Overlooking Lake Michigan from the front room of his twenty-ninth floor condominium, my father sat awaiting my arrival. His smile patted the cushion of the chair next to his, as if to say, “Come. Sit down, Son. It’s been too long since we last spoke.”
Refusing to surrender graciousness to personal discomfort, my father welcomed everyone with a smile that made one feel as if he were the only person in Dad’s world who mattered at that moment. “No one should feel bad because I don’t feel well.”
His first grandson Ben dubbed him Poppy whom I came to know better at the end of his life than at the start of mine. But to my older brother Ron and me, Dad was and had always been Dad, except for the one and only occasion when I addressed him as father. He exploded. That’s all I recall.
Dad is a term of endearment, including its diminutive Daddy. He reposits trust and unconditional love and is that special someone who touches the heart. I suspect Dad feared the possibility, however remote, that he might lose us to the three hundred miles between us, but if you knew my father even if only perfunctorily, it is indeed impossible to imagine that he would have ever surrendered his sons to divorce and distance.
Great Parents, Lousy Spouses
Following his 1950 graduation from the St. Louis University School of Dentistry, Dad worked many long hours, perhaps too many for an already strained shalom bayis*. In striving to become the best provider he could, he discovered something along the way he hadn’t anticipated.
My parents failed as each other’s spouse to find a balance between work and family, a failure that cost Ron and me our parents’ marriage. They divorced in 1959 after ten years, an outcome that wasn’t supposed to happen in the age of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best.
Would it have been better had they decided to remain married for our sake? The best answer is perhaps the simplest one-that a good divorce, as undesirable as it may seem, is better than a bad marriage for Mom, Dad and the kids.
For better or worse, parents remain their children’s most influential teachers. I was impressed by how respectfully my mother and father treated each other after their divorce unfailingly through all the years.
Kibud Em (Honoring Mother)
“Mother deserves better than that, Son,” Dad scolded me once for having spoken of her in the third person.
“How’s Mom?” the first two words he asked us consistently every Sunday night when he called. Mother was everything holy to my father. “My mother kept a kosher home and sent me to afternoon Hebrew school,” he said with the adoration a son reserves for his mother alone. Although he admitted to me on several occasions that he skipped Hebrew class for the stickball game around the corner, Dad unpretentiously adhered to his belief in One God, honoring one’s parents and acts of kindness.
Did my parents ever quarrel? They probably did but never in our presence nor did either one say an unkind word about the other that Ron or I might have heard. When years later, my wife and I divorced, we vowed to treat each other as my parents had done.
The difference was my parents had two reasons, Ron and I, for their mutual civility; my first wife and I had three: Benjamin, Kimberly and Zachary whom we love above all else.
Never one to sidestep his responsibilities, he continued parenting Ron and me as if there had been no divorce. As my first and most important teacher, Dad’s pedagogic style was a blend of schoolmarm with rabbinic sage. I once heard a notable rabbi say that years after his father’s death, he remained and would remain a great teacher because his memory and teachings continued to live on through his students and his students’ students.
Floss Those Teeth You Wish To Keep
My father coined this pithy adaptation of the central principle of all responsible parenting. Should you wish to raise kind, loving children, begin modeling acts of loving kindness for them from their earliest childhood when they are most malleable. Preaching unaccompanied by good deeds only reminds us how cheap talk really is.
Dad’s devotion to me strengthened my devotion to him. Though we lived apart from each other, we never grew apart.
As a matter of fact, the relative infrequency of our visits taught us to cherish the memorable in each and every one. His diligence demonstrated that a divorced dad could remain as much an effective parent as any other, but there was one thing Dad couldn’t do.
Early divorce robs the whole family, but the children in particular, of both actual and potential memories. “We only really saw Dad on Sundays,” my brother Ron said. “Mom put us to bed before Dad came home during the week probably sometime after ten o’clock.”
By the time Mom, Ron and I relocated to St. Louis, he and I had become accustomed to Dad’s daily absence, a fact which though sad made the transition to our official one parent household less disruptive than it might otherwise have been.
Stepfathers and Stepsons
“What was it like living with Dad?” I asked Richard, my stepbrother, who lived under his roof from age thirteen through his high school graduation, following his mother Lillian’s marriage to my father. Although my father never formally adopted him, Dad continued to regard Richard as one of his three sons even after Lillian’s death until the day of his own, October 18, 2008.
“About average I guess,” Rich responded when I asked him to rate Dad’s performance. Never one to embellish an explanation with too many words, I was struck by Rich’s response: “He and my mother never attended one swim meet in four years. He’d come home late, watch television, have dinner, smoke his pipe and go to bed.”
There are those like me who acquire a stepfather when his mother remarries. Dad was a six hour drive away. Though a stretch of highway lay before him, there was no distance between us. Harold Grossman, my mother’s second husband, respected that fact. Were it only for that reason alone and none other, I would honor his memory.
Then there are those who like Rich, as with all human beings,
had a biological father but never a dad, at least not until his mother married mine. “I seem to remember you always addressed Dad by his name, Al, isn’t that right, Rich?
“Yes.”
“Tell me why.”
“It was never brought up for discussion,” Rich explained. “I guess my mother and Al figured I’d figure it out by myself which I did.
I was comfortable with “Al”. He seemed fine with it too, but when I looked at your dad, I saw my father, the only father I’ve ever known.”
