I wrote this nine years ago (27 May 2013) for a Facebook post, and since it came up as a Facebook memory today, I thought I’d make it public, with a few revisions. My dad has been gone for thirty years, which is now almost half of my life, which seems kind of weird.
Today we in the United States observe Memorial Day. But it’s also the twenty-first anniversary of my dad’s death. As I recall, he died on the actual Memorial Day and was buried on the observed holiday. Perhaps it was the other way around. It makes no difference, really, as the two occasions are forever intertwined in my mind. (I’ve since looked it up and found that the historical Memorial Day was the 30th of May.)
I have been scanning a lot of old photos lately. I have seen many of these over the years and some have been etched in my memory more so than have others. When I recently saw the above photo, it struck me as one I might not have seen before, or had not paid much attention to. I’m guessing that it was taken sometime between 1945 and 1952. There is no information on the back of the print, so, I don’t know if my oldest brother, Bob, had been born yet (1946); I don’t know if my parents were married at the time it was taken (17 January 1945); I don’t know where it was taken. My guess is Staten Island as it looks like the apartment above 262 Maine Avenue that I’ve seen in other photographs. Dad would have been as young as 24 or as old as 31. He has a cigarette in his hand — no doubt a Lucky Strike. He smoked cigarettes until I was in high school (I think), moved on to cigars for a time, then a pipe, and then he quit smoking altogether.
When I decided to post this particular picture today, I also decided to do major Photoshop repair. As I worked on it, I thought about what I would write to accompany the photo. A number of years ago, when I regularly blogged, I wrote about my dad on Memorial Day. This rankled my mom and one of my brothers as it spoke partly to the imperfect man we lived with, a man who — like so many people — mellowed as he got older. The point of what I’d written was to recognize the growth he’d made, and how I’d come to respect him more as I, too, got older.
I didn’t want to write the same thoughts today.
So, as I worked away at the photo, slowly, patiently, meticulously getting rid of as many imperfections to the image, it occurred to me that that is what we often do when it comes to the memory of those we lose once we’ve grown old enough to realize that it’s not easy being a human being. Our parents’ flaws, which we experience in our pre-adult years, become less important to us. We might not totally forget, we might not outright forgive, but we touch up the rips and folds and stains and wrinkles, and gloss them over so that the picture looks at least less flawed.
A few things about my dad, John Bell Power, that need little or no touching up…
• He loved to golf. He played semi-pro baseball and later, softball (neither of which I got the opportunity to witness), but when the weather cooperated, he golfed almost every Saturday and Sunday for as long as I can remember. If there was a course open, and it wasn’t pouring down rain, odds are that he was there. I caddied for him a couple of times, which meant I carried his bag. He didn’t ask for advice.
• He made the best popcorn. A little salt, a little Parmesan cheese shook up in doubled-up grocery bags. I have made my popcorn the same way until recently. As a vegan now, I use nutritional yeast instead of the cheese. If I have grocery bags on hand and I make more than will fill a bowl, I use the same shake-up technique. He also regularly cooked potatoes and eggs on the weekend. He mixed the eggs in with the potatoes — so neither scrambled nor sunny-side up — and with salt and pepper added for taste, they were a delicious treat of a breakfast.
• He shook our hands at night when we went to bed. No kissing for us boys.
• He would go to bed at 11:30 each work night and dutifully get up at 7:15, wash up and be out the door by 7:45. Also at some point each night, he would get up, get a glass of water, go to the bathroom and go back to bed. (This would be my undoing one early school morning.)
• Speaking of 11:30, he hated Ed McMahon and his cackling presence on the Tonight show (understandably… so did I), but he also hated Johnny Carson. Why? Because he told “dirty jokes.” This from a Navy man!
• For years, he drank cold black coffee, usually with dinner. Not iced coffee, cold coffee. As best as I can recall, he didn’t drink coffee in the morning before heading to work. Nor did he have breakfast before leaving for work... I don’t recall that he even had toast. In his later years, he drank coffee warmed up.
• He would whistle a lot. He also would sing fragments of songs, usually repeating the same fragment several times before either moving on to another song or getting immersed in television. One of his regulars was “Shave and a haircut, two bits.” Another was “I go from rags to riches…” (These two habits, by the way, I have picked up, but with different songs.)
• Speaking of television, while we usually watched the local CBS affiliate for our nightly news, he often would watch the station which had the best looking weather girl or anchorwoman. He’d often say something about how smart she was, or how good she was at her job, but we all knew better.
• When he swore, he usually started it with “Jesus Christ!” He never dropped the F-bomb around us.
• He constantly picked his fingers. He would sit watching a television show, all the while biting and digging at the dry, dead skin around his nails. My mom would regularly chide him: “John! Stop it!” It was such a habit that once, Penny, my wife at the time, unwittingly drew a caricature of him with his fingers in picking mode.
• He loved feeding the birds in our backyard. He would collect leftover cooking grease and make suet balls or cakes for them, and he would keep a pellet gun at the back window to chase off the ever-industrious and resourceful squirrels. For a year or so, he built birdfeeders and scratched “Crude Productions — Not Made In Korea” in the bottom of them.
• He loved helping people, whether it was shoveling the snow for the aging Clara Barrett across the street or working the beer booth at school festivals (OK, so, he might have had ulterior motives with that one) or looking at friends’ refrigerators or air conditioners (he was a refrigeration mechanic for Coca-Cola for twenty-five years).
• He helped to saved the lives of fourteen men in Boston Harbor during World War II when a munitions ship exploded. I recall that he or (more likely) my mother had mentioned it vaguely and with few details once or twice when we were growing up, but we didn’t know the circumstances. We didn’t know the harrowing circumstances. It was something he didn’t boast about, and it was only after he died that we discovered the details. (I’ve since written a bit about it.)
In the last few years, my mom’s health has been deteriorating due to dementia. Since, as I mentioned, I know so little about her, my dad or their history before I came along, I think about them a lot, trying to recall all the best parts while acknowledging (and accepting) that they were far from perfect parents or human beings. One day a year ago or so, I thought about how dad would often show affection for my mom, and mom would resist, as if it embarrassed her. He would approach her while she did something at the sink, for example, put his arms around her waist, and call her “sweetie” with a kind of silly affectation in his voice, and often a wide, cartoonish grin on his face. And I thought of my grandma Power, who once stayed with me and two of my brothers, Mike and Jim, when my mom’s brother got married in New York. I don’t recall that we did anything all that horrendous during that weekend, but apparently, grandma felt tortured and said, “Never again!”
Well, as I thought about these things, and as I thought about the fact that we never kissed my mom at night (nor she us), I had a flashback to Christmases and Easters and just about any other occasion that we might spend at the Breiers’ (my dad’s sister Mary Belle and her husband, Dick) home, where grandma lived. Every time, he would arrive and say, “How’re you doin’, Ma?” and bend over (she was very short) and give her a kiss. Upon leaving, he’d say, “We’ll see you later, Ma!” and give her another peck on the cheek.
None of us is perfect. But we all have a lot of perfect in us.
