My Dad

I cannot for the life of me remember a worse case of writer’s block than the one I have been suffering from all week long. A lot has happened since my last entry, but I have been completely unable to get my thoughts about any of it out in anything resembling a coherent fashion. In no particular order: I had to travel to North Philadelphia to undergo an independent medical exam for my car accident from January of ’04, I received word that the Rev. Dick Sutton succumbed in his battle against cancer (see previous blog entries), I attended the beef and beer fundraiser (Sunday afternoon) for my friend Keadren’s fiancé who passed away in December, and my father has been hospitalized since Tuesday with heart attack symptoms. He underwent catheterization surgery late Thursday afternoon and more tests are scheduled for today. Please keep my Dad in your prayers.

I have been trying to write this blog for the better part of a week. With all of the reports of people I know getting sick and/or dying, it has my mind reeling. You see, I have had a fear for as long as I can remember - that once I started to hold on a little more tightly to life, that I would die. Whether it be getting sick or having a horrible car accident, I have just had this feeling in my gut that once things started to go well for me it would spell the end of my time here on terra firma. This fear has caused me to become a bit of an annoying hypochondriac. My wife is ready to begin spousally abusing me over my constant vocal worrying over every headache as the onset of a brain tumor. My blog WAS going to be about how I would like to be remembered by my friends should something happen to me. However, I cannot seem to wrap my mind around writing it in such a way that is not too morbid-sounding. Every time I read over it I feel that it sounds too crybaby-ish. So, today I will write about my Dad – one of the most confusing people that I have ever encountered in my life.

The last handful of years have seen the final stages of my Dad’s transformation from one of the hardest working people I have ever known into an almost completely defeated man. Some people in the extended family have called my Dad “lazy”, but it is not an accurate description of a man who once worked 8-10 hours a day in a North Philadelphia sweat shop and then performed home-improvement contracting jobs at night and on the weekends. It is a description that does not properly encapsulate a person who came to this country from Torre Annunziatta, Italy with a year of architectural college under his belt and a job offer from a prominent German building firm – who was forced to take a menial job to help his family and never found a way back into the field he was so passionate about.

I am thankful to have had a Dad of European origin. I am thankful for his contributions towards my being a free thinker. I wish he spent more time doing things with us when we were little, and I wish he would have stepped in between the four of us and our Mom, who was a bit of a nutter when we were growing up. I wish he didn’t see reasoning with my Mom as such a lost cause – and I wish he didn’t retreat to his room almost every night after dinner. I am thankful for the catches we used to have in front of our house in Darby – where I would throw simulated games with him calling balls and strikes for me. I am thankful for the few times he came to watch me play little league in 4th and 5th grades, and I wish he made more of an effort to come see me play. I wish my Dad wasn’t so heavy-handed with us. I wish my Dad would have had more patience for being around little kids. I wish we didn’t have to flinch every time we walked near him or my Mom. I am thankful for the times he and I had together in the early mornings when I was in middle school – I attended the Masterman School at 17th and Spring Garden and had to wake up well before dawn to get ready to take Septa from Overbrook into downtown. I still hold a grudge against my Dad for not teaching me Italian. I wish my Dad was as nice to his family as we was to everyone else he encountered – I cannot tell you how upset it used to make me when people would say “you are SO lucky to have Sal as your Dad!”. I remember wanting to scream at them at the top of my lungs – “he isn’t like this at home!”. I used to love watching World Cup soccer games with my Dad. We rooted like crazy for Italy every four years – they won it all in 1982, and we watched helplessly as they were seemingly eliminated on penalty kicks every Cup thereafter. My Dad loved teaching me geography as a kid. I used to love watching him beam at me when I would pass his quizzes by pointing out different countries in the atlas. I wish my Dad would have given me some kind of guidance – ANY kind of guidance as far as what adult life would hold for me. I am thankful that my Dad taught me the importance of thinking for myself, and to not swallow whole the government propaganda machine. I wish my Dad (and Mom) did more to focus the four of us on our educations – as it is, I am the only one of the kids to graduate high school and I needed 5 years to do it.

Nowadays, I just find myself wishing that my parents had even the most minute ability to plan ahead. My Dad has been out of work for a couple of months. My parents have no life insurance. They have no will. They are in the process of adopting my niece (which is an incredible thing for them to do), but have nothing in place to secure their future, or hers. My Dad has gotten weird as he has gotten older. They both smoke like chimneys and I highly doubt that even this second heart episode will lead him to quit. My parents are such simple people, and they completely fail to grasp the big picture. They live day-to-day, cigarette-to-cigarette. It saddens me a great deal and adds a ridiculous amount of stress to my life. Sometimes I feel as though I care about their futures and well-being more than they do. That being said, my Mom and Dad have been great around the times of my wedding and when The Man Zachary was born – my Dad making sure he videotaped everything he could.My Dad has been worn down by the system – and by poor decisions he has made along the way. After being burned (literally) in a workplace accident and being screwed out of any workmans’ comp benefits he swore he would never work for anyone else again. After he healed, he began successfully contracting on his own and ran a successful pool hall in the space under his house in Philly. As the neighborhood deteriorated, so did the businesses – and his drive.

My Dad has maddening swings from thoughtful and caring to completely irresponsible. He is intelligent, yet makes some of the poorest decisions a man can make. But, he is my Dad…and if I were to lose him now it would hurt. There is still a lot that I would like to do with him, most notably traveling to Italy with him so he can show me his hometown. It’s no more than a pipe dream for me right now, but if I ever had the means it would be a dream trip for me – something I have wanted to do since I was a small child. For that to happen though, I will continue to harp on my Dad to start making better decisions – and to start taking better care of himself. I have no doubt that it will continue to be an uphill climb. But, I love my Dad - and where a lot of people in my position would just leave their parents to it, my conscience will not let me. So, wish me luck in trying to get through to him.

[Currently Listening: I Dik Dik – “Viaggio Di Un Poeta”]