A Tribute to My Dad in Heaven
My dad has been gone now for eight years. It’s hard to believe when I can still vividly hear his booming voice and infectious laugh.
Just a few days ago, I was talking to my friend Earl and I mentioned something about my dad. Earl made me so happy when he told me that the stories I have shared about my dad, make him want to be a better father.
I had no idea the impact of my stories, but upon reflection, I realized my dad was constantly imparting such amazing life lessons on us.
My dad was an amazing storyteller and we were a captive audience. I learned about grit and hard work, the importance of honesty and above all, the true meaning of love.
He grew up in the Bronx during The Depression to immigrant parents who always struggled. To make money, my dad would go around the city and collect junk that had value, like scrap metal and sell it for pennies. He got creative and made money doing odds and ends.
When he saved enough, he proudly took his two sisters to the movie theater.
That theme of his willingness to share his mere earnings has stuck with me forever and I know his generous spirit rubbed off on his children.
I’ll never forget during my senior year of college, I was flat broke. One weekend, my sister, who had already graduated, came for a visit.
One of my dad’s favorite things to do was to hand one of us a $50 bill and say, “Take your sister to lunch.”
We had a great weekend together, but I can’t tell you what we did other than that lunch.
However, after she left, I noticed a note on my pillow. She wrote me a short letter and included $100. I was so poor that those $100 made me feel like I had won the lottery.
Her thoughtfulness made me cry and I recall thinking, “That is such a daddy thing to do.”
When I was a kid, his example of always doing the right thing was a theme that played over and over again.
He loved to tell the story of when he was coaching my brother’s little league team and after one of the games, he took the team to an ice-cream shop. He told the kids to order whatever they wanted, his treat.
After he thought he had paid for everyone, one kid said proudly that the cashier forgot to ring up his ice-cream order.
My dad got angry and told him that's stealing and gave him the money to go up and pay.
He never sped, drank and drove or stole a dime in his life.
That moral code is so ingrained in who we are, it’s hard sometimes to bend a rule.
The upside is that I am now passing that playbook of ethics on to my kids and they are incredibly honest and good people.
My dad is probably the smartest person I have ever met in my whole life. He was a walking dictionary. There was not a word he couldn’t spell or didn’t know the meaning of.
At every holiday we would play Trivial Pursuit and his depth and breadth of knowledge of so many different subjects was beyond impressive.
But his incredible know-how was only a piece of the puzzle. He made every significant other and friend that joined us feel loved and welcome.
At the end of his life, his body started to fail him, but his mind was still brilliant. Every day he did The New York Times Crossword Puzzle, Sudoku’s and he read for hours a day.
My dad set the bar high for us. He would tell us there were only three acceptable grades we could get on our report cards: A+, A, and A-.
He was only half-kidding, but setting high expectations for us meant we all graduated with stellar grades and went on to great colleges.
Academics were only part of the equation. He pushed us to do our best in everything we were interested in and mostly, he encouraged us to be good people.
My dad was a career Marine and he was really tough on us. He was not always the most affectionate or expressive with his words, but his love was more than evident in his every day actions.
I never saw my dad cry a day in my life, but he was a rock when my mom got diagnosed with cancer and stepped up to be an amazing caregiver until she passed away.
All the tears he had been saving up were unleashed the day of her funeral.
His adoration for my mom was inspirational and my first example of true love. He taught us family above all else and every holiday, we would hold hands and cheer, “Blood is thicker than water.”
As tough as he was on us as kids, he was the most gentle grandpa. He loved his nine grandkids with a tenderness I never saw in him before.
He would make them ice-cream sundaes for dinner, read their favorite stories over and over again and my favorite image is of him playing Barbies on the floor with my niece, Cristina.
A rock of a man, a gem of a soul and the first man who ever showed me unconditional love.
He continues to inspire, cheer and love me from afar and I’m forever grateful he was my dad.
I like to think that today he and my mom are up in heaven, watching some Pavarotti and the Spain vs. Croatia game, sipping a Manhattan with extra cherries and looking down on the beautiful legacy he left behind.
RIP daddy, love you and miss you today, and always.