I lick and stick fifty-eight cents worth of postage on every envelope I mail despite the fact that forty-four cents is sufficient. I’m not in the habit of showering undue generosity upon bloated government bureaucracies nor am I trying to impress my letter carrier with an ostentatious display of postal excess. I just have a lot of twenty-nine cent stamps.
When my father died, I inherited a veritable cornucopia of postal commemoratives to hobbies, music, and history preserved indelibly on sheets of scored, gummed paper. (For the younger readers, “gummed paper” is a phenomenon of a more primitive age, before the overindulged MTV generation grew into whiny, self-absorbed impostors of adulthood demanding self-adhesive stamps to save the whales, horses, shoe leather or whatever it is that manually operated, saliva-activated glue comes from.) Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, marines on Guadalcanal, scuba divers, bloated puffer fish and grinning dolphins: if there’s a “29” in the corner, I’ve got ‘em. A lot of ‘em.
My postmaster, a hardnosed librarian-esque overlord of all things bundled, sealed and stamped has assured me that I can’t exchange them for new stamps. And I mean “assured” in the “if you ask me just one more fucking time I swear that as certainly as I’m cloaked in this something-vaguely-akin-to-paisley mu mu, I will call the sheriff” sense of the word. So I’m forced to use them two at a time, which is undoubtedly all part of some sinister plot concocted in the shadowy linoleum-clad halls of Post Office Central to extract more money from simple, unsuspecting glue lickers like me.
Why so many stamps? Maybe dad was a bit letter-happy back in 1993, but a scuba diver he was not. Most assuredly he was no fan of “crazy god-awful noise” like blues or country which became remarkably clear about seventeen seconds after I took up the electric guitar. Actually, I hadn’t known him to favor any particular musical genre, although the “Charlie’s Angels” theme was a perennial favorite. (I suspect this had more to do with Jaclyn Smith’s breasts than with musical composition.) I can only surmise that like so many of his generation who grew up in leaner times, he had a penchant for stocking up on whatever was available, to which the nine cases of liquor in our glass-of-wine-only-on-the-holidays household stood as bold testament.
To be sure, postal preferences aren’t high on the list of things a son treasures about his father’s memory, but somehow these innocuous pieces of sticky paper served as a gateway toward profound insights about my dad as a person and a human being rather than simply a father.
I don’t mean simply in the sense of “merely.” Rather, as a child my dad occurred to me as the mythical ideal of a father, not simply the decent, committed, faithful man busting his hump to make a good life for his family. Eventually every son’s fantasy of father as Hero, the stalwart invincible protector of home and family, fragments piece by fragile piece, splintered by the trivial yet incessant attacks of day-to-day life. My fantasy began to fracture in high school.
I came home one spring afternoon to news that my grandmother had died several hours earlier. Seated in dad’s favorite avocado green recliner, a piece that shouldn’t have survived the seventies yet had managed to drag its shredded carcass well into the eighties, I waited for him to return from work. Dangling dad’s favorite decrepit baby-shit tan corduroy slippers off my toes, I wondered what it’d be like to lose a mother. My own mom, an overly compassionate woman who couldn’t bear to see any living thing suffer sat on the couch close by. Her uncharacteristic silence belied the tumult raging in her sweet-tempered heart.
The familiar low-pitched rumble of the garage door opener announced dad’s arrival, followed soon thereafter by the pop and metallic click of the lock as he entered through the kitchen. Before he had managed to close the door behind him mom blurted out “Grandma Anna has died,” no longer able to contain within her gentle soul the fireball of emotional demolition fate had tapped her to lob.
Seated with my back to the door, not quite ready to bear witness to my father’s pain, I felt my heart cramp up in a doughy, twisted knot as his voice cracked softly, turning upward in pitch with a slight air of confusion. “Died?”, he repeated, obviously failing to choke back his tears.
