I’ve grown up to almost be him.

Except that I’m taller.

That’s a relief to me, because I was always so short I was the shortest person of my age. When I was little, the average height for men was 5’ 6.” I grew up to be that average height. Unfortunately, the average height grew up as well, so I’m still below average.

But my Father was 5’ 3” and my Mother was 4’ 10.” Little people, but adorable. So I’m part of the improvement of the human race. Standing up grown up, I could look down on the tops of their heads.

But I am not the giant in the family. My Brother is 5’ 11” and can look down on the top of my head.

I’ve written a lot about my Father. He’s scattered throughout my blog, and features prominently in the autobiography I’m continuing to write as I continue to live it.

I think I want to say something about him now because I’m feeling nostalgic. It’s the New Year’s season and I’m reviewing my life.

I could cite specific instances, even if that’s replaying them, but I think I just want to take a moment to remember and to thank him.

He was the gentlest human being I’ve ever known. He had reservoirs of love for all things living, for the whole world and everything and everyone in it.

He was not a man of the world, but he surprised me. I didn’t think of him being clever with his hands, but he produced a series of remarkable productions which I tended to take for granted, but that have a cumulative effect when you look at the full picture over the full time.

He made his own desk, and the book shelves that stood up at the back of it, rose to the ceiling, and had ornamental molding to give it that finished look. He painted them with dark mahogany oil based paint, his favorite color for all the furniture he made.

He made a record cabinet with a flip top and closing doors. He made free-standing shelves for the family record collection which was increasingly extensive.

Now that I think about it, I realize that I slept in a bunkbed, top shelf, with my brother on the bottom because he was older and could choose. My Father made that too. He also made a ladder for me to climb up to the top bed, dark brown mahogany, of course.

Since we never had any money to speak of, I think he decided it was easier to just make everything himself. He was modest about his achievements, which is probably why I took them for granted, but I could tell he was proud.

He had a workshop in the garage. It was a double garage with big sliding overlapping doors. We never used it as a garage for the car, but we stored things in both sides, piled high, stacked up. At the back on the left, he had a workbench with vise clamps for holding wood, a mitre box for angled cuts, overhead lights so he could work any time day or night. I was not expressly forbidden to go near the workbench, given the lecture about being careful around tools, and my best friend Jimmy and I would sneak in and play history in costumes we made up.

Sometimes I got to hold a board that was being sawed and got to be part of the process of making things.

He had a lot of tools, my Father, and I was impressed by the family of wrenches and screwdrivers, different kinds for different needs, in graduated sizes from very small for fine work that needed tiny precision like a wrist watch, all the way to the very large wrenches with movable jaws that could twist a pipe.

I’m thinking of all the things he made and did, and hindsight works the way it should. If I didn’t recognize it then in my youthful unawareness, I see it now more clearly.

For example, and I see that there are many to choose from, he did things to improve the house itself. He asked Mrs. Hill, the landlady, for permission, and she was thrilled to have her property upgraded. She was also thrilled to have such long-term tenants who weren’t just renting until they could buy a house and move out of hers. We couldn’t afford to buy a house, so the rental became our house and we weren’t going anywhere.

The world is better when there’s stability.

The example I want to give is the change in the house’s internal structure. My Father decided an upgrade would improve our living conditions and the transition from the living room to the dining room. There was a large wide opening that may have held sliding pocket doors with wall on either side. He felt that arches in the upper part of the wall would give a feeling of openness, “light and airy,” that apparently was the current “thing” in all the magazines.

I don’t know how he did it, but the little arches like interior windows, were perfect. They were seamless and smooth and painted so that they looked like they had always been there as part of the original design. Suddenly the whole house was classier.

He also built a gazebo on the land just to the right of the driveway. There were several yards of improvability before the chain link fence and the hedge on the other side which obscured us from the neighbors. The hedge grew through the chain link so we could trim it and it was just a wall of shrubbery.

The gazebo had wooden poles, latticed sides, rafters which could hold vines overhead, and a comfortable bench where you could sit and drink tea in your enchanted garden.

He also built and installed a trellis by the front porch, painted it white, and grew roses on it.

These were just things that he did over the years to improve our lives and give my Mother more of the setting she wanted to become accustomed to. She was raised solid middle class with pretentions. He was lower and had married up.

