It was Father’s Day, a day my family celebrated every year
that I could remember since childhood. Dad was to barbeque and Mom got the day
off from cooking. It was a tradition to give Dad a wrapped head of lettuce with
a bow tied around it since he loved salads. But his biggest present was the
presence of his children and their spouses as we gathered to celebrate dad.
Dad would get himself into comical situations like falling
off a pier while getting excited about a crab that was swimming toward him
while I held a flashlight and the crab was led into Dad’s net. One evening, in
particular, a hot and humid summer night, as we crabbed at the dock in
Patchogue, NY, a larger than usual crab started following my prompt. Mom was
sitting in the car and cooling off while everybody else was at the dock’s edge
crabbing, with an extra-long pole and flashlight. We were veterans even as
children equipped to take on the biggest of crabs.
I called Dad’s attention to the incoming crab and he got
excited!
“Ooooh! Oooooh-ooooh-oooooh!” he said, then there was a big
splash! Right into the Great South Bay Dad went! There was some Italian spoken
from the wrong side of dockside and my little sister runs to the car to tell my
Mom.
“Ma! Daddy fell in the water!”
“Well, tell him to come out!”
Mom couldn’t swim and damned it all it was comfortable with
a nice breeze from her sit point. Meanwhile, I’m laughing hysterically while
trying to help Dad out of the bay. Dad is getting angrier by the moment,
increasing his use of Italian swear-words, some I had never heard before, and
the more he swore, the more I was laughing.
In 1991, on June 16th we spent a rather sad Father’s Day, as
Dad was laid to rest the day before. I suddenly held the tools to the food on
the grill and feeling like I was in the wrong place, or with the wrong people
as an emptiness filling my body. All I could think of was that Dad was no
longer here! I thought how shallow it all felt, but there were other fathers in
the group so we went through the motions. From that holiday, that lone Father’s
Day, all the holidays that followed all failed to measure up to the past ones
we celebrated. Suddenly Christmas Eve, Dad’s favorite day, the day he sat at
the head of the table in his flannel shirt, a glass of wine and lobster and
spaghetti was no more. Now it was in another place with a buffet set-up, no
seats at the table but find a place to eat. It would never be the same again.
I recall going to lunch the next day as I returned to work
and suddenly feeling this overwhelming sense of panic, Dad was gone!
During his last twenty years, Dad and I became very close,
we were no longer father and son but two people who loved each other. To this day
I am grateful that it was so when he passed.
And now I want to celebrate another father, Dad’s namesake,
namely #1 Son, Anthony.
Many years ago I had the happy experience of having a son
for the first time. I didn’t know what life would bring me but I knew what I
wanted for him. I wanted him to have all that I had, no, not my money, or
house, or car, or anything that had a physical presence but what meant the most
for me, the love of a good woman and children. If he had that, then everything
else would take care of itself.
As he grew older I saw in him the need to recognize the
truth and to speak out, sometimes he told me ‘what for’. He was always
respectful, compliant, and loving, and so life went on.
He dealt with the misery of a sister with developmental
disabilities and was a protector of her, and to this day like his younger
brother Mike, cares enough to take time from his life to ask about her. There
was the horror of losing his younger brother Joseph when he was six and I’m
sure it affected him considerably and took a toll. But he had an undeniable
spirit for life, to spread joy and make his parents laugh when we weren’t being
proud of his achievements. He did so well as a young teenager into his adult
life that I was afraid there would be a full and deep investigation where I
would have to provide DNA to prove I was his father. I knew it wasn’t the
mailman, he kept bringing me my neighbor's mail and George the mechanic was
always under a car.
Then he graduated from college and went to work as a
copywriter at my company and became known as; ‘Anthony’ Mr. ‘D’s” son to Mr.
‘D’ and his father. That was good because it put the pressure on him to behave
like an adult, not me, anymore.
And now, after the tragedy that befell him in June of 2018,
while giving birth to HIS first son, Bobby, he lost his beautiful wife Courtney
while she gave birth. Left with a beautiful little girl named Darby, #1 Son has
put together an amazing display, a playbook almost or primer on how to be a
father, how to rescue lives in turmoil, and put his pain aside to raise these
two wonderful children.
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY Anthony.
Love, Mom, and Dad
