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Father's smile always endures
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Published: June 21, 2009
My father moved through dooms of love through sames of have, through haves of give singing each morning out of each night my father moved through depths of height
— E.E. Cummings
I thought of my father's smile the other day.
When he really meant it, my dad's smile was the realist thing I have ever seen. It was wide. So wide, it brought you into it.
It came to me for some reason while my wife and I were watching a segment on one of those Sunday morning feel-good shows that involved a couple with four children. The wife had cancer and the husband had lost his job at a local factory. The house they lived in was in disrepair and the couple felt their four children should have it better.
So they made a video of themselves in a way, they hoped, would invoke the most sympathy from the producers of a show that builds houses for families. The producers passed.
But when residents of the couple's town found out the family had struck out with the show, they worked together and built the family a new house themselves.
Nice story. It hit on all the biggies: caring, compassion, charity, community, giving and, most importantly, it had a happy ending.
While I am always touched by the kindness people show toward others, I was also a little put off by the whole thing. I'm biased. For two reasons. The first is that I was raised generations deep in the old bootstrap tradition. The second is that if a family could have used some pity and maybe a handout or two, it was the family of Jack and Frances McNally. That couple had 14 children (13 of whom survived childhood) and raised them in a house only slightly larger than the garages attached to most modern houses.
I was 13th child of that group and, trust me, that's a picnic at which a rainout would be welcomed. There was mom, dad, dad's Aunt Anne, me, my seven brothers and five sisters in a 900-square-foot house of three small bedrooms and one bathroom. I could go into the details of those kinds of living quarters but it should suffice to say it was not an environment conducive to expressions of individuality.
On top of that I know the conditions of my wife's upbringing, and compared to the way she was raised — on the mean streets of Lima, Peru, by an abusive stepfather — I grew up in the lap of luxury. But this is not about me or my wife. We made it through and, pity be damned, we are both proud of whence we came.No, this story is about being a parent.
More specifically, I'm proud of the things I learned from my father.
Again, as I watched the segment I was moved by the outpouring of the town folk. Nothing touches my heart more than altruism. It was beautiful to watch a community pull together for a good cause.
But the father/husband in the story sort of caused my face to tighten. I told my wife that as bad as we had it as kids, my father would never have: (1) made such a plea for help; or (2) accepted such a bounty if it was given to him. That's the way they made dads back then. They earned things. They worked for things. They provided.
I was never close to my dad. He was 38 when I was born. And while that age now seems relatively young to me (I'm 47), I know it was a tough and well-traveled 38. My sister Cindy was still in diapers when I arrived. My brother Dave was 2, Anne was 4, Larry (whom we called Goafer) was 5. Without mentioning all my siblings, my oldest brother John was a freshman in high school. So on the day of my birth, with the exceptions of 3, 6 and 13, my father had children of every age from 0 to 14.
Dad was movie-star handsome, svelte and muscular for most of his years prior to my birth. Pictures of him in his 20s, always smiling, make me wonder how he wasn't discovered in a drugstore somewhere. But much of that had been gobbled up by August 1961.
The smile, sometimes, was all that remained.
My father set bowling pins and sold cigarettes when he was barely beyond his toddler years. While he was somewhat pampered by the aunts and uncles who raised him, he also grew up in the Depression and pampering had a whole other meaning back then. He served in the Navy during World War II and was involved with things during his service — bad things, I think — he rarely spoke about.
I can count on my hands the conversations I had with my father. He had a lot of opinions, and I came to disagree with most of them. He meted out advice in the sternest and simplest terms. So stern and so simple, in fact, that they seemed like mandates and, indeed, were treated as such.
My father and I were cut from different cloths, and starting at an early age, I began to wish I knew my father better. But I also seemed always to know that I never would. There was distance between us — beyond the norms of a generation gap — that was too far to travel.
What I did know about Jack McNally, as well as I have ever known anything in my life, is that he could walk through brick walls. And while he was never shot or stabbed, I know instruments like bullets or knives would have been useless against him. He could fly if he wanted to. And blessed with those gifts, my dad was incapable of telling any kind of sob story.
Plus, as I said, he had that smile. If the roof leaked, he patched it. If the toilet broke, he fixed it. If the car stopped working, he stayed under the hood until it ran again. If the cupboards ran bare, he replenished them. If pains came, he absorbed them. And when the alarm clock sounded, he woke up and went to work. Every single day.
It was a time, as far as I knew, that there were no trophies or medals for anything but first place. And, so, at a family picnic offered by my father's company when I was about 10, I was in a sprint race. My father watched from the side and seemed to be cheering for me, which was a rare thing for him. I was thin and wiry and fast, so I was leading the race. And when I glanced up at my father, I could tell he was saying something. So as I looked at him close to determine what it might be, two boys caught me on either side. I looked at my father again, who had moved down to the finish area, and both of the other boys passed me right at the finish line. After the race, I asked my dad what he was saying."I was telling you to look out for those two kids," he said. And then he smiled.
I know there's a life lesson or metaphor in there somewhere, but I still haven't found it. My dad didn't take me in his arms and comfort me and give me words of encouragement. I neither expected nor wanted that. He just kind of tasseled my hair and then put his hand on my back and we walked away. Another kid had won the race, so there was no point in sticking around and no point in stewing about it. There may have been an implied, "Better luck next time."
But with my father, it was more likely along the lines of, "If you work hard, maybe you'll do better next time."
The emphasis would have been on "work." With my father, it always was. I wrote a book eight years ago. It was a hack-job of a murder mystery I had published by a vanity house. My father was never much of a reader, but most of my family members in New Jersey bought copies and, for a short time, the book was the buzz in family conversations. At the wedding one of my nieces around that time, my father came up to me and said, "If you're going to make any money at this, you have to keep writing and you have to keep getting better."
I know he wanted to say something else. I know he wanted to say he was proud of me or something. He just didn't know how. But when he smiled, I knew what he meant. In the last decades of his life, my father's beautiful smile increasingly made return visits to his ever-aging face. In college, I became aware of the poetry of E.E. Cummings and, while I never fully understood most of his abstract poems, I fell in love with one he wrote about his father. The unnamed poem's first stanza comprises the epigraph of this column. But a couplet from it always stuck in my memory for two reasons. One was its use of a politically incorrect term — and my father was nothing if not politically incorrect. The other was that it simply exemplified my father's purity. It was: "no cripple wouldn't creep one mile/uphill to only see him smile."
My father died three years ago. At the time of my mother's death, seven years before that, my parents had been married for nearly 54 years. And while we didn't talk nearly enough, I miss that smile. Man, I miss that smile.
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