My Dad was typical of a lot of men of his era.
He was a truly good man, quiet, frugal and conservative.
He attended Church every Sunday, but I never heard him sing.
I know he prayed every day, but I never heard him pray.
I know he loved me, but it wasn't a hugs and kisses kind of love. He never said "I love you."
He taught me to fish, and light a fire with one match, and tried to pass on the principles he lived his whole life by.
He showed me how to make Pancakes.
He fought in WWII in North Africa and Italy under General Patton. That's him pictured with a Mohawk, and on a motorcycle, and smiling big checking out the tailfin art on a B-25 bomber, somewhere outside Capistrano Italy around 1943. I never would have imagined him with hair like that, or on a motorcycle, or ogling a girl in a bikini, but like so many men of his generation, there was just a lot they did not talk about.
Dad always told me what the right thing to do would be.
There was a cigar that seemed to be a permanent fixture in Dad's mouth which he used to great effect as he talked to you. Dad could recite the Gettysburg Address in perfect diction with that cigar tucked into the corner of his mouth. He could move that cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and you never saw his lips move. It was as though it rode on ball-bearings.
Surreal.
Whenever Dad wanted to put some punctuation to any remark he might be making, the cigar would come out of his mouth and he would study the cigar, and the ribbons of smoke that came off of it.
When I turned 16 and got a car, I met a girl at a Junior Achievement Dance. She was not my first girlfriend but she was the first with me having a Drivers License and a car. A whole new world was opened up.
She was very pretty, with blonde hair down to the small of her back, Ice-blue eyes and pouty lips that shone with Ice-Cream lipstick, and she danced like you wouldnt believe. I am sure that it was her good looks that prompted my Dad into one of our little conversations.
After coming in from a date, Dad sat me down.
"Thats a real nice lookin' girl you are seein' there son"
"Thanks Dad"
He looked at the ceiling, rolled the cigar from left to right.
"You know, son, one of these days that little girl is gonna get the hot pants for you"
"Undoubtedly, Father"
The cigar comes out and we both study it for a long moment as he blows a slow steady stream of smoke...
"Well when that happens I want for you to take her on to her house and you just come on home too."
"Sure Pop"
It was the equivalent of giving a girl a coin to put between her knees for birth control.
It was good and well intentioned advice, but there were other signs that Dad was losin' it.
His signature was getting sloppy and his writing wandered off the line.
When we worked on the car, he had trouble getting the screwdriver into the slot.
When he pulled up to a stop sign, sometimes he stopped 20 feet in front of it.
I thought jokingly that he must be getting senile.
Two years later in 1975, I heard a Medical term I had never heard before.
Alzheimers.
Dad had the "Early Onset" form of it and it left him completely disabled at the age of 58 years old.
Dad had always told me what the right thing to do would be. I miss hearing him and seeing the way he talked with that cigar.
My nephew and I have started being sure to talk to each other every week. Some weeks we talk on the phone for an hour, other weeks only a little while.
The thing is, Davy lost his Dad too, and there are so many things we wish we might have talked to our dads about.
So, for you who still have fathers, even quiet and secret men like my father was, you go and talk to them, talk to them a lot because some day you will not be able to talk to them at all.
Its not too late.
