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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