He was from the school of ”Don’t throw anything away, save everything, save the planet,” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and “If you can’t afford to buy it, make it yourself.”

I’m astounded now to realize that he could make and fix anything.

Except his marriage.

My Mother wanted more than he could give.

He tried. He tried everything. He made the long front lawn into a kind of golf course manicured expanse. When dichondra became the mark of opulence and class, he put it in by hand, rented a roto-tiller to turn over and prepare the ground, then a large roller to smooth and flatten the furrows. The dichondra he personally supervised into the ground so it grew evenly in a green textured expanse. On the weekends, he would stand like a Colossus overlooking his domain and pull any errant weed that dared raise its head.

I never thought about it, because you didn’t think of your parents in that way, but he must have been a proficient lover.

Because my Mother was his first and only, she was the devotion of his life, and he was very devoted. He had learned from those six long years in the Jesuit order before he lost his faith and dropped from the path to priesthood before taking the final vows, dropped out of the church altogether and moved past religion into the real world, he had learned patience and sensitivity and concentration for hours. He may have been short in stature, but he was larger than life, earned the nickname in high school as “The Babe,” and lived to serve “the greater good.”

I overheard my Mother describe me to Shirley, though I can’t imagine how she surmised it, that “He’s like his Father. He’s no torp.”

Whatever that is, apparently I’m not it.

He wanted to give her everything and the world, and she was happy with all that but wanted more. She wanted “everything that money can buy” and he didn’t have money.

We didn’t have a television. We had books.

My Father never got angry. Except twice that I remember. Once was when a bunch of my neighborhood friends and I dug a big pit by the back porch and filled it with water. We had made our own swimming pool, and were waiting for the mud to settle so we could jump in. My Father came home from work, saw, and shouted, “You’re undermining the foundation of the house! Drain it and fill it back in immediately!”

We bucket-brigaded the water from the pit, never got to swim in our pool, and filled it in immediately.

The second time I remember my Father being angry was when I stole his cigarettes. He said smoking was the second thing he learned in the Jesuit order. We had just learned at school that “smoking is bad” and “If your parents smoke, try to break them of the habit.” So I came home and said, “Smoking is bad. I’m breaking you of the habit. It’s for your own good.” I grabbed his pack of cigarettes.

He got so mad that he grabbed back and l ran away and he chased me. I tried taunting him, running backward, waving the pack of cigarettes, saying, “It’s for your own good.” We were outside, running around the house.

But he was driven by his obsessive addiction and was gaining on me. My facial expression changed from laugh to fear and I turned back around and ran faster. He was a beast monster. He was getting closer. I threw the cigarettes down and kept running.

He stopped immediately, picked up the pack, took out a cigarette, and started smoking.

I thought, “That was a close call!” and, “There must be something to be learned here,” like, “Never poke a bear.”

It’s a lesson I’m still learning.

Even from an early age, I was learning to be judgmental. That’s probably partly why I became an English major. When you take language seriously, you judge what you read and what is said.

We all have feet of clay. I did. He did. That’s why, when my Mother dropped by to show off her third or fourth husband, and the three of them went for a walk through the neighborhood, and my Father came back and pronounced that this current husband, this time a minister of some church, he decided the guy was profoundly empathetic because he had said, “Just think, in all those houses, there are people.”

I lashed back, I was old enough to judge and say so, “He’s a shallow charlatan fake who stole your wife and she’ll come to realize that and leave him too.”

My Father said, “His words are so profound.”

I said, “The only one profound is you. He’s a shallow fake all veneer and doesn’t deserve to follow the ground you walk on.”

I didn’t say all that, because I was just a kid, but I saw that my Father’s compassion was a weakness, he could make mistakes, and I learned again that “nobody’s perfect.”


I remember the interloping minister’s name, but I won’t repeat it.

Another time, my Father showed his deep empathy, controlling his own emotions to perform a needed act at great personal cost.

A mother cat had been killed, run over by a car in the street at the top of our yard. She had left a litter of kittens just born, helpless, eyes not yet opened, hungry, mewling pitifully. He tried to find a vet or animal shelter that would take them in. They told him there was no hope, nothing anyone could do. They said don’t flush them down the toilet the way some people do because it could clog the drain. The kindest thing is to put them out of their misery, end their lives but make it clean and quick so they won’t suffer. He was the one suffering. He didn’t want to take any life, ever, under any circumstances.

