Friday, June 19, 2020

Art Heals: Fathers


I have a little collection of penguins. Glass, wood, porcelain.  You know how that goes—you  buy one and a friend sees it and suddenly everyone is giving you penguins until they take over your bookshelves and eventually find their way into a box at the back of the closet.  But whenever Father’s Day comes around, I think about penguins.  One in particular,  the male emperor penguin. After the female of the pair lays her egg, she passes it to the male, who balances it on his feet, tucked under a pouch of skin, to keep it warm in the Arctic cold.  The female then leaves to forage for food.  Father penguin stands with that egg on  his feet for up to 64 days.
I think about this because my favorite memory of my late father is, when I was little, maybe about 6 or 7,  he would place my feet on his feet, and dance with me.  Music was informal in our house.  My father played what we called the mouth organ, which I later learned was a harmonica, loosely translated from the German.  His prized possession was a record player, that played the large format LPs. Every Christmas and birthday a new record would appear.  Italian and German popular songs, later in English (“Volare” was a big hit), musicals.  We would take it with us on our annual vacation from Chicago to a cabin we rented every year on a small lake in Wisconsin.  There  my dad would play music while he made gnocchi and ravioli by hand in the kitchen; I rounded up the kids my age from neighboring cabins to watch and assist in kneading the dough amidst clouds of flour. 
As I grew older, I spent less time with him—he worked long hours and had a 2-hour each-way commute.  I later learned that he put in the extra hours in order to get the Christmas bonus and various productivity awards, which were used to buy us holiday gifts.  During high school and college summers, he got me a  job at his company, and we commuted together.  My mother was talkative, especially in the morning—my dad and I were taciturn, not speaking at all during breakfast and the morning car ride.  But the afternoon  ride home was lively, as we discussed the doings of the day.  The company was located in the south side of Chicago, and provided my first introduction to African Americans. (I later learned that all my black supervisors in those years had been promoted to their positions by my father—black supervisors being a rarity in those days.) The office I worked in had about 50 desks, each occupied by a woman with an electric adding machine rapidly calculating strings of numbers all day long.  Rapidity was valued, and  I tried my best, but in my zeal I  blew up the  machine, setting the paper tape on fire.  The next summer I was given a different job. By now my dad had risen in the company, and had  access to the Executive Dining Room.  Once a  summer I was allowed to invite one of my co-workers to dine with him there. (I later learned that along with promoting African Americans, he also integrated the Executive Dining Room.  And many years later, he told me about the prejudices he himself had to overcome, suspicions about his accent and his Egyptian background.)  He really wasn’t a talker, especially not about himself.  Later when I moved away, when I would call and he answered the phone, there was a quick hello and then “I’ll get your mother.”  But we had good talks in the car when he picked me up from the train, and later from the airport.  Maybe he remembered the commutes.   I have lots of other great memories—parties in the yard where he recreated the Nile river and the pyramids,  an every-year birthday cake he baked that was a hazelnut torte with seven layers, each fragile section spread upon the bottom of a springform pan. 
Every father-child relationship is unique.  Every father expresses himself  in his own way.  But each balances his  children on his feet as best he can.  Happy Father’s Day.

This is Father and Son, by Zahi Khamis.  Art Heals.



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