My father’s day

The thing about parents is we never forget them, whether we knew them or not.  While they are alive, most of us fight with them or silently resent them.  We adore them as babies, but we don’t remember the adoration as we grow up and become more conscious of them.  Unless they are out all the time as my mother was because she was a working single mother. At that time the term single mother was not in fashion yet.  My mother was widowed when she was 22 and I was orphaned when I was six months old.  My mother worked as a secretary during the day and a professor at night.  She hardly ever came home before 10 p.m.

This daily absence actually built my affection for my mother.  The person who took her place was my grandmother who taught me to sew, to cook and filled my ears with laments over my mother’s absence.  I was the ball they passed on to each other daily.  Sometimes I was dropped, sometimes slightly battered, but it was a life anyway.  When I think back, I had a wonderful childhood anyway.

And I adored my mother.  Slept next to her almost every night until I hit 11 or 12 when I had my own bed divided from her by two matching dressers placed back to back.  As I was growing up, my mother and I never fought, not even when I was a teenager.  Our “fighting” happened most seriously at the end of her life when she got Alzheimer’s disease and consequently hated me. 

My father died when I was six months old.  The Japanese took my grandfather, my father, my uncle, the cook, gardeners, and drivers — all the men in our family — in one fell swoop and shot them at the Masonic Temple a few blocks down from the house.  They never returned.   I recruited a surrogate dad.  I called him Daddy Toot.  He adored me until I became a teenager then he was jealous of the boys who came to visit.  He died when I was 15. That broke my heart.

But what do I think of my own father, the one I never knew?  These days — and I am nudging 70 — there are four pictures on my desk.  One of my father, Vladimir Gonzalez, wearing a straw hat.  He must have been 22 years old.  It’s the only solo shot of him that has survived.  There’s a double frame, one side has me at around five months in the arms of my mother and the other one in the arms of my father.  Then there’s the picture of Daddy Toot in his office.

I am 70 and my father has been dead for as many years.  He is still a compelling mystery to me.  I love him, that I know.  Strangely enough I miss him even if I have no personal knowledge of him.  I wonder — what did he smell like?  I know what Daddy Toot smelled like.  Once I dreamt of being lost in an office, opening and closing doors, then I opened a door and saw my Daddy Toot and he embraced me.  I inhaled his fragrance.  It  stayed with me for a whole week.  But what did my Pappy — that’s how my mother referred to him — smell like?  I don’t know.

I only know he was tall (6’2”) and handsome, they say.  The people who knew him or look at his photographs say I look like him.  Yes, I do down to the dimples but he did not give me his cleft chin.  He was supposed to have one.  I guess he was saving that for my brother but he, my Pappy, died too early.  So I have no brothers or sisters.

But as I grow older, I know I am a Gonzalez, the only daughter of Vlady, that’s what they called him, who inherited all the maverick traits of his branch of the family.  His parents died young and that gave their children every reason to turn maverick.  We laugh out loud.  We have many husbands, wives and children, without regard for legitimacy or illegitimacy.  We love them all.  We are not judgmental.  And I will never forget the breakfast I went to once where on the buffet table next to the coffee and tea were bottles of scotch, brandy, gin and vodka.

My father’s birthday was last Saturday, May 17.  If he lived he would have been 95.  He would never have lived that long.  In his generation, the Gonzalez men all died when they were around 60.  Early death is a Gonzalez trait and I genuinely hope I will have that. 

 So Pappy, sorry I was too busy last Saturday to light a candle to your birthday.  But here’s the gift.  My son Gino is a musician and he attributes that to you.  You played the trombone when you were young.  You passed on your talent.  And you know my grandson called Mikel Vladimir?  He looks like you and is as tall as you.  You live still within all of us.

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