Thoughts of My Father While Renovating a Bathroom on Father’s Day

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I was just a young boy on November 22, 1963. My dad had recently bought a second-hand, 1959 Lincoln Continental, and it was his pride and joy. It was a marvelous land yacht with impressive tailfins and a rear window that slanted inwards, and rolled down so that when we went to a drive-in, my sisters and I would sit backwards and put our burgers and fries on the trunk.

On that day, I heard somebody on television saying that a man who everybody loved had been shot and killed while in his Lincoln, and for a moment, my world ended.

I cried inconsolably until my mother had to call the factory where my dad worked, and the foreman had to bring him over to the phone so I could talk to him and know that he was okay. Yes, it was some other little boy’s daddy. My young heart ached for that other little boy but I was still glad that my father would come home to me that day, greasy and dirty from a long day at the shop and smiling.

I think of him when I fix things around the house. He was always the man who friends and relatives called when something needed to be fixed. Furnace won’t go on? “Call Uncle Walt. He’ll know what to do.” This is why even today, I won’t “call the guy” when something needs to be fixed. You do it yourself. It’s what a man does.

He was of that lucky generation which came home after the war and found a booming economy and good working-class jobs. It was a brief time in history you might call Camelot, when a relatively uneducated man could walk into a factory, get a job on the production line, and earn enough money to buy a house and raise a family on a single income.

He was not without his faults and prejudices. Raised a Catholic in an immigrant, Polish-speaking household, he married my mother after the war and became a convert to her bizarre and somewhat cultish independent Church of Christ. Although I loved my mother too, she was from the old pre-Civil Rights South, a strict fundamentalist, and freely called black people n—s without a second thought. He usually didn’t use that word, but stood silent when my mother would. It made me uncomfortable.

A World War Two navy vet, he sported two wartime tattoos on his big Popeye arms, a battleship on one and an anchor on the other. Like many men of that time, he didn’t talk much about the war, although towards the end of his life a few of those stories came out. He was on the USS Purdy in the South Pacific when a Japanese airplane slammed into the side of the ship, creating a gaping hole and killing several men on board. The ship took on water, but they were able to navigate the crippled ship to a safe harbor. I learned that while he seldom talked about it, the experience haunted him his entire life.

One story has since become family legend, and there is a photo to go with the story. The photo shows some US Navy men on a battleship, holding up a huge Japanese battle flag. It seems that when the war ended, my dad was part of the occupying force in Japan. With his ship anchored in that foreign land, he looked over and saw an abandoned Japanese ship, with that battle flag still flying. He decided he wanted it – and he would take it. He and his shipmates boarded the Japanese ship, took the flag and went back to their ship, and that photo of those smiling Navy men holding up their treasure is still shared at family gatherings today.

His worldview softened a bit with age. He – and my mother as well – were at first a bit taken aback when I brought around my high school friend Sylvester, a black kid, who was friendly and engaging and they couldn’t help but like him. My dad told him Polack jokes and they laughed together, and Sylvester called my mother “Mom.” I think it was Sylvester more than anyone who was responsible for them softening their racial viewpoint, not by argument, but just by being himself. (Yes, like black people who can call themselves n—s, we Poles can call ourselves Polacks from time to time.) Later in life, they even accepted my very Buddhist, Asian wife – something that would have never happened in my house in the 1960s.

On this Father’s Day, I honor his memory by working on our house, fixing little things. From him, I came to know the pleasure and peace of sitting alone, in old clothes, in a bathroom, Zen-like, putting tile on the wall. Mix the mortar. Place the tile and put in spacers. Cut the tiles to fit along the edges. It’s a meditation. He wouldn’t have thought of it as Zen, but he understood well the peace of mind it brings, when you quiet your mind and focus on the task. It’s more than just fixing something, it’s a state of mind that men come to know and rely on.

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