Lessons from My Father

“Gillette Blue Blades, with the sharpest edges ever owned.”

“Not ‘owned,’ honed.”

“What’s honed?”

“It means sharpened.”

“Oh.”

I learned a lot of things from my father.  Like the fact that the Mirror wasn’t a mirror, but a newspaper.  And that Pee Wee Reese wasn’t short, but given that nickname because as a child he was a champion marbles player and a “pee wee” is a small marble.  And that you can always tell a well-dressed man by his shoes and his fingernails.  And that when you’re driving a car and you see a ball rolling into the street, slow down because nine times out of ten a child will follow.

But what he taught me that snowy December afternoon was the most valuable lesson of all.

It was about three-thirty and I was walking home from school.   As I turned the corner of  our street I saw a few people gathered around an automobile, which I immediately recognized as my father’s pale green Chevy.  It didn’t take more than a second or two to sense that something was wrong.  As I quickened my pace and hurried to the car, the people seemed to move away from it.  The only words of their murmuring I could make out were “the son.” 

I opened the door of the car and saw my father’s lifeless body – a sight so horrific, to describe it in detail would be far too grim. 

It seems my father was shoveling snow, in order to move his car to the opposite side of the street – the legal alternate for the following day – and he had an argument with an encroacher who tried to nab the space before my father had a chance to switch sides.  My father won the argument, as he often did, but lost the war, so to speak.

My father was a textbook example of a heart attack waiting to happen.  He weighed too many pounds, smoked too many cigarettes, and, that day, shoveled too much snow.  Plus, he had too violent a temper, which, in this instance, seemed to be the straw that broke the Camel-smoker’s heart.  He was 49 years old.   

My mother lived to twice that age.  She was slim, didn’t smoke, and was even-tempered – she was the exact opposite of my father...which, after that day, I always tried to be.