An Old Coot wishes his pop a Happy Father’s day!
by Merlin Lessler
I stumbled on an old picture of my father the other day.
It lay hidden for decades in a box of memorabilia. It was taken in 1970, a few
months before he died. He was sixty-eight. Something about the picture struck a
chord in me. It looked familiar in a new way. Then it dawned on me. I’ve been
seeing a semblance of his face in my mirror for several years, when I really
looked. Usually, I’m not paying close attention; I see myself in a memory haze.
We all do. None of us can believe how old we really are. Even a thirty-year-old
sees a younger face in the mirror. Every once in a while the haze clears and
we’re startled. “Who the heck is that?” That’s the way it was for me when I
looked at my father’s picture. He’d been appearing in my mirror of late and I
didn’t know it.
I was in my twenties when he died. His face
showing up in my mirror has been a long time coming. So long that I didn’t
expect it. It’s why the long-lost snapshot gave me such a start. I came face to
face with my mortality. I can remember being irked with him when he died. The
national life expectancy for a male at the time was sixty-nine. He died short
of the mark. I thought he should have stayed around longer. We’d just started
to develop a nice friendship. The salad days of suffering through the “old
man’s” unsolicited advice had finally worn away; we both had come to realize
that each had a unique perspective on life, to value, to treasure. Then he was
gone.
Now it’s my turn. The face in my mirror is
looking very much like his. I’ve got to hang on longer than he did. My son is a
few years from discovering that his “old man” is okay. I can’t rush the
process. I couldn’t with his sisters and I can’t with him. He won’t grow up right
unless he goes through the transition, rejects the nurturing and flies from the
nest. It’s nature’s way and you can’t mess with Mother Nature.
My father would be 111 if he were still alive. I
know he would get a real kick out of the technology we take for granted today.
He was a technocrat himself, an inventor. His name is on dozens of the patents
for Ansco cameras. He loved to tinker, especially with cars. His favorite
vacation was driving us to the Jersey shore. We almost always ran into car
trouble. He’d somehow patch things together so we could limp to the motel.
While we enjoyed the beach he took on the car problem. He’d spend all day
leaning in, or lying under, the vehicle. If you stood within hearing range
you’d hear him yell, “Sucker,” every once in a while, when his hand slipped off
the wrench and he skinned his knuckles. He never swore; he just yelled
sucker. The whole thing is easier to
understand when you realize that our car was a Ford Edsel. He bought it brand
new, the first year they made it. He liked being on the cutting edge. It was
the lemon of the century. The repair bills added up. He didn’t care. He loved
it. I did too. It was the car I got to drive when I turned sixteen.
It was one of the few things we agreed on during
my teen years. When I bought my first car, a well used, 1953 Ford convertible,
for sixty dollars, it made two things we agreed on. It made me a Ford man too.
Cars had magic in those days. They brought fathers and sons together, under the
hood, taking on the beast. It was a time when a regular Joe could fix a car -
change the spark plugs, replace the generator, adjust the brakes. You could
even pull the engine and overhaul it if you were especially handy. The
automobile had a social context. That’s gone now. The manufacturers have put
the backyard mechanics out of business. The secrets of today’s automobiles
can’t be passed on from father to son. The secrets are locked up in computer
chips and buried in a web of pollution control components. Even the design
engineers aren’t sure how it all works.
It’s too bad. Cars helped fathers and sons stay in touch through the
difficult teen years. Now that bridge is gone. Happy father’s day Pop! I hope
the Edsel is hitting all eight cylinders.
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| me and my dad at my 2nd birthday |
my father at his desk at Ansco
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