This is a photo of my Dad from World War II. He's the middle one in the front row with his pipe in his mouth. They were in Burma, but whenever I look at this picture, I think they are in Egypt in front of the pyramids.
He had finished two years at Lehigh in engineering when he enlisted in the army. He was in the Radio Corps. He was never injured, but he did get malaria in Burma. He came home after five years, but didn't get to finish his college degree because his Dad had died and he needed to get a job to help support his mother.
Funny how you can remember a parent's handwriting. How just looking at it brings back your Dad with as much vividness as if he was speaking to you. The smell of his pipe, the checks he kept in the desk drawer in the living room. His curly salt and pepper hair. The way he belly laughed when he watched Johnny Carson or cartoons with us.
He rarely said anything about the war to us. I learned more about his experiences there when I began dating Mr. Pom and my Dad would talk to him, the son he never had. I can't imagine what it was like to be gone 5 years from your family. To spend 5 Christmases away, 5 birthdays, and then to be told that your father had died suddenly and you would never see him again. He said that when his Dad died, he had a dream that night that his father had come to see him in the war. The next day he learned that his father had died.
My Dad passed away twenty years ago tomorrow. He died within 3 months of being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For a long time, I remembered each and every moment of those three agonizing months.
I've willed it to become a blur now. I'd rather remember the cloud of smoke that wreathed around his head and billowed through the living room every night after dinner when he read the paper in the green chair in the corner. I'd rather remember him showing me his arthritic hands and his resignation that he couldn't play golf anymore. I'd rather remember the typerwriter he gave me when I graduated college, and seeing him all snazzy in a blue suit and a red tie. I still remember and always will how never got angry but told the doctor that he'd just like to go home and be with his family awhile longer.
I make sure I talk to my kids about my Dad. I feel as though the two older ones have a pretty good memory of his presence and that the youngest has heard enough and seen enough photos that he is in some way a part of her heritage. The only grandchildren he knew were The Princess and Mystery Man. He did have the pleasure, however, of finding out in the last weeks that sister #4 was pregnant with her firstborn. And then her second born, her son, was born on my Dad's birthday, which no one will ever convince was not divine planning.
My Dad is always on my mind. I doubt a day goes by that something doesn't remind me of him. It gets me to thinking about love and loss and long term relationships. They were married 44 years on November 3rd and he died on November 7th. Thirteen days later was our 10th wedding anniversary. And now here we are at our 30th and what seemed like an unachievable lifetime of 44 years is only a short 14 years away for us. Time wraps us around us like a top and sends us spinning faster than our futures can keep up with.
In honor of my Dad, we will have an Italian Sunday afternoon dinner. I took to the kitchen this morning. It seems like whenever fall comes, and I take to the kitchen as I chop and stir and fry and bake, I have a cadre of people looking over my shoulder. My Aunt Anita is telling me not to add too much breadcrumb to the meatballs or they'll be tough. My mother's mother is reminding me to be careful with a pot full of oil or I'll burn myself like she did when the pan caught on fire. When my kitchen seems impossibly small, my great aunt Gussie pokes me in the side and reminds me of the tiny kitchen where she turned out one holiday meal after another.
I browned a loin of pork and an eye round of beef in olive oil, salt, and pepper. I opened 4 cans of imported tomato puree and two of diced tomatoes, threw in two cloves of garlic, more salt and pepper, a little nutmeg and cinnamon, and a dollop of red wine. I mixed ground beef, seasoned breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, rosemary, and parmesan cheese, and made about 48 meatballs and fried them the old fashioned way. It all went into the tomato sauce and when the house filled with the aroma of the gravy, I found the heel of some Italian bread and dipped it in the gravy and tasted about a thousand meals of my life in that red, savory, warm mouthful.
Micalangela and Mystery Man came home for the weekend. After I made the gravy and lasagna and washed the pots and pans, I took out the griddle and whipped up some pumpkin pancakes and breakfast sausage. (I can manage to cook more on a Saturday or Sunday morning then I do in a week. ) Vampire Weekend was blasting from the Ipod player. Mr. Pom was reading the Times, and The Princess was fixing a bagel. I took silly pictures of MM eating with aviator sunglasses on and Micalangela recounted all the costumes worn to the Halloween party at school.
After we ate, I sat in the art room and painted a bunch of canvases for an Christmas art fair. As I painted and looked out at the sun on the last scarlet leaves of the dogwood by the garage, I reasoned that I had lived the life I had meant to live. I remembered back when I only had the two oldest and worked part time. On my days' off, I'd make a big pot of something that could simmer all day and I would drag the sewing machine into the dining room and work on a quilt where I could watch the kids play inside or out.
One day my next door neighbor came over with her kid. Younger, prettier, she watched me cook, offer her a cup of tea, and baste a quilt on the table. In exasperation at her own mixed emotions over parenting, she said with some impatience, "You're so domestic!" I still remember it. I was embarassed at my own contentment at the time. But I'm not anymore. Content was how I felt this morning as the kids crowded in to my art room and showed me You Tube videos. I felt as if I was living exactly the life I was meant to live and I was living exactly in the center of where I was meant to be.
Tomorrow we will jam ourselves into my dining room. The Empress will preside, matriarch by default on my father's side now. Two of his nephews, my cousins, will be here along with three of my sisters, two brothers in law and five of the grandchildren. Hopefully the dogs will not steal anyone's meatballs and no one will need to use the bathroom during the meal or 16 people will have to be climbed over. We won't ask people to go around the table and tell the memories we have about him. We are criers and I don't want a dining room full of sobbing people. But by day's end, everyone will have spoken of him and looked at photos and shook their heads that it could be twenty years since we last heard him laugh or tried to read the comics after he cleaned his pip stem on it or listened to him complain that nobody filled the ice trays as he made his evening martini before dinner.
I will sit next to my mother so she can hear me more easily. I will measure the thirty years between her and I and myself and The Princess. I will project into the future and wonder if I will be here for The Princess when she is 55 and if she will be hosting a dinner for us or in memory of us.
Either way, I will be standing over her shoulder, poking her in the ribs if she forgets to add the parmesan to the ground beef or doesn't have any red wine on hand to add to the sauce. I'll watch her haul out the table leaves, untangle the legs of the folding chairs in the closet, hunt for the good cloth, and hope nobody notices paper napkins instead of cloth cause there was no time to iron.
Always remember, there is nothing worth sharing
Like the love that let us share our name
-Avett Brothers