My father was the calm at the center of the storm

The other day I was putting my little grandson, Mr. Man, down for his nap. (His parents do not want his name or picture on social media, so he will be Mr. Man in this blog and his twin sister is Little Miss.) He lifted his arms to ask for a kiss, then he did something unexpected. He bowed his head so I could kiss the top of it. After I did, he lifted his head up and smiled, then dropped his head down so I could kiss the top of his head again. He repeated this several times before I could tear myself away and let him get on with his little snooze fest.

As I closed the door to the nursery, my eyes teared up. That little head movement brought back some very special memories of my father. Little Man has the same beautiful blue eyes as my dad. When he looked up at me from under those long lashes, I could feel my heartstrings tug all the way back through the years.

My father was not big on PDAs. He never put his arm around me, or kissed my forehead, or patted me on the back. He wasn’t cold and distant, just very shy and unsure how to show affection. Due to his upbringing, he simply wasn’t comfortable showing his love in such physical ways. His favorite way to show he loved Ma was to lightly smack her on the fanny and say, “Look at the size of that!” Just as Edith Bunker knew Archie calling her dingbat was a sign of affection, so my father’s little fanny smack was his. Ma was always a little embarrassed but a little pleased, too.

“Oh, Jimmy, cut that out,” she would say with an exasperated giggle.

Some nights, I needed to show Dad I cared about him, even if he had difficulty reciprocating the gesture. I would approach him as he sat on “his” seat on the couch (Sheldon Cooper has nothing on my dad when it comes to claiming ownership of the sofa). I would say good night, and he would bow his head so I could kiss the top of it. Never the forehead or cheek.

Where did Mr. Man learn to make that same little movement to get a kiss?

My father was the calm in the eye of the storm in our family. Ma would fly off the handle, consumed by the vagaries of her bipolar disorder. He was invariably quiet, centered, and unruffled. (With one exception. He refused to talk on the phone. He would literally stomp his feet and shout that he didn’t want to make the call. Even a Marine is entitled to his idiosyncrasies.)

If we misbehaved, Ma was likely to go off on a loud tangent decrying all of our past sins and faults.

Dad, on the other hand, would invariably respond with the dreaded, “I’m so disappointed in you.”

That hit so much worse than any of Ma’s tantrums.

He was a man of few words, definitely fitting the mold of the strong, silent type. He never lectured or pontificated. I never heard him swear or use a slur against any group. His verbal lessons on how to behave were simple and few.

“A lady never brushes her hair in public, and a lady never sits at the bar” were his rules for us girls to live by.

The real lessons I learned from him were by watching and listening very carefully for those rare moments when he revealed his moral and ethical core.

When he came home from work, he would read the paper and watch the news. That’s when I learned the most about what he believed in.

One thing that horrified him was the abuse of people in the South protesting Jim Crow laws. When he saw Bull Connor and his ilk turn the water cannons on people, he would growl, “I didn’t fight a war to see citizens cut down in the streets for simply wanting rights they deserve.”

His view on the protesters during the Democratic Convention in 1968, however, was decidedly less sympathetic.

“Cut your hair, and get a job!”

The sight of dead Marines brought out the most virulent response. Night after night the nightly body count in Vietnam reported on the news would be enough to set him off.

“Drop the bomb. Get it over with!”

He sounds reactionary from these examples, but he was a quiet, reserved intellectual sort. I never heard him raise his voice or threaten anyone, but he held his own in any group. When he spoke, he spoke from a place of honor and integrity. I think that was primarily because he thought before he spoke.

When asked a serious question, he would take a moment to clean his pipe, refill it, and light it. Only then, after he had marshalled his thoughts, would he answer.

His was a quiet strength, born of perseverance through adversity. Congestive heart failure took the life of his younger brother and the spark out of his mother, the war took away his ability to play music, and cancer took his life at an early age. Yet I never heard him complain.

His first act of bravery was to enlist in the Marines on his eighteenth birthday. He served in the south Pacific in the big one, WW Aye Aye. He was a radar operator, and he said he never left the ship. That was his story, and he stuck to it.

Every morning that I can remember, he woke up, put on his work uniform, drank his coffee, and left for a job that paid well but was dangerous and soul-sucking: repairing elevators in the housing projects of Chicago. That represented an entirely different kind of courage.

My parents had a huge fight the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. My mother begged Dad not to go to work because she feared the violence that might erupt in the projects.

He said he had to go. There would be elevators to fix, and he wasn’t going to be derelict in his duty because of fear.

“But they might shoot you!” Ma said.

He assured her that the people in the projects were smart enough to leave the tradesmen alone. No one wanted to walk down forty flights of stairs.

And so he went to work just like he did every day. And he came home safe that night, just like he always did.

“The people who live there are just like people anywhere,” he said to me later. “Most are good, some are bad. Mostly, they didn’t have opportunities.”

He may have been a Marine, but he was a pacifist at heart. He was never in a hurry to get into a fight, but he didn’t back down.

Here’s a famous story in our family lore. My parents lived with my mother’s parents and her three brothers when they first got married. Now, my dad was not a big, powerful guy, but my uncles and grandfather were.

One night at dinner, Uncles Tom and Cap got into a heated argument. As the story goes, Dad just kept eating. The argument got hotter. Dad just kept eating. Then, Uncle Tom went upstairs and returned with his service rifle, bayonet attached. Dad stopped eating. He got up, calmly removed the rifle from my uncle’s grip, and sat back down at the table, the rifle propped up next to him. He resumed eating. He never said a word during the entire exchange.

Do, don’t talk.

So as I gaze into Mr. Man’s brilliant blue eyes, I remember my father and all he taught me. I hope I can instill in my grandchildren that same idea that we all are equal in dignity if unequal in opportunity. And it is my duty to make sure my words match my actions, because those little children are paying attention to both.