening to, playing piano, and singing). He hid inside his own brain, which was already more interesting than the world around him. He spent Christmas when he was 10 years old reading the aforementioned collected Sherlock Holmes.

Dad originally wanted to be a doctor, but when he graduated with his degree in biology, he concluded he didn’t have the grades. Dad’s solution was to go with where his grades were—philosophy. Dad followed the career path into academia. His only goal was to “get his union card” and a paycheck to live off of. He would become a Thomist philosophy and end up with professor Sydney Hook, secular humanist, as one of his professors.

Despite being a PhD in philosophy, dad always ended up as an administrator as well as a professor. First he worked at Caldwell College in New Jersey, which helped me identify where The Sopranos took place. After a decade, they fired him (his tenure was with the department, not the college… so they closed the department).

As implied above, Dad grew up in the family brownstone and had to bribe his way into a different apartment in the same building. He basically had a front room, which enabled him to go in and out at will. He drove from where he lived in Maspeth Queens to teach in Cauldwell, NJ, to take PhD classes at New York University. Put that through the Maps app some time, and you get the idea.

In the middle of this, in 1975, my father got sucked into a job in Bed-Sty, Brooklyn. One of his classmates from his masters degrees was a Catholic priest. Somehow, this turned into my father becoming an assistant pastor.

It later turned into a novel where a PhD gets highjacked by a priest to work as an assistant pastor, and the local jerk gets killed.

Yes, I helped my father get that one polished and published.

He didn’t like any of the textbooks, so he wrote his own … which I also helped polish for him, in later editions.

My father married in 1977, and ended up being employed by Saint John’s University — where he went for his BA, and his MA, where he met mom, and where half of my family went… etc.

Saint John’s University was very much a family disease.

For the first decade of my life, and beyond, Dad’s schedule made him come home at 7:30 at night. So he wasn’t around a lot until the middle of high school.

So if there are gaps in my ability to act like a person, that is in part because my father had similar gaps.

I’ve told the story of how he walked up to Alec Baldwin and told him that “Adam is my favorite Baldwin Brother.” Alex sighed and said “I get that a lot.” (The film It’s Complicated was partially filmed on Saint John’s campus. My father’s favorite parking space became the location for the Kraft tent for three or four days. It became his shortcut to the office. If you want to know how bad filming is: they filmed there to shoot a graduation scene, using the graduation setup already established for SJU. All 30 seconds made it into the film.)

My father liked some food with his salt. In the local deli, he asked for salty lox. The guy behind the counter expressed disbelief. Three times. My father finally burst out, “Yes, I mean salty lox! Do I look like a goy to you?” That ended the discussion. Yes, he was Catholic, but he went to school in Crown Heights.

But Dad gave me quite a bit. He encouraged my writing, and read everything I had written from the time I was 16 until the day he died. Dad made omelets every Sunday that were good enough I wanted to recreate them, and I ended up cooking 75% of the household meals since I was 16 (my mother had had surgery and my sister was studying abroad for a semester), and now I cook … almost all the meals.

Dad gave me love, and he gave me books, which are very much the same thing.

And other stuff.

The only annoying thing is that Dad said he was going to come with me to Texas, and then reread all my books. But he died before that could happen. Hell, he even died before Blaine Pardoe could tap me to work in Land & Sea.

But as I said, given everything Dad went through, he came out reasonably sane and normal. He clothed and sheltered those who needed it. He made certain to give at least 10% of his annual salary away each year.

Despite everything that happened to Dad growing up, he ended up doing the best he could with what he had, and that’s all any of us can hope to do, now isn’t it?

But this will be my last post about my father. I can’t do this anymore. Every post I do just rips off the scar tissue, and I’m a bit of a mess.

I guess it beats marketing, but still…

Goodbye, dad.