My Dad

My father passed away Tuesday afternoon, after a 15-year battle with Alzheimer's disease. He was 81 years old.

Many of my friends either never met my dad, or met him after the disease had already robbed him of his mental faculties. Since most people will never know my real dad, I want to just introduce him to you briefly.

My father was intelligent, eloquent, hilarious, and had an infinite capacity to love. He wrote poetry for my mother frequently, throughout their marriage, and would delight in sneaking a paper with a little verse onto her plate before we sat down to eat, so she'd find it there and read it while we all watched. Most of these poems were about her upper arms, which he said were amazing and better than anyone else's in the entire world. OK, he was quirky, but he wrote great upper arm poems. He allayed my sister's childhood fears by telling her that everything she was afraid of had been sent to Bakersfield. This was a brilliant ruse, but proved a bit sketchy in later years when a detour on the way back to the bay area from southern California resulted in passing through Bakersfield. That must have been an interesting car ride (I was too small to remember, or perhaps not yet born). Dad turned a mostly blind eye when the neighbors tattled to him about my brother's poker parties (held in my parents' absences) and, in fact, didn't even lose it completely when it turned out that the ringleader behind a football betting pool at my dad's high school was (you guessed it) my brother. And, when my complete horse-craziness took me beyond rides around a ring on a pony, my dad learned how to ride a horse so that I could go trail riding. He also started emulating my way of dressing at the time and began a years-long habit of wearing cowboy boots and singing Merle Haggard songs.

He let me come down to his school in the summers and hang out with him, where he taught me Pedro (a great card game) and always let me play with him and the other administrators, even though I think I was probably only ten or twelve when he taught me to play. He taught me how to pluck a chicken, candle pinfeathers off a duck, bait a hook, shoot a gun (he earned a letter at Cal for marksmanship), read the TV Guide (remember those?) and reload shotgun shells. Every evening when he came home from work (school) at about 4:00, he and I would sit downstairs, watch Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas, and have a drink together. Yeah, you heard it right. He would have Jack Daniels or Jim Beam whiskey on the rocks, and he'd mix me a highball with a bit of whiskey (cheaper stuff) and a lot of 7-Up. I have known since I was eight years old that you NEVER mix Jack Daniels; it's sacrilegious.

Dad told me once that my mother was much more generous than he was, but he never really refused us anything we needed. And his generosity came through in other ways. I remember once asking him, while we were watching an old movie, if Sophia Loren was pretty. He said yes, she was. I asked if she was prettier than Mommy, and he said that NOBODY was prettier than Mommy. I asked him some tough questions. I remember I asked him once if he loved us more than he loved God. (Jeez, what a creepy kid I must have been). Rather than pop my bubble, he simply said that it was a really unfair question to ask ANY Catholic, so he wasn't going to answer it. He never complained that I collected pet frogs who would croak at night in the family room and force him to turn up the TV to be able to hear it properly. And he saved up his "mad money", a few dollars at a time, for years until he could buy my mother a huge console stereo one year. She still has it, and always will.

On weekend mornings, he and I would get up early and go to the bakery, and then when we came home he'd make eggs - the best. The only person who can cook eggs as well as my dad did is my son. At night, if we were sitting downstairs watching TV, and one of us simply gave him the puppy-dog eyes and professed a hankering for a fried egg sandwich, he'd get up and go upstairs and cook one up. My dad loved popsicles, and squid, and pickled pigs' feet, and pineapple upside-down cake, and anything my mom cooked. He could grill a steak like nobody's business, but his BBQd chicken was always blackened (hey, nobody's perfect!). He hated casseroles, and would never eat macaroni and cheese. Once in a blue moon when he would have a meeting that took him away at dinnertime, we would have mac 'n cheese or TV dinners (which he also eschewed). He drank his evening coffee from a glass (sometimes with a bit of brandy,sometimes not), but the morning coffee from a mug (sans brandy).

He would send us upstairs to get properly dressed before dinner if we had no shoes on or if my brother had on a white t-shirt (Dad said that was underwear). Going barefoot, ever, for any reason, was against the rules, as was wearing flip-flops or most sandals. No makeup was allowed until about age 16, and I got in trouble once for wearing nail polish. The only thing that saved me from serious trouble when I got my ears pierced at 15 was that my mom got hers done, too. My curfew was midnight until I got married.

Dad worked for years at a job that he ended up hating because of the political bullshit and dealing with parents and students who no longer had respect for the school system or the teachers. He retired at 55, as soon as he could, and spent the rest of his life with my mom in their house at
Clearlake, at one point writing the fishing column for the local paper there. He taught Spanish at a junior college nearby for as long as he was able to remember how, and he tutored people in Italian. He spoke a few languages, and it was very common to have a dinnertime conversation that revolved around the etymology of some word or other. He learned English as a child, when he started kindergarten; Italian was his first language. In the end, he spoke Italian more easily than English.

My dad used to call me "motor mouth," "machine gun mouth," and "The New York Times." He told me that, ultimately, my mouth would get me into trouble throughout my life (and he was right). He used to say to me often, "Come le fai lunga," which means (or would mean, if I knew how to spell it all correctly), "How you make it long," a constant reminder that brevity was NOT one of my strong suits. Clearly, he was right again, since this has gotten way too long....so I will stop here. Thanks for reading.