I don’t recall what happened next. My memory stalls, frozen in time at that fragile moment of sorrowful disbelief in his voice, the lilting sadness, a child-like whimper bespeaking vulnerability that I had never before witnessed in this paragon of emotional control. I remember that one short utterance and to this day my heart breaks for him all over again. In that moment he wasn’t my father; he was my grandmother’s son, a child who had just lost his mom. And in that moment he became human to me. We were both sons now.
It wasn’t until my late twenties that the seed of my father’s humanity planted that day would finally sprout into living, breathing understanding. I was home for the holidays, taking a short respite from my usual role of unjustifiably dissatisfied, over-privileged and under-appreciative asshole. Realizing that I knew almost nothing about the man who had done so much and asked so little, I decided it was time for a sincere father/son chat. This wouldn’t be easy.
Not one to reveal much about himself, dad wasn’t particularly versed in heart-to-heart discussion. He was “old school” 1930’s European, not even vaguely resembling late twentieth century mushy-spined new-age ilk, emasculated hypersensitive twits who spew forth their every precious thought and feeling like do-do birds regurgitating fishy pabulum for their young. Dad was a practical, logical man. No frills, no idle chit-chat and the only hair product he owned was a roll of masking tape. He’d stick down a strip over his slicked back Elvis hairdo to keep the wind from blowing the hair into his eyes when mowing the lawn. That is, until mom finally talked him into using far less obvious “invisible” cellophane tape, the one concession he made to her finer aesthetic sensibilities.
It was Christmas Eve with everyone settled comfortably in the living room, gifts unwrapped, coffee brewing. Mom was laughing, most likely about nothing in particular, just laughing because, well, that’s just who she was. The consummate hostess, cloaked in a tastefully understated beige wool skirt and blouse she had embroidered herself, my mother couldn’t help but laugh, a release valve, I suppose for her overbrimming supply of good cheer and optimism.
Dad came alive at times like these, animated by the radiant glow of the woman he’d loved, adored, and cherished since the moment he set eyes upon her almost four decades earlier. Reserved as he was most of the time, around company he could be quite lively, engaging everyone with his cornball humor. Mom completed him, a bottomless well of lightheartedness from which he could draw to complement, or perhaps offset his rather impassive facade. I seized the opportunity afforded by the holiday spirit and invited him for a heart-to-heart.
We shuffled hesitatingly into the front room for some privacy. Suddenly I grew terrified. Heart pumping furiously, arteries throbbing in my neck, blood gushing through strained veins so fast I thought my eardrums might pop. I was in uncharted territory, taking on the task of intimacy with a man I barely knew and had feared my whole life.
Dad was always good to me, but we tend to fear what we don’t understand. A cavernous forty year generation gap had entrenched itself between us, a chasm chock-full of misunderstanding and tempers lost, the inevitable shrapnel strewn from an explosive mix of old world expectations for obedience rubbing up against the rebelliousness of a stubborn free-willed son. I was making my first attempt to cross that chasm, woefully underequipped for the journey, armed only with the desire to communicate my feelings for him. I wanted to give something back to the man who had given me everything.
Immediately I sensed his discomfort. In our conservative old world Ukrainian home the air was often thick with the unspoken and this time was no exception. “What is this about?” he must have wondered. Was I in trouble? Whom had I knocked up? Had I concocted yet another hare-brained scheme begging for the old man’s financial sponsorship?
Clad in the blue version of his two favorite polyester Sansabelt trousers and his inseparable companion, a wool-lined suede vest once tan but now worn to a slick and shiny deep chocolate brown, he plopped down in an ergonomically-devoid yet ornately carved chair my mom had displayed in the front room, her little museum of knick-knacks and family heirlooms. I’m not sure whether he sighed from the discomfort of sitting in a chair not designed for actual sitting, or simply to brace himself for what might be coming. I didn’t give it much thought. At his age, my dad’s body had a tendency to casually liberate peculiar sounds that only youth and better health could more reliably restrain.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I intentionally placed myself beneath him, a token affirmation that despite his age and my taller height, I was still only half the man he was. I started to speak, struggling, anxiety playing hell with the stutter I’d had since the age of six. I was dancing tentatively now, scared witless out on the skinny branches, unstable, shaky, unfamiliar. But I was looking for the fruit and out there, far from the safety and stability of the trunk, is where it grows.
