A Parent's Pride

            Through no fault of our own, my father and I got caught up in a cold war.  On the one side was someone who had lost his own father at the age of 13 months; dropped out of school after the seventh grade; and spent a lifetime working.  Fire engine, delivery truck, assembly line—Ed Bukowski did his job without complaint or regard to his safety and health.  And so God rewarded him with a hippie of a son, in so far as seventeen years of Catholic education and living at home allowed me to be a hippie.

            If it wasn’t a cold war, it was a Venus-and-Mars thing.  I talked civil rights at the dinner table, he fought fires while being shot at.  Our common ground was being father and son.  Otherwise, who knows what might have been said or done?

            As Mark Twain said of his own father, I was amazed by how much the old man learned the older I got.  Age allowed me to see the extraordinary sacrifices this man had endured for his family, whether working the assembly line at Ford on Torrence Avenue to help his mother with the mortgage or putting me through college.  I probably never told him that just as he probably never told me he what he thought of my being a writer.  But he did say something toward the end of his life after yet another hospital stay.  I was picking him up to go home, and there was another patient, an elderly woman, who had no one to take her.  Seeing her wait for the bus, my father allowed, “I don’t know what I’d do without you and your sister.”

            My daughter isn’t a big fan of Mark Twain, and she has her doubts about my ever figuring out electronic devices, but she’s learned as she was taught and as I was taught.  This week, she went to a wake for a person who should have been too young to die; she also made sure other members of the Elmhurst softball team went to pay their respects.  Yesterday, though she didn’t have to, Clare also attended the funeral service.  This is how a team captain should act. 

            I look to be set in old age.