Happy Father's Day

(Reprinted from a Post I made on June 21, 2009)

I loved my father with all my heart.

He always took me with him when I was a kid. Wherever he would go I would be right there beside him. He used to take me to work with him when he worked an extra job on the weekends. He used to do the books for this furniture store in middle of Bed-Stuy in the sixties which was a real rough place back in the day. We used to get out of the subway and walk past burned out buildings that made the landscape look like Dresden during World War 2. He taught me that if you walked confidently and looked people in the eye and always treated people with respect, you would be OK.

He met my mom when they were both working for the Irving Trust Bank on Wall St. She was the naive first generation Italian girl in the cable department and he was the handsome personable Irishman who was quick with a joke or a kind word. He used to tease her and ask when she was going to cook him a nice Italian dinner. She finally invited him over one night. They ate dinner together every night for the rest of their lives.

He was an Irishman surrounded by Italians. He liked to go to the bar on a Friday night with his buddies and tell stories and hoist a few. But he was a family man through and through. He loved his family more than anything. But he was also partial to the Mets and his Reingold Beer. Everynight in the summer he would put the game on the radio or TV and pop a can of Reingold. Well a few cans of Reingold. You know what you have to do as a kid. You have to go against your old man. So I became a Yankee fan. He didn't care, he made sure to take me to see the Yankees in the Old Yankee Stadium. I got to see Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and the 1961 team.

He would spend his vacation with me. When I went to Boy Scout camp for two weeks, he used up part of his vacation to help out. Whenever I was interested in something he taught me about it or showed me how to find out about it by looking it up long before we had such a thing as the internet.

He was very active in the church and the Knights of Columbus. He was always tabbed to be the treasurer or some other thankless job. He was always about doing the work and not about getting the credit. To this day I meet people who come up to me and tell me how he helped them with some problem in their life. Immigration or taxes or just a letter they needed to compose for their kids to go to college. People still remember him vividly and he will have been gone for twenty one years this August 15th.

Most of what I know about being a man I learned from him. How to treat people. How to be a son. How to be a friend. How to be a dad. How to be a grand dad.

I miss him every day and think about him more than you can know. Tonight I am going to have a Reingold. I will even watch a little of a Met's game for him.

If your dad is alive, give him a kiss and thank him for what he has done you. If your dad has passed, say a prayer for him.

Happy Father's Day Daddio. I love you.