I said I wanted to know more about him. What was it like growing up in Ukraine, starved under Stalin’s diabolical rule? What games did he play? Who were his friends? How did he get to America? Who were my great grandparents?
Silence. He looked up as though searching for something, then closed his eyes. His head drooped forward and down, as though the muscles in his neck, suddenly aware of what was coming had given up, retreating from the frighteningly unfamiliar. Then a sharp uptake of air through his nostrils and a forward thrust from his belly: A sob in the making.
Time stands still, an emotional eternity passes. Still no words. Then tears. Not the smattering of moisture that occasionally breaks free from the rigid grasp of a man well practiced in holding back emotion, but the honest unabashed sobs of a father who could no longer contain decades of nagging, parasitic doubt about his son’s feelings.
In a flash of insight triggered by his release I realized my own failures as a son. This was no mere insight but an abominable vision of whom I had been for him all those years, as though a thick, choking fog had suddenly engulfed my soul, upon which some angel, or demon, projected an inescapable 360 degree hologram of my ugliness. There I was going about my life, self-absorbed, taking for granted my father’s generosity, love and dedication to family, expressing no prior interest in him. Taking taking taking. Always taking. Now I needed to give.
What is love but to take heartfelt interest in another? To care, to pay attention, to strive for a glimpse of their soul. Yes, I cared about my father. I appreciated his sacrifices and his hard work. I scribbled “I love you” in every birthday and Father’s Day card. I bought him cologne he’d never use, gloves he’d never wear, doo-dads he’d never pull out of the box after Christmas. But had my father ever felt my love? Had I ever made it real for him?
On that day I did. He’d been waiting for it all my life and in that instant the painful yearning overwhelmed his stoic facade, like tumultuous floodwaters no longer willing to tolerate the artificial restraint and puny efforts of a man made dam. So too did his need to be heard overcome his usual silence. He spoke freely, between tears, of childhood trials with severe asthma, of family and friends lost to Stalin’s purges, of witnessing loved ones undeservedly carted off by the secret police in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. So much became clear to me now. What I perceived as faults, what I had thus far failed to understand about him began to make sense.
My father detested sports. Now I understood why. What small boy, crippled by severe asthma wouldn’t develop a reflexive loathing to the arena in which he was undoubtedly mercilessly shamed and taunted by children whom nature had chosen to equip more suitably? A boy first wins confidence and wrestles into his position in the cruel pecking order of boyhood on the playground. How could my dad compete in a game he was unfairly predisposed to lose?
Silence, emotional distance: Traits of an unfeeling man unwilling to display vulnerability? Hardly. To dad, silence meant survival. He barely knew his own family. Growing up in a place where loved ones were routinely “disappeared” for any indiscretion or cross-eyed glance at the pathetic results of the Glorious Soviet Revolution, my father was denied routine childhood inquisitiveness.
In Stalinist Ukraine, adults spoke little and revealed still less to children for fear that their innocent playground talk would lead to a visit from the KGB. Stalin’s thugs-in-trench coats relied upon hearsay to sniff out alleged enemies of the state, like pigs rooting for truffles, guided only by the flimsiest fleeting scent. Spineless neighbors routinely furnished rumors in exchange for a pat on the head and favored status with the local communist henchmen. A simple joke, a complaint about an empty belly (induced by Stalin’s forced starvation) could result in banishment to Siberian labor camps, perhaps worse.
Trust no one. Say nothing. The less you know, the longer you live. In my father’s world, silence and emotional withholding translated into self-preservation and survival for friends and family. How could he have learned any other way? How could he have turned out any differently?
