Dear Cal and Charlie,
Father’s Day comes and goes. I remind my Tattooed Boy to call his father. I try to indulge my Dear One, serving meals he likes, joining in whatever pastimes that give him pleasure. I read the remembrances and eulogies that fill the papers and watch moving tributes on the news; often I am struck by the obituarial expression of these remarks.
Of course you, Cal, died when I was just thirteen. You were forty-two; it was February 1965. I have never forgotten that day, but I think about it more and more as I get older. The memories were especially vivid when Lynn–you remember my best friend Lynn–called to say that her father Joe had died. That was 2008. Joe had had an iffy ticker for quite some time, and he had been quite frail for a year or more. Joe’s death was not so much a surprise as unexpected. Lynn, however, struggled to understand what a fatherless world would mean to her.
What I told her is that she would never be fatherless.
Do you remember, Cal, when you taught me how to use ratios to solve math problems? I was stymied by the “New Math” and overwhelmed by my promotion to the junior high fast track. I am not sure whether I was adequately prepared for those classes. Without question I could not think or listen fast enough to keep up. I was sobbing, convinced of my own stupidity. After much thought and reading and rereading of the textbook, you asked if I wanted to understand the New Math or whether I wanted to be able to find the answer. I have always been a pragmatist: I wanted to be able to find the answer. You showed me how to think through the problem and identify the unknown, the x and set up a ratio that included the x. I had known since the fifth grade how to cross-multiply and solve for x. That process served me well in my PSATs, SATs, and GREs; it serves me well still.
What you really showed me, I have since learned, was that there would always be multiple paths to any destination. The decision will only be what path to follow.
Cal, I think you would have liked Charlie, my other father, very much.
He came into my life just about ten years after you departed and stayed until 1991. The text between the lines of a letter Ma wrote in 1975 told me that our families would soon merge. He was a funny man, less droll than you, earthier in his story telling.
What good friends we were, Charlie. You pointed out in the kindest way my spelling errors and showed me the drafts of your op-ed pieces for the Boston Globe alongside the version that survived the editors’ attentions. Our closest moment may have been that trip to your house in Vermont after it had been broken into. The theft was a minor nuisance; the devastation the raccoons left behind was a real headache. So was the aftermath of all that red wine we drank as we talked into the night.
I’m glad that Joanie S. brought a clump of ash-laced soil from the roots of the Peace rose planted on your grave, Charlie. It went with Ma’s dust into the hole dug above Cal’s grave in Hingham Cemetery. Not only did that bring my two dads together with Ma, but Uncle Dave is right there too, a fourth for celestial bridge. I can imagine the ice rattling against wet glasses and the slurps of Johnnie-Walker-on-the-rocks and gins-and-tonics-with-extra-lime, and think I hear the thump of a trick taken with glee and the laughter at jokes at everyone’s expense.
So I raise my glass to you both, Cal and Charlie. Thank you for being my Dads. So many people never know the strength of even one father’s love; I have known and still know the strength of two.
Happy Father’s Day. And give my love to Ma.