Not Fade Away

I gave a watch to my brother this week. I hadn’t planned on it and I am not sure that he really wanted it. Sometimes you just feel the need to give watches away. He had meant to bring up a watch that had been my father’s and he had forgotten it. He normally doesn’t wear a watch. I still evangelize the wearing of watches. I am odd that way.

My father stopped wearing watches years ago. “Why would I? My cell phone tells the time more accurately anyway,” he would say. He did not see the romance in inanimate objects. He was not sentimental about things. He cared about people.

In keeping with the recent mood of The Escapement Room I thought that I would share what I said about my father this week in my old parish church. It is really more personal to me and not much interest to anyone else. I just want it here to give it some internet permanence. I don’t want these memories to fade, although I know that they will. When the internet was still new I looked online to find an elementary school friend that I had lost contact with many years earlier after my family had moved. All I found was an old mention of a scholarship set up by his father in his name at a Catholic high school in Philadelphia. He had died in his sophomore year. I don’t know how. The only trace of him was one line in an old digitized bulletin. Maybe this will linger here longer:

When R*** V*** was born in Brooklyn on February 24, 1944, VE Day ending the European part of the Second World War was more than a year off. No cars were produced that year in the United States. Every industry diverted its production to what was needed in the war. There was rationing. It even affected the distribution of middle names (he didn’t have one). His mother D*** had worked in an office and his father F*** was designing radar systems while in the United States Navy. February 24, 1944, was closer to the end of the Civil War than we are to that date today. The world was still in black and white. Later a second child was born, J***, just younger enough to be in a different generational cohort. They shared a love of music, although the younger’s taste skewed younger. 

After the war, the V*** prospered, and moved to the bedroom community of Westfield, New Jersey, home to average Americans, like Charles Addams. In Westfield R*** would be the catcher on his baseball team. He would wrestle, until he broke his elbow and had to have a pin put into it. He was a Boy Scout. He listened to Buddy Holly, even seeing him in concert in New York. He would sneak into New York on the train with his friends and make mischief. He learned how to hide a lit cigarette in his mouth and make a zip gun.

After high school he went off to Western Pennsylvania to St. Francis College. While there he met L*** and his purpose and direction in life changed. With her family moving, it was uncertain if L*** would be allowed to continue at St. Francis. R*** decided that they were old enough to marry and they did in 1964. At 20 they dropped out of college and became adults, with jobs and no money. They ate honey buns as an inexpensive treat. So many that they could not eat them in the decades after. That is what crazy kids did when they were in love.

Children followed in quick, but not too quick, succession: a boy in 1966, girls in 1968 and 1970. Sensing an imbalance that needed correction, but not wanting to bring a child into the dystopian 1970’s, in a dazzling late display of fecundity, they added a boy in 1980, and the set was complete.

R*** changed jobs, and careers, and always did what was necessary for the family. He worked extra jobs at Christmas time to make the holidays special. He built toys, late at night, in the basement when money was short. He was a scout master. He made elaborate costumes for Halloween and school plays. If ever there was someone who passed the “marshmallow test”, it was my father. He delayed personal gratification by putting the needs of his family first. He overcame adversity by doing what needed to be done. It never occurred to the Boy Scout to do otherwise. If he complained, it was not within the earshot of anyone but L***. He taught himself to repair automobiles and appliances. He learned basic plumbing and could run Romex and wire an electrical outlet. He spent many Saturdays drinking black coffee in the summer heat while watching his youngest, the closest to an athlete this side of the family had, play baseball. Despite bearing a grudge against the Dodgers for leaving Brooklyn, he still could be a fan of the Mets, Phillies, Orioles, and later the Nationals. He introduced two new generations to the game of baseball. When the zeitgeist changed and his kids and grandchildren became fans of soccer, he adjusted and found a love for another game.

He allowed a seven-year-old to stay up past bedtime to watch the first U.S. broadcasts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on PBS in 1974. That was the first clue that his sense of humor was not of the normal type. He was able to find old clips of Ernie Kovacs, the DADA doyen of early television. His humor was absurdist and literary. It required a deep knowledge of all things cultural. It was quick. His mind made connections and processed them at incredible speed. They could still be “dad jokes” but they were next level “dad jokes.” And he knew that jokes gained traction through repetition. Early on, after getting a parking spot closest to the entrance of a business, he willed into existence the “V*** Spot”, the ancient parking space birthright of the Clan V***. It never failed as a self-fulfilling prophecy or as a joke. His humor adjusted to changes in technology. He was an early meme adopter. He curated comics to send to his children and friends.

He was an autodidactic polymath, or an self-taught, well-rounded, smart guy. He dove headlong into books on all subjects from quantum physics to Habsburg inter-family politics. He would often switch between different books in an evening. He had a rare and unreplicable ability to watch a television program and read a book at the same time with remarkable recall for each. He could toggle his attention between a history of the Roman Republic and a Swedish police procedural with subtitles. It was only late in life that he relayed that he kept a different stack of books at his bedside, mostly poetry, for quick reading at bedtime, after having spent an evening reading. He was a librarian’s raison d’etre. They always held the best new books for him.

When life became less hectic, and importantly when the last of the children’s college tuition had been paid, R*** and L*** finally could take pleasure in the travel that they had always deferred. They could take longer and explore further. They could see the great cities of the world, marvel at natural and man-made wonders. They could cruise the Danube and the Nile. The places found in books and in television documentaries now became memories to make and share with old friends and family.  He was not an aloof traveler. He was engaged.

Had he started a little earlier he may have been really fluent in a number of languages. He understood more Spanish and German than he let on. To some of his dearest friends he was an “honorary Cuban.” His neighbors became his friends and shared Fourth of July pool parties, pig roasts, and boating trips. His interest in genealogy put him in contact with distant German relatives who also became friends. He always held on to friends, even over long distances and over long times.

He took pleasure in small things: the subtle changes in the weather, the squirrels not raiding the bird feeders, new birds as they migrated through, meteor showers, the song of tree frogs after a rain, and the squeal of children realizing that the pool water was really as cold as he had said it was. He was a “get on the floor and play” type of father and grandfather. He always tried to make babies laugh.

He was a Stage 4 prostate cancer survivor. He had a high tolerance to pain. That pin that held his left elbow together after a wrestling injury decided to remove itself one night while he watched television. With a large piece of metal distorting the skin of his arm he decided to drive himself to the doctor. He had not felt it. He didn’t feel the Stage 4 lung cancer as it spread. His children had pestered him to stop smoking in the early 1970’s and he did, aside from the very occasional cigar. He later tried to look back for clues, but when you are 80 everything hurts to some degree. He only turned his full attention to the cancer when it became unbearable. He did not have to bear it long.

Seneca said that “Joy comes to us from those whom we love even when they are absent.” R*** is absent now, but the joy that he gave us endures. Hold him in your heart. Many a tear has to fall, but it’s all in the game…

(Many years ago, before cell phones.)