I have loved three men in my life, not counting my father, my uncle, and my god-father, not to mention the mad crushes I had on various male teachers who I idolized, some of whom were decidedly gay and all highly intellectual. Let me start this again.
I have been in love with three men; two of these men I married and one I spent three years with in my late 40's. As I suppose is the way with all love affairs that do not last forever, each man appeared to me to be someone rather different from the person he really was. That is not to say all three were terrible people, because that is simply untrue, but it is clear to me none of them, in the end, was the right one for me. Often I think about the men who have been a notable part of my life, the men who came long before anyone stole my heart, and how they set the stage for the way in which I view myself and the qualities I have wanted to find in a mate - the ever elusive man of my dreams. Thus far I am zero for three. However, for the life of me I cannot understand why.
My father is foremost in my mind, as he is one of the most influential people in my life although he has been dead 13 years now. So much has happened to me in those 13 years. In fact, I would say some of the most signifiant experiences of my life have happened without him here to help me navigate. I always turned to my father for advice whenever anything difficult came my way. He was good at listening and helping me to parse out what was really important and was able to keep a steady head when I was freaking out with anxiety and fear. He was also the buffer between my mother and me, but that is another story for another time.
He was the kind of person everyone loved, adored and respected, men and women alike, although he certainly was feared by some. Mostly I think people feared not measuring up to what they thought his expectations were. He held himself to such a high standard in every way, but I do not think he always expected others to be like him.
When people talk about him they recall his gift for story-telling, the way “he filled a house rather than a room”, his warm and gregarious nature, his firm hand-shake, his booming laugh, his always stylish attire, his beautiful and impecable manners and his lightening quick temper. I remember him the same, but would add he had a rather salty tongue. I once asked him why he swore so much. I guess he learned it working on the oil rigs in Texas and when he was a soldier in basic training during World War II. It had become such an ingrained part of his own vernacular, he never really noticed how much he cursed. I do not remember him saying anything foul, but he did say God-damn-it and son-of-a-bitch an awful lot in his every day communications. I am not sure I have heard anyone since swear with such fluidity without being foul mouthed and trashy, but those were two things he never was.
My father was an avid reader of history…American and European, ancient to modern. He especially enjoyed reading the arduous histories of war and the battles fought. He was the person who read to me. I have no memory of my mother ever reading to me, although she read every night before turning out her light. My father was the one who read me the ancient myths of Rome and Greece, as well as the fairy tales from my fat cream-colored book of The Brothers Grimm. (Snow White and Rose Red was my favorite, in case you are wondering.) He was also endlessly quoting beautiful, as well as saucy, poetry and taking me outside to point out the various constellations in the night sky, relating them back to the myths. I regret I can no longer hear in my head the colors and textures of his beautiful speaking voice. I think he could have had a career in radio or as a voice-over artist. His voice enveloped you and made you instantly feel at home, at ease, at peace.
My father is the reason I started writing. When I was but five years old, he would encourage me to make up little rhyming poems by sharing with me the ones, some short and sweet and others quite long and hilarious, he wrote on a regular basis. (My parents' group of friends were very big on composing poems to read at the parties which celebrated each other's birthdays, anniversaries, travels abroad, etc. They were a very lively and artist bunch and all of that energy and creativity were a part of our own every day lives growing up.) The first poem I remember writing was "every night the crickets snore, right beside my bedroom door. i can hear them when they go crick, crick, crick." Nothing to stop the presses, but his enjoyment of my expression was enough to make me believe I could be a poet.
He was a smart man, but not exactly what I would call an intellectual, although he pursued intellectual growth constantly. I think he spoke eloquently because he read so much during his lifetime, and perhaps because of this he ordered my siblings and me to read all the classics of childhood and young adulthood. I think he felt the stories would encourage us to dream big and reach beyond our safe little affluent world to explore and open our minds. It was not uncommon for us to have lively discussions about Gulliver's Travels, Tom Sawyer or The Last of the Mohicans around the dinner table, just as the war and watergate were a part of our dinner table conversations. This was the 1970's.
