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As I’m typing these words, it is Fathers’ Day, 2018. My own father, Moish Weinstein, passed 10 years ago on April 3rd. He was a man who, like his daughter, immersed in love soup and splashed about wildly. He was raised by Russian Jewish immigrant parents who came to America which they saw as a land of opportunity where the streets were paved with gold. Not sure they believed it, but they did their best to create a new life for themselves.
I think about the courage it took for my grandparents to cross a vast ocean and arrive on the shores of a foreign land, not speaking the language, meeting (arranged marriage) and wedding, and raising four children in the multi-ethnic neighborhood of South Philly. My father, aunt, and uncles each married and raised children who continued the lineage with grandchildren. I consider my son to be a link in that love chain. When he becomes a father (he has already been a surrogate father to the son of a former partner) I trust that he will love his offspring with the kind of devotion that my father offered me and my sister, Jan.
My dad loved his kids with a fierce, protective style. He showed it, spoke it, sang it, (“I love you, a bushel and a peck.”) and what he may have lacked in musical acumen, he made up for in enthusiasm. He would worry, inheriting that trait from my smother love grandmother; perhaps one of the original helicopter parents. He would tell me that was his job and I would remind him that worrying wouldn’t keep me safe. My father had an ironclad work ethic and toiled “crazy hours,” as my mom referred to them, to support us.
In my early 20’s I told him that I would rather have had less stuff and more of him. To his credit, when he was home, he wasn’t ‘the babysitter who helped with the kids and housekeeping,’ as was so for many men of his generation. He was the daddy and husband who shared those roles with my mother. He taught me to stand up for myself, with the reminder that “They put their pants on one leg at a time, just like you do,” so I wouldn’t be intimidated by anyone. I can say that sometimes I attempt to stand up and put my pants on and trip over my feet, but like my dad, I laugh when getting back up. He had a grand sense of humor and a way with people.
The party got started when he arrived, sometimes garbed in his bus driver’s uniform. He knew how to work a room and help people feel at ease. Just about anywhere we went, he knew someone and if not, by the time we left, he had made at least one new friend. I absorbed that trait as well. Although I never saw him as shy, I have heard from the mother of a friend who knew him in his childhood, that he was quiet and humble. Hard to imagine my gregarious father that way. He called us ‘goofy kids,’ and he joined us in that kind of behavior, willing to be silly. He welcomed our friends into our home and called all our female friends ‘Doll Baby,’ with one exception. He referred to my BFF Barbara as ‘Barbie Doll’.
In addition to his full-time work; initially as a milkman and then a bus driver, he volunteered in the community as a firefighter, at our synagogue and with a young girl who had Muscular Dystrophy. In retirement, he and my mom offered service in their new home.
One of the things this city boy who moved to the suburbs liked to do was gardening. In our side yard, we grew strawberries and in the backyard, tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini. I was his assistant at times. Today, in his honor, I will get my hands dirty by planting. Another of his lifelong passions was fitness. He was a Golden Gloves boxer in the Navy and worked out long after he left the service. Using weighted handle ropes, he would jump with us. He jogged nearly daily on the track at the Junior High across the street. When he and my mom retired at 65 and moved to Ft. Lauderdale, he worked another 18 years at a gym and when Parkinson’s took hold, and he needed to quit his job, he continued to work out. When he could no longer do that, my mom would take him into the pool and walk him in the condo with the aid of his walker. This robust man had six-pack abs into his 70’s and a cabinet full of nutritional supplements that I took home with me when he died. I smile when I am the gym sometimes, since I feel his presence there, urging me on when my energy flags. This gym rat’s daughter will be heading to Planet Fitness and sweating it out once this article is complete.
Fathers’ Day was a big celebration in our home. My mother called it Poppy’s Day and we would sing it to him to the tune of Happy Birthday. On this day and every day for as long as my heart beats, I honor the man who not only helped give me life, but taught me to live it with honor, love, exuberance and service.
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Photo credit: Caroline Hernandez