Daddy-O

A Fond Recollection

You can’t count on me for sentimentality. I have a sardonic edge which I’m not always happy about, but there it is. The Hallmark holidays pull me in a different direction and offer an opportunity to remember the past in a more sanguine light. It’s just another filter, I tell myself. No need to choose between comedy and tragedy. Just take a road and see where it leads. So this Father’s Day, I find myself drawn to revisiting my daddy, Sidney Rosenberg, who died forty-five years ago. I resist the temptation to orchestrate an overarching story to tell. People arrive at a particular time in history and do what people do. Work, love, procreate, second-guess themselves. I’m not interested in shape as much as texture. I want to remember what it felt like to be with him. So much time has passed that a special effort has to be made to bring him back into focus. He stood 5’4” in his stocking feet and used rubber bands to keep the sleeves on his shirts above his wrists to accommodate his short arms. He always smelled like the shaving cream he lathered on his face with a brush. Not subject to any of the usual vices, his greatest weakness was junk food…most of all Carvel, the ancestor of Dairy Queen. My father, Manhattan man, didn’t drive but whenever we went on an excursion upstate in a two-tone Chevy with some uncle or other, we would of necessity stop at a Carvel. I’d say he was never so happy as when he was slurping a vanilla cone held in his left hand, the ersatz ice cream dripping onto the silk tie he wore at all times, while playing a word game on the back of a discarded envelope with his right hand. We spent untold hours, whole months it would seem, making lists of short words that could be found inside of a long word. Metropolitan was his favorite. We loved hangman and all games that could be played in the back seats of cars on long, fearsomely boring trips in the Catskills. 

My mother and father in 1940

When he died in 1978, John Travolta was on the dance floor. Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the Russians were in Afghanistan. For me, it’s a time that’s both nearby and far away. I was thirty-three and newly in love. My son was seven, still small enough to climb onto my father’s hospital bed when we came down to visit him in the city and still tender enough to cry when I told him that his grandfather would likely be dying soon. Daddy was only seventy-five which seems young now that I’m seventy-eight, but he had lived through three-quarters of the screaming century and just wasn’t up for Reagan. My father was a ‘20s kind of guy. He met my mother, graduated from CCNY and Harvard Law School in that bathtub gin-infused decade. They told jokes and passed their enthusiasm for game-playing down to me as well as their encyclopedic knowledge of American popular music going back to vaudeville and World War I marching songs. If we ran out of word games and had already counted a great many license plates from different states mounted on hulking Buicks and Pontiacs that were passing by, we would break into “Smile, Smile, Smile” or “Margie” or “Baby Face.” This music was on the radio. Everybody knew these songs. They were shared across generations and were designed to keep people from worrying about the reality of trench warfare and the bread lines that followed. My father believed in the culture, Buchenwald notwithstanding. He believed in the American project and assumed a rosy future despite the fact that his Harvard education didn’t pan out and he ended up peddling ladies’ dresses and later dinner plates. 

Sidney at Harvard, mid-twenties

My mother was a force to be reckoned with. At home, my father did what he was told. I didn’t understand the dynamic when I was small but I knew he had his territory and she had hers. In his shop, which became an antiques store with a reputation for fine porcelain and silver, he was top dog. Dealers came from as far away as Texas to see what treasures he had set aside for them.  Beyond that, he was a fiendish bridge player and clearly the man in charge whenever the huge family of his ten siblings, their partners and children would gather. The fancy education and the silk ties gave him a certain cachet if not a corner office or an investment portfolio. I don’t think he expected more than that. He was satisfied with a Hollywood tearjerker that allowed him to cry in a dark movie theater and a dish of something so sweet your teeth would hurt just watching him eat it. When I allow myself a sentimental moment, it’s because I am his daughter. The salt in our tears originates in the same ocean.

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