He wrote voraciously – filling a notebook with his favorite quotations and notes about what he read, and he wrote letters constantly; letters-to-the-editor of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc., as well as wonderfully engaging letters to his friends and family on a regular basis. Even when he was away on a trip, for business or pleasure, he wrote letters and post cards. He was also a big time record keeper. Not only did he keep each and every letter he received in a file bearing the sender’s name, but he either typed his letters in triplicate or made Xeroxed copies of his handwritten response and filed it away with the letter to which he was responding, and all of these he kept organized in one of several tall fire-proof filing cabinets in the corner of his dressing room/study on the second floor of our home and against the wall in his office downtown. Another peculiarity of his was to keep a hard-bound Marion Webster dictionary in nearly every room in the house, including his bathroom.
He was strong, athletic and manly but approachable and trustworthy. He had a reputation for being someone "who’s word was his word.” He was a diligent hard worker, who always did as much, if not more, than those around him. All my life we had “people who worked for us” and I do not recall once my father sitting around while any one of them took care of us, his land, our home or our grounds. He was a very physical person, who was always working with the horses, building fences, moving, branding or inoculating the cattle, mowing the lawn, hauling dirt, planting trees, or helping mother weed the garden and move furniture – she was forever rearranging the house. He was reliable, ready and willing to do whatever needed to be done. Because of these and many other qualities, it is accurate to say people were drawn to him.
My father loved music and took particular pride when my mother played the piano, as she was classically trained and could easily have enjoyed a career concertizing. He had a very sweetly sad baritone, with little to no range, and spent many hours standing behind my mother singing with her the “popular” composers of their day – Porter, Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, and Hammerstein. Their song was “Love Affair” from the original movie An Affair to Remember. They were so cute singing together, a quiet tenderness between them, and I remember thinking one day I will have someone to watch over me and sing with me, just like my dad.
He was undeniably handsome as a young man and he aged pretty well. Standing six feet he was tall, although the “runt of the litter” within his family of seemingly giant men and women. In his high school year book he is referred to as "Adonis, the body beautiful" and was a very good athlete through college. With all of these gifts, he was not an arrogant man. He certainly was possessed of a healthy ego, but I do not believe anyone who knew him would describe him as ego driven.
While television was not loved by my parents, my father called it the idiot box, we watched The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie together each week and often as the show closed I would see him wipe a few tears from his eyes. He had such a tender heart and loved stories of family. In my memory he was a lot like Pa Walton and Pa Ingalls - strict, strong and hard working, but equally loving and accepting of his children.
Some important lessons I learned from my father were never forget where you came from and while money and professional success could help to ease your every day burdens, it would be your family and friends who would give your life real meaning. My father worked extraordinarily hard to be successful in his profession and he was, but his family was more important to him than anything else. He was home for dinner every night and while he did work in the evenings, and sometimes on weekends, he did this at home and was available to us. I've often wondered if he would have put his family formost in his life if he had been born in the last 50 or 60 years and had to deal with the terrific high cost of living and raising a family in this day and age. It seems so hard to live a life of integrity now, but I like to believe he would remain someone who was true to himself, even if he had to navigate the world today.
Along with my father's somewhat corse language and quick temper, his other less stirling quality was (what I now think of as ) a borderline obsessive-compulsive personality. He kept personal and business records in triplicate (which caused no end of frustration for my mother who has carried out a portion of his business since he died and the amount of records has been overwhelming and far too time consuming for someone who is also highly organized, but far more efficient) and had drawers specially built-in to his dressing room so he could have one drawer for his solid colored socks, one for his patterned socks (having both a summer island cotton and a winter fine wool collection, which we would switch out twice a year), one drawer for his solid boxers, one for his tartan boxers and another for his handkerchiefs (which he carried in his back pocket every day - bandana styles in various color combos for casual and beautiful Irish linen ones for dress), along with other drawers for his golf shirts and shorts. Each particular piece of clothing was folded in a certain way, but he never imposed that upon anyone else who might do his laundry. I watched him quietly refold his clothes so they would fit, as he preferred them, into each drawer.