He steeled himself with a resolve I could never match. He took a hatchet, a quick down stroke, and he cried out in pain with each blow.

My best friend Jimmy climbed over the neighbor wall to watch. When he heard the cry of pain, he said, “Did he hit himself?”

I looked at a friend who diminished in my eyes, who didn’t understand anything, and said, “No, he just can’t stand killing anything for any reason.” I looked down on Jimmy, but looked up at my Father.

I remember the time, Mother gone again, we went to the movies at the local Garfield Theater that sometimes showed a triple bill, and I saw the horror sci-fi Invaders from Mars. It scared me and I had nightmares about the ground opening up and falling down to the alien monsters, and I told my Father and asked if I could sleep in his bed at least until I felt safe. He was happy for the company, and I felt warm and safe. On his part, when your wife leaves you, an empty bed is really empty and very cold. I saw no reason to go back to my bunk bed and shared his on the far side, taking comfort in his snores, just knowing that he was there. I slept that way for the next few years, safe every night.

One of my best memories is the time we went to Wallach’s Music City to buy a recording of the complete La Boheme. The store has these little glass booths with doors that seal out the sound so you don’t disturb anybody. They didn’t pressure you about time, and didn’t push you to buy the record you were listening to. We found two complete versions as boxed sets and took them into the booth. There were chairs to sit, earphones if you wanted, a turntable to play the record, and we were careful not to scratch the surface so the records would remain pristine for selling.

It was a bonding moment and we both felt it. We were both unusual, atypical, because we both loved opera, glorious singing, and Puccini. Kids my age had never heard such stuff.

We put on the first recording with Maria Callas and Giuseppe Di Stefano. We agreed that the Callas reputation was earned on stage more than on recordings, that she was trying too hard with a voice that was not naturally free and easy, the performance was acceptable, enjoyable, but we withheld judgment until we heard the next candidate.

The next one, as they say, “blew us away.” It was Victoria de los Angeles, Jussi Bjoerling, and Sir Thomas Beecham. We knew right away that this was the one, and it only got better. Bjoerling had a lovely, clear, effortless voice, but we missed the Italian Mediterranean warmth of Di Stefano. Bjoerling was not noted for his stage presence, and was the exact opposite of Callas, better on records than on stage. But de los Angeles was the clincher. She had the clear impossibly beautiful voice that embodied the emotion of the score, swelled with the crescendos Beecham provided with his mastery of the orchestra as an integral supporting voice. I’m not surprised that this recording has become legendary. We listened to it all to the last cry of “Mimi! Mimi!” bought it, took it home, and listened to it again.

But those hours together with my Father in the little glass booth, sharing our love of the same thing, joined us together as we shared the same air and I loved him beyond words and knew he was a part of me forever, and that moment, some might think was insignificant, was one of the most memorable and cherishable of my whole life. I can play it again, with or without the recording.

There was something about my Father. He gave my Mother everything he could and she loved his everything, which, to him, and I agree, should have been enough. But her other needs, for money, status, recognition, she tried to find in other men, but they weren’t enough, and she kept coming back to my Father. Over and over.

Long after my Father was gone, she made one last effort, went to a bar, snagged a banker, and spent the rest of her life in a frenzy of activity trying to fill an emptiness with compromise.

When Shirley and I got married young, and were poor, my Father loaned us his car for our honeymoon and told us to keep it as long as we needed, he could walk to work.

He never got over my Mother. She was the one and only and everything. That’s exactly how I felt about Shirley.

I remember this one time when Shirley and I came in from Riverside to visit the house where he still lived alone, we saw a light from his study, and crept over to surprise him. We saw through the window that he was sitting at his desk, pictures of centerfold women open in front of him, and he was cutting out and pasting on the face of my Mother from photos, and we slunk away, left him to his privacy, and decided, “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

When we had a child, he was the perfect grandfather. He would drive out to Riverside and stay the weekend, sleeping on the living room couch in our little student housing. I have a cherished picture of him and the little toddler arranging concrete blocks for the brick-and-board bookcase inside the house where all my books were.

When we moved to the Big House on Third Street, he had his own room. We would come in to Altadena with him and explore it. Driving around with him back then, we saw a beautiful craftsman house for sale on Woodbury Avenue, with a fully furnished garage apartment they promoted as the “mother-in-law” accommodation. We said, “We could pool our incomes, buy this house, and all live here together.”

