The Ross Writ

1935 - 2004

My father enjoyed fatherhood – in the day-to-day sense – for as short as a time as he enjoyed marriage. A little over four years. It was long enough for him to leave me with the images of an archetypical father, the awaited giant who makes his entrance through the front door, finally, with work clothes smudgy after a long time at some mysterious but surely adventurous place called work, who squeezed me with a hug almost too hard and a stubbly kiss that seemed to leave the imprint of his five o’clock shadow on my cheek.

But one of those days he came home I wasn’t happy to see him, because I had taken one of my mother Dorothy’s favorite music tapes and pulled all the tape coil irreparably out of the thing, and overwhelmed she inflicted the severest of punishments a mother can impose: “Wait until your father gets home!’ This led to the only memory I have of my father angry at me. Which is pretty amazing, I can say now as a father myself, because I should be so lucky that my children survive childhood with only one memory of me losing my patience. But as I enjoy my fourth year of living in marriage and in fatherhood, it reminds me how unfair it is that four years was all my father got.

And ironically, his travels and adventures were to the very places where others found more lasting unions. He traveled to Sweden, presumably in search of more than Swedish meatballs, and yet the marriage that resulted was ultimately his sister’s. He traveled to Korea as a serviceman, a place where American GIs are warned to be careful because it is a place where marriage is rarely successfully escaped or evaded, and yet the person who found his wife in Korea was not my father, but his son.

It’s as if he were something of an instrument, fate’s own heavy tool, that made possible other people’s lives, sometimes at the expense of his own. So much would not be as it is, if not for his accident in Sweden. Norrudden would not be. I would not be.

And yet if he were fate’s instrument, he sure was sturdy. His body was sturdy. The accident broke him in pieces, and yet he put himself together again, and when he walked for the first time in the VA hospital, it was such a miracle that other families fought to have their injured relatives occupy his bed after he was promoted to a rehabilitation ward. He proved he could survive anything.

That’s why, despite all his physical problems through life, this casket here is so preposterous.

Not just his body was sturdy. So was his smile. His infectious happiness. He never took any detail for granted. I once interviewed him for a school project, and he once told me his philosophy of life was no matter how hard life gets, there is always a good surprise around the corner. Of course, on the way to that corner, no matter how bad things were, you have to say hello.

He said hello to everybody. Nobody was invisible. No one was a stranger. I visited him at the post office once, and he introduced me to every teller, every letter carrier, and every customer in the building. They all knew him. They liked him. Maybe the reason is he never pretended not to seem them, even if his limp might have prompted some of them to try to pretend they couldn’t see him. He would interrupt them on their private island and say, “Hello.”

I think my father, who never saw a face that wasn’t sufficiently familiar for a hello, would never say this to anyone, but his life serves as a reminder of the following: It’s right and necessary to go on journeys in life – that’s how magic happens – but as far as you go, it’s wrong and unnecessary to say hello only when you’re saying goodbye. We should say hello more often.

So to my father, I say, I love you. I admire you. I wish I had grown to be as tall as you. And I say, “Hello” to you.

posted by Joe  # 10:39 PM 47 Comments