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NNadir

(33,368 posts)
9. I loved my father very much, and miss him still. He quit school in the 8th grade...
Sat Aug 8, 2020, 01:50 PM
Aug 2020

...to support his mother after his alcoholic and violent father abandoned her for the umpteenth time. He witnessed drunken beatings, and the last time he saw his father alive he threw him down down the stairs and told him never to set foot in the house again, because my grandfather was threatening to burn my grandmother's face off with a hot iron.

The next time he saw his father, it was to identify the body after my grandfather had been murdered in a bar fight and thrown into the East River. The cops didn't even bother to look for the killer, and frankly, nobody gave a damn, except the British Army that buried him.

My father was sunk in the North Atlantic; shot at in the Pacific by Japanese aircraft.

He met my mother and until the day she died, he treated her with profound respect and love. I never saw anyone show as much love to a dying woman as he showed to her; he was literally willing to die for her. I will never forget what he did and what he endured.

As a father, my father made absolutely sure to be everything his father wasn't, because he was a father. As a father myself, I try my damnedest to be as good a father as he was. There are many ways I work to be different than him, but as a father, well, he was the best and I'm just a pale imitation.

We fought; we argued; but we loved one another very much.

Although he had no formal education, he taught me that one could teach oneself anything. He worked long hours in physical labor to see there was a roof over my head, food on the table, and took on extra jobs to buy my brother and I what I now understand to be trinkets. He read a great deal, talked about the world, thought about the world, and tried to be decent as he understood it.

It was not how I understood decency; but nevertheless having a vision of decency mattered.

He was, in many ways, a right winged bastard, but he was very proud of the fact that I had my own mind and forgave it was not his mind, reveled in our differences.

He was uneducated, but very bright.

He's dead now for decades, and still, after all these years, I can still weep that he's not here.

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