He liked the idea of “together,” but not the idea of a mortgage. Also, it was too far to drive to work way down in Monterey Park. Also, his health wasn’t as good as it used to be, he wasn’t specific, but was trying to hold on until retirement which could start when he was 62. He never made it. After he passed away, Shirley and I would later move to Altadena, and buy our first and only house which became home, and raise our daughter there. That home is still our family home, I still own it and cherish it.

Before we moved to Altadena, we were still living in the Big House on Third Street in Riverside — which I wrote about, and you can find some photos of it in my blog. My father was still renting in Monterey Park, when he went to his local doctor who tested him and told him he had pancreatic cancer, adding “It’s beyond my expertise.”

I, who was never courageous or assertive, demanded an audience with the Head of The City of Hope, the world-renowned go-to for cancer research, control and cure. The Head Man said conclusively and dismissively, “His own doctor won’t recommend him to us because of how far it’s progressed, we find his case uninteresting, too typical, he’s going to die anyway and he would just mess up and weaken our statistics of success.”

That was his bedside manner.

I shook the dust of The City of Hope off my feet, and we turned to the current latest discovery my Father had found, the controversial possibility of Laetrile. This new “promising” drug was not sanctioned or available in the U. S. It was being administered in a clinic across the border in Mexico.

My Father was on sick leave, it was too far to drive down to San Isidro, just below San Diego on this side of the border, and we helped him find a rent-a-room where he could join the other hopeful cancer patients every morning as they all took the bus across the border to the clinic for their daily treatment.

We kept in touch by mail and phone, and sent him money to help, because I was teaching and had a steady income.

When the clinic had done all it could, and the cost for the little rented room was becoming prohibitive, they sent him home with a box of laetrile and vials and syringes with instructions on how to do the daily injections.

So he came to live with us in our Big Third Street House where he had his own room.

I had to calm my nerves to boil the needles and mix the ingredients and tie off the arm and find the vein and try to inject the needle with as little pain as I could manage, and he never complained. I felt the way he did when he killed the kittens, but I didn’t cry out.

He was not just being stoic, he was grateful for being taken care of. I loved him without letting it overwhelm me, and he loved us as he always did.

When he could still walk, we took him out to dinner at restaurants we could afford.

We prepared meals at home with loving care, and he always ate well for as long as he could still eat.

I remember, burned into my memory, the vision, and I wrote about it in a poem I can’t reread without crying, how he walked into the kitchen naked, shrunken, frightened by the realization that he was dying, and I, not knowing what to do or say, fumbled some words, “Please, not in front of…”

And then the time we had to go somewhere, hated to leave him alone even for a few minutes, and he said, “It’s alright, I’m fine, take as long as you need.” And when we got back home, he was gone.

My Mother had swooped in with her latest husband, packed him up and carried him off.

We didn’t know what had happened, thought of calling in a kidnapping, but then we got the phone call telling us where he was, at a “convalescent home” or “care facility” on the outskirts of Monterey Park, that this was “for the best” and we could visit anytime.

Visit we did. As often as we cold. We brought him whatever he wanted, something to supplement the institutional food. He loved the fresh grape juice available at the road side stand on the way to Riverside. There were still vineyards, the concord grape juice was sweet, the best anyone ever tasted, he used to drink it there by the side of the road and bought bottles to take home. When the grape season was over, they still had the juice frozen, and all you had to do was thaw it out.

He wanted carrot juice. He had learned it was a health food, and drank it with purposeful delight. They didn’t have it at the care facility, didn’t know where it could be found, the local markets didn’t carry it, and we scoured the neighborhoods in a widening circle until we found a source at a health food store, stocked up and took it back to the facility where they were happy to keep it available in the refrigerator.

The staff at the facility appreciated him as an ideal patient because he never complained.

I’ve tentatively stopped holding a grudge against my Mother for kidnapping him without any discussion or warning. It’s too late to ask her side of the story, because she’s gone now too.

But now I can construct the possible probable scenario where he arranged it himself. That he knew he was dying and accepted it with the realization I myself still can’t manage for anyone who’s dying. That he knew he’d need on-site twenty four hour round the clock care with a medical presence, and the kindest thing he could do for us was to remove the burden. That he called her and asked her to take him to “the place.”

