Father of Invention

Today would have been my father’s 78^th birthday.  He was taken from us before his time, the result of complications from a knee replacement he should never have been allowed to have.  It has been nearly three years and yet I have not broken my habit of reaching for the phone to call him.  In his last few years he spent most of his time at home.  An engineer by training, he never stopped tinkering with or marveling at the latest in electronic bells and whistles available on a desktop platform--computers that contained orders of magnitude more processing power than the room-sized systems he used to design and sell.  He loved to burn mix CDs, try to stump his voice recognition software, play online games, pay his bills with a few clicks, and experiment with social networking.

My father was a difficult and complicated man whose opinions and points of view were normally and sometimes deliberately off-putting.  Nonetheless, he could be respected for the depth of his conviction and the depth of his love for his family—particularly his grandchildren.  I had a very difficult time dealing with him as a child and into young adulthood.  His inability to deal with variation was manifested in a need to control both actions and thoughts.  He believed in free will if it was his but did not suffer it well from his children.  In light of the fact that his approval was rarely forthcoming, I learned to coexist with him by moving away and pursuing my own dreams.  But typically and predictably, my father could never turn his back on family.  He learned to accept my freedom, my husband, my career choices, and eventually, to be a guest in my home.

The best thing about my father was his sense of humor.  He loved to be entertained and he loved to laugh.  It took me years to realize that this was the key to defusing his anger.  He was made easily pliable by a good joke, a reference to a funny anecdote from the past, or even an ironically well-executed sticking out of the tongue.  His laugh was infectious; it filled a room.  And it turned his steamy, sometimes piercing eyes into kind green pools, framed by the gentle lines of age and experience.  That’s when I loved him most.

Over the years, my father became incredibly close to my own little family, always remarking that he loved my husband as if he were his own son.  He loved my children to distraction, enjoying wrestling on the floor with my son (even when it was no longer advisable) and cuddling with my daughter as he scratched her back into rapture.  My kids loved to write him letters because he always wrote back, signing them “Love, Grampa” by turning the letters into musical notation, the L into a natural and the G into a treble clef.

My husband and I speak often of how much we miss my father.  I miss the way he would call in the middle of the afternoon because some work of Chopin’s played on the radio and brought tears to his eyes.  He always told me that I played it better, a lie that only a proud father can get away with.  My husband misses having him as a drinking partner.  They loved sampling and tasting together, whether it was a pitcher of sapphire martinis or a flight of microbrews.

For over fifty years, my father and I yelled and screamed, laughed and cried, stormed away and hugged again.  It was his way, and—regrettably—it became my way.  I think confrontation was how my father became close with people.  If he did not scare you off, you became lifelong friends.  He loved the art of the argument in his personal relationships as much as he loved the art of the deal in business. 

Had my father written his own life’s script, he would have chosen to leave this Earth without any advanced notice.  So it came to pass that even in this, he had his way.  During the last conversation I had with him he was talking about his family and laughing so loudly that the nurses asked him to keep it down.   It was an apt ending to the story of his life.

I miss him still.