As a child I was forbidden to leave the dinner table until my plate was clean. My obstinance and free-willed nature resulted in hours spent alone hovering over a partially-full plate, silently raging over the grave injustice of being forced to eat what I didn’t want. But my father’s attitude was born of a time when dinner was random, unscheduled and unreliable, dependent entirely upon whether someone had managed to scrounge up a morsel of food. Pickiness was a luxury hungry children could ill afford. What I perceived as a tyrannical effort to break my will occurred to my father as gratitude and respect for the seemingly endless bounty available to us here in the land of plenty.
Suddenly the man who made my skin crawl when sucking the last bit of marrow out of every chicken bone was transformed into the grateful and generous provider who’d never allow his family to do without. My father appreciated the last, miniscule fragment of food on his plate in a way that only a starving child could. He just wanted for me to understand.
And understand I did, finally. One short conversation inspired by love and the desire to touch another’s soul, and an entire universe of compassion had opened to me. On that day I began to truly appreciate my father’s humanity. In subsequent years I’d find myself solving more of the riddles that were my dad. Many of his quirks, some of them now finding renewed expression in me, began to make sense.
I had wondered why a man of relative means would waste time and energy fixing the seemingly unfixable, forcing still more mileage out of a toaster that had long since surpassed its right to eternal rest in household appliance heaven. I found myself doing the same.
In a disposable society where repairs, oil changes, health, most everything is outsourced to “professionals”, my father and I found pride and confidence in self-reliance. He came from a place where nothing was thrown out because so little was available. Naturally predisposed to an apocalyptic mindset, I often find myself worrying that society will soon collapse, thereby rendering new toaster acquisition unlikely. But I’ll make it no matter what, just like dad. I’ll have toast come hell or high water. (I like to think of this as normal behavior for children of war survivors. I prefer not to think that I was born with several of the more important screws torqued to slightly less than optimal levels.)
Sometimes I wondered how much I’d never know about him. And one day while licking my newfound bounty of twenty-nine cent stamps I saw my dad. Not physically, of course. He had died by then. But I envisioned him at the post office buying those stamps. Temporarily released from the shackles of habitual family interaction, (we learn our roles early and play them for life), undoubtedly he joked around with the clerk, animated and lively, the way he was around house guests. This was his exclusive world, far from family expectations and roles to play.
In four decades it had never occurred to me until that moment that my father had lived an entire life outside of our family: His office, his practice, his patients. Of course I had always known this, but I’d never truly grasped its depth: That for forty hours a week he lived in a world entirely foreign to me.
I could see him back at the office putting away the stamps and tending to business. This place was all his. He built it. An immigrant on the run from World War II, he fled his homeland and arrived at Ellis Island not knowing English. In time, neither asking nor receiving help from anyone, he put himself through school, obtaining first a degree in engineering and years later graduating top of his class from the University of Michigan Dental School while juggling a full time job, wife and child, and another on the way. He was the American Dream incarnate.
I envisioned him standing in his office, beaming, proud and strong. This was the little empire he had built through sheer will, tenacity and hard work. He wasn’t just my dad anymore but a man whom I admired, a man worthy of anyone’s admiration.
Actually, my dad most likely never indulged himself with pride. He was too humble and decent for that. Perhaps I was projecting my own pride upon his memory. But he deserved to be proud and I wished that he had been. And happy. I felt so deeply for him in that moment, so sorry that he had helplessly watched the love of his life reduced to a lifeless shell by cancer, so sorry for his lonely suffering in the two years spent without her before finally succumbing himself. I hoped that he had harbored no regrets and that he’d known what a good man he was. It nourished my heart and made me whole to imagine him standing there, just a decent man satisfied with his life, proud of his family, aware of his extraordinary accomplishments.
In that moment all my thoughts, questions, and memories had come full circle, wrapped up neatly within the unlikely prism of a postage stamp, projecting a complete, perfect image of the man he was. I finally understood my father as a person, a man with his own life, his own history, feelings, passions, triumphs and failures, the extraordinary ordinary man in the street. This was my dad; a man with many stamps and so very much more. He was human, so very human. And my hero.
Mark …
You are an excellent writer. I’m really glad I took the time to read this! xo
Elizabeth