This new realization frees me to expand my vision and see him more clearly. I will use it to allow me to love him even more.

I see, understand, and forgive his idiosyncrasies because they all come from a purity of heart.

I remember so many things. I remember the family outings. How we made Seal Beach “our” beach because, though it was a bit farther, it was free, and we could do all the beach things, swimming and body surfing and sand castles and an oversize umbrella we brought strapped to the car, and fire rings with charcoal and wood to give us the best smoky food, and drinks we brought in by an ice-cooler with handles.

I remember the time I cut my foot on a sharp piece of glass buried in the sand at the beach, and he swooped in, picked me up, and threw me into the waves. He explained that it was the best and quickest way to clean the wound.

And how we drove all the way up to the Sequoias in King’s Canyon and didn’t need to go farther to Yosemite which was too crowded and cost more. How, to provide the full comfort of a real vacation, we had two full-size mattresses strapped to the roof of the car, and a stand-up army tent, probably actually used by the army, with a sloping roof, pillars, and pull-out awning for shade or in case of rain. And trails where we could get lost among the trees, but always found our way back.

And one of my Father’s schemes, to get rich, if not quick, at least as a plan, if you’re too poor to buy a house, you’re not too poor to buy property. People will sell you anything, and my Father bought, sight unseen, ten desert acres at $40 each, a landed estate which we visited once to see where it was, that endless stretch of flat emptiness with stakes and strings to outline your plot, our visit prepared by the agent the way you prepare a patient in the convalescent home for the family visit, put on the nice clothes and slick back the hair to pretend this was like it was every day, because the visit might include an assessment, and the land management property agent led us, stepping over a patchwork of strings as vast as the desert expanse of flat emptiness, saying, “Here is your property, over there is where the club house will be, this is the entry road, can’t you just imagine it?” and we tried, and couldn’t, and when my Father couldn’t keep up the monthly payments and lost the property we never owned, which very likely was never developed, no refunds, you signed the papers.

And my poor Father, trying to hang on until he was sixty two and could get social security which he could pass down to us, but had at least kept up his payments on a life insurance policy which, cut three ways, netted me my $6,000 share, enough for the down payment for the house we still own and lived in for 55 years and where he could have lived with us with his own room, almost as nice as the house on Woodbury.

I’m looking through all the boxes and files and papers for every reference to my Father, everything he ever wrote, college papers for a grade, notes to himself. I have his high school yearbook. I have his diploma, his certificates, the article in the newspaper proclaiming him “The Singing Mailman,” chanting the songs he was writing, beloved by everybody, followed on his delivery route by his faithful dog Flippy.

I think of what he must have been doing in his study, his inner sanctum behind closed doors, wrestling language into poems, then setting them to music.

One of his last projects was to take his poems into songs, carefully written down after his extensive study of the songs from “his time,” the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s when they wrote “real music with real words that had real meaning,” and he decided his were as good as theirs. He spent some of his last money, since he was living alone by himself and could afford to spurge, on a small company that produced records, would hire arrangers, musicians, singers, and make a demo which, upon your approval, could be released to the world and make you rich.

There were always setbacks, delays, more steps in the process, more money needed, and finally a demo which I think was less than satisfactory, needed revision, and more money.

An unfulfilled dream, like so many dreams, over too soon, and I’m trying to piece together what I can of his last efforts.

Some of his songs, I remember as best I can, which he sang for us, which stick in the memory, and recall the bygone days of an earlier music “scene.”

I may try to sing one or two, as much as I can remember or reconstruct, and put them on my blog to share with the world and give some completion to his dream.

For example:

Without you, a house on the hilltop
Or perched on the cliffs by the sea,
Would be lonely as a lighthouse
And I wouldn’t trade the White House
For the home that your heart gives to me.

I feel right at home in your heart,
And here is the most precious part,
I know when things go wrong,
My heart still sings a song
That tells me I belong
In your heart.


More and more I am happy to realize how much I loved my Father and love him still, how he infused himself into my life to make me who and what I am, to embody his love for the world as he lives on in me.

I remember the lines in Rodney Dangerfield’s iconic movie, Back to School, where the son is accused in an attempted put-down, “You’re going to be just like your father,” and the son replies, “God, I hope so!”