JUNE 16,1991

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