There were drawers in his desk and credenza, both at home and at his office, arranged in obsessive detail with old cigar boxes of varying sizes to hold his Pilot felt-tipped pens (yes, one box for each color: red, blue and black), mechanical pencils, collection of high-end colored pencils (which he used for the map work required in his profession), rubber bands, tape, a stirling silver letter opener and a pair of stirling silver desk scissors, etc.
He knew exactly how many of every item was in each box and had arranged them in a way as to know immediately if someone had borrowed something and had either neglected to return it or had not replaced it in the correct spot. I know it sounds as if I am exaggerating, but believe me this is the truth. Now that I am older I realize it was rather whacky, but at the time it was just the way he was. He never punish us for touching his stuff, but he did not like it if we did so without his permission and we were read the riot act if we did, or at least I was because I am pretty certain none of my siblings really cared about any of the stuff in his desk drawers.
My father had beautiful shoes which he would polish once a week, even if they had been worn just once. One of my favorite things was to sit on the floor of his dressing room while he sat in one of his leather arm chairs, pulled out his wooden polishing box and went to work meticulously caring for his shoes. The smell of the polish punctuated the air sharply and the whisking of the brushes often went in time with the music of Glenn Miller, Petula Clark or Vikki Carr, which he played on his 8-track tape player. This ritual usually took place on Saturday afternoons. Some times he would listen to a news program on the ancient large metal AM radio that has belonged to his mother.
He kept a small dorm size refrigerator in his dressing room/study to house his secret stash of small-sized glass bottles of coca-cola, bags of his favorite miniature candy bars (milky way, snickers, butterfingers) and often a box of nutty buddy ice cream cones. My mother was not big on junk food, although she baked beautiful cakes and delicious cookies for our dessert each night. Sweets were limited and closely watched, so in order to have the things he liked when he wanted them (because you can never trust children not to eat candy and ice cream if it is there), he would keep his own stash in his little frig and I may have been the only person who felt it was my place to go in and swipe one or two candies from time to time. He never got mad as long as I did not take the last of anything.
My father loved me without question. He was not a comparative person, so I never felt I did not measure up to my older siblings or smarter friends. I certainly pissed him off regularly and he expressed disappointment plenty of times when I did something stupid and foolish, but I never felt I was not good enough or lacked anything in the way of brains, talent or beauty. In fact, through my father’s eyes I learned I was incomparably beautiful and while that did not jibe at all with the way my peers saw me, it certainly helped to ease the bitter sting of adolescence and the teen-age years.
There was no pretense with him. He had grown up with tremendous advantage and those who came before him were remarkable people. He was surrounded by gifted intellects and creativity, and an endless bounty of love and acceptance was poured out over him during his formative years. All this in turn made him kind and caring toward others, empathetic, eager to help in whatever way he could, and able to shower upon his youngest child endless unconditional love and encouragement, even in the midst of telling me what I was doing was not acceptable and I could make much better choices.
He was not perfect and we certainly argued often and loudly, but my father was not a grudge holder and he apologized when he knew he was wrong. I remember that about him, since others in my life have either been unable to apologize or have always had an excuse as to why they have done or said something unkind or flat out wrong.
I miss him still and wish he were here to know my children and for them to know him. Their lives would have been enriched, and he would have felt blessed. My life certainly would have been different in some ways if he had been here, but then I would not be who I am today if certain things had not happened to me and I had not been left to figure it out on my own. As much as I wish he were still here, it is impossible to know which path would have been better for me. If it is at all possible, I hope he has some view into where I am and how I got here, and I fervently hope he is proud.
