Prompted by Father's Day, I wrote this piece, not because I thought anyone would ever print it, but because I thought it’d be good therapy for me when someone asked what lesson I learned from my father. It was time to stand up and spit it out or forever hold my peace.
The fact is that, if I learned anything from my honest, Uneducated, Big-Hearted, Unambitious, Fun-Loving, Non-Competitive, Russian-born and Brooklyn-settled, Couldn’t-make-a-living-for-the-life-of-him, Too-good, Too-soft and Too-generous old man…it was that Honest, Soft, Generous, Good-hearted guys come in last. That’s what my father did till his dying day;
And that’s because he never made it in the Savvy-Status achievement department. So he came in last, everywhere. And all those other beautiful human things he had poets rhapsodize about were lost to a society that looks rather to the marketplace for its heroes. Oh sure, today….the family, the grown-up kids sit around and savor the touching, tender memories of “Uncle Jack.” Above all the ultimate movers and shakers we had in our nest (including a mayor of New York), they go down the old familiar “Uncle Jack" list again – “Warm” and “Funny” and “Gentle” …and…the truth? I get mad. I just get MAD.
Where was this gushing Nobel Prize Committee when Mr. Goodwrench was ALIVE?? There was no applause then, not for the hapless auto mechanic who couldn’t make the family bills most of the time. No fan clubs then, or support groups. It was only “poor Jack.” It even trickled down to us, his own kids. And it shouldn’t have.
He should’ve been Buck Rogers and Captain America to us, no matter WHAT he earned. But he wasn’t. He was a sweet, easy, good-time loser who was always there, like that little couch pillow nobody used with the faded Mark Twain adage nobody reads anymore.
My more idealistic wife emphatically disagrees with me on this one. She contends that he, my father, had the ULTIMATE gift; You know, the “pure,” “proud,” “spiritual” rap – “inheritors of the earth” and all that. And I say POPPYCOCK (among other things). My father had some of the goods at the PTA and none at the BOA – Period.
Strangely, my brother himself disagrees – Did I say “disagrees”? He was “ENRAGED” when he read this. “You got it all wrong,” he screamed. “That’s the way YOU saw it. That’s not the way it was. “
And two things strike me when I run this peculiar tirade over in my head. One – how could we both have lived with the same father and come up with such diametric remembrances? And Two – something amiss there somewhere, when the man gets emotional about what would seem to be a relatively academic observation of a common relative, No? Could it be I got too close to something too deep and too raw and too unresolved??
Now I blame nothing and no-one for my father’s lowly social station. As for the “impatience” I feel for the Monday Morning Cheerleaders who gather and dribble his virtues… well, I’m not really sure I understand that. Maybe it’s part of the general anger I’ve come to know I feel toward HIM, angel that he was, for letting them swarm over him and devour him, for not putting up more of a fight, and finally, for checking out too early and too quickly just when my glory boat was so close to home.
SO…you ask what lesson I may’ve learned from my father (now that you know him) and I tell you I learned one – not by any one-to-one “teaching” my father would’ve loved to have imparted, but by the graphic, living scenario the ubiquitous world bolted around my father every day all those early years I sat there and watched. I learned THE PRACTICAL LESSON OF LIFE IN AMERICA, maybe THE LESSON OF THE WORLD:
Be Good and Warm and Sweet and Generous and all those other Hallmark favorites my father was…but BE them SECOND…NEXT…as a BACK-UP…in the wings, on hold, in the trunk, at your cousins…(if at all)…
FIRST? Be Successful.
FIRST? Be Accomplished.
Find something you do better than anyone else and FIRST, be a WINNER FIRST, be all those Dow Jones things MY father WASN”T.
It may not cover ALL your bases in the big game everybody’s in down here, but it’ll sure as hell get you off the street and through the gate and out of the locker room and off the Bull Pen and right there in that juicy kick-off place at bat.
Maybe my brother and my wife will give me that this June 18.