I Never Wrote For My Father

A son sifts through the memories of a dad's love

"You're nobody till somebody loves you..."

Dad loved singing that song. But something quietly gnawed at him.

"Have you ever heard him sing?" he'd ask my mom when I was out of earshot. "Does he have a voice?"

My dad -- who had a great singing voice and an even greater love of using it -- was clearly itching to know if his only offspring had taken a swan dive into the family gene pool, or simply wiggled a toe in the shallow end.

I never even got the trunks on. Outside of clownish, exaggeratedly bad warbling for buffoonery's sake -- a ruse to avoid actually singing -- I had a tin larynx to match a tin ear.

To quote a movie I recall, I never sang for my father.

Not that my dad -- who longed to sing for a living but wound up selling wines, food, candies, clothes and bug spray and clerked in the basement of a bookseller to support his family -- ever imposed his great passion on his son, despite the great pleasure it would have given him to hear even a peep of my pipes ... Well, maybe not.

But I could write for my father. I just never did.

Whatever modest creativity I had rested in the printed word rather than the sung note. I could push a noun against a verb and make it look not awful on paper -- the stuff newspaper careers are made of. And so one was born, with all the misplaced ego.

"Hey, Dad!" I'd boast in my cub reporter days, proudly clutching a creased newspaper section, my byline immodestly thrust toward his eyeballs. "Look, I covered the school board -- they OK'd $10,000 for new textbooks!" He was proud, if not exactly thrilled by the details.

And even as the career progressed and the assignments grew glamorous -- interviews with celebrities, even a few he'd heard of! -- I knew it couldn't match the thrill he'd get from a son-to-pop performance of "Besame Mucho," a valentine direct from my heart to his that would have set his soul tingling, despite my raft of off-key clinkers.

But my strides were important to him because they were important to me. And I had taken his unfulfilled dreams of success -- a college education, a solid career and, most significantly, earning a buck doing what I love -- and fulfilled them. And that warmed him.

It also warmed me on a cold, devastating December night in New York when he was frozen in time at 79 -- fate walked him into the path of an oncoming car, and out of my life after 37-plus years, as 1994 was turning the corner to 1995. And it warms me still.

"... You're nobody till somebody cares ..."

He was not a textbook, made-for-TV father, my dad: a good man with sizable flaws who suffered bad breaks and hard knocks. A man who could have easily turned bad if not for the essential goodness in his heart that overruled the darkness. "I always thought it was amazing that he didn't turn into a hood or a gangster, considering his childhood," his sister once said, referring to his chip-on-the-shoulder upbringing in Newark, N.J.:

A loving mother but a father hit by a train when he was 4; an abusive step-father who belittled him but gave him gifts on holidays -- which he took back when holidays were over -- and who forced him to drop out of school to work for the family, despite his own successful business; a possible athletic scholarship that evaporated when he was yanked from the classroom, leaving him to look on as buddies got them instead; family fights that left him sleeping in cars; answering anti-Semitism with his fists.

He had a temper but never laid a finger on his family. Instead, he watched and read about boxing with religious zeal, and indulged a lifelong fascination with gangster movies and books -- judging from my high school-level psychology instincts, a safe, vicariously violent outlet for his darker impulses.

He could be stubborn, quick to judge, harshly opinionated. A friend dubbed him "the last angry man."

He was far from a saint. Then again, I always thought that saints -- the earthly variety -- needed little motivation to be saintly, given their, well, saintly dispositions. My dad struggled to keep his demons in check and live a loving life -- successfully -- to me, a true triumph of character.

And I never felt more loved by anyone.

"... You may be king and you may possess, all the world and its gold; but gold won't bring you happiness when you're growing old ..."

They met at a dance and married on May 9, 1954, after five years of dating -- it took that long for the knock-about guy from Jersey to be convinced he was good enough for the popular gal from the Bronx. She was pretty, many years his junior, and adored him. Good thing, too, because, temperamentally, they were polar opposites: she, diplomatic and demure; he, defensive and direct. They fought often. They loved deeply. Love always won by a knockout.

They were, in many ways, one soul, even reflected in the way they marked their return address on correspondence: Jer-Ri, as in Jerry and Rita.

Five days before their third anniversary, the stork dropped me off on their Bronx stoop.

" ... The world's still the same, you're never gonna change it; just as sure as the stars shine above ..."

Mostly I admired his ceaseless refusal to give in to life's disappointments, despite his daily grind of driving into New York's seedier neighborhoods every day to earn commissions -- and absorb rejections -- by peddling his products, and what Arthur Miller described in "Death of a Salesman" as "a shoeshine and a smile."

Mostly I remember the eternal little boy inside the world-weary man: The silly expressions ("I'll be back, I'm going to the bink-bank"); his nicknames for loved ones (nephew Peter was "Pietro" and niece Lori was "Loralie"); the way he was the only adult on the beach to cavort with the kids in the water, tossing them over his shoulder as they screamed in delight; the way he consistently cut through the tension in crowded, silent elevators, leaving smiles in his wake as he got off on his floor in our high-rise apartment building.

And there was the selflessness: The do-anything-at-anytime attitude toward my mom's parents, whom he adored, and who considered him a genuine son; the way he picked up, carried and cradled his sister-in-law, who was dying of cancer.

But above all, I remember the music. On a bandstand, sadness and regret melted away, leaving only ecstasy (the picture on this page is of him performing at his niece's wedding).

Despite his daily grind, many weekends he would play club dates around New York -- bar mitzvahs, weddings, confirmations -- for the money, sure, but mostly for the pure thrill of it. He would emerge from his bedroom a sleek, elegant vision in a black tux, proudly wheeling his upright bass fiddle to his car. He'd squeeze that sucker in some way, somehow, its bulky wooden neck invariably protruding from the passenger-side window as he criss-crossed the Brooklyn, George Washington and Verrazzano bridges for decades, singing his heart out to every corner of New York and New Jersey.

Fleetingly, he would be in heaven. Then it was back to reality. Back to peddling bug spray.

He always wondered: Why Frank Sinatra, and not him? Two tough guys from Jersey, two singers, born two months apart. A lucky break here, the right timing there, and who knows? And if not another Sinatra, then why not at least a career doing what filled his heart with inexpressible joy?

It wasn't to be. But he had a family and friends who truly loved him. Still do. Always will. And despite his morbid, self-lacerating jokes that no one would attend his funeral when the time came, many did.

" ... You're nobody till somebody loves you ..."

And so, after years of poetic, generic Hallmark sentiments that I finished off with hastily scrawled notes of affection and slipped into slightly scented envelopes, on this Father's Day I can say: I finally wrote for my father.

When I go back east to help my mom move west, I'll also return to that peaceful New Jersey hillside where he rests under a headstone that reads "Music in his Soul."

And I plan to sing for him, too.

"... So find yourself somebody to love."

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