We share the same name.
We shared the same deep love of books and reading; of enjoying the early morning hours before others are up, to watch the day, to listen and think. I have little left to me of my father's life except digitized photographs of him and my mother before they were married, an old Kodak camera, and his Merchant Marine registration book -- a wonderful, cracked-leather wallet book, with a brass clip lock. When I open it, I actually feel time in my hands. This is the single image that I believe represents him most: his eyes are somewhere we cannot really determine; it is a pose, and as well - a document of his concentration: his muscular arm seems caught in the instant of action. Or, is he impressing for the camera? I don't know who took the photograph. I look at it and think: how handsome, young, blond, and serious this man is. At this moment in time, I was not even a thought in his life; and I wonder what was.
I know that he loved being a seaman; most of what he ever spoke of were his memories of his merchant marine buddies, and the experiences at sea, traveling around the world. This photograph also shows its time: his arms are bare. Yet I only remembered my father's arms as completely covered in faded blue tattoos -- some of my first reading and seeing -- the names of countries, images of mermaids, anchors...and two astounding swallows in wing, one on each side of the expanse of his chest! A pig and a rooster -- two nautical goodluck charms which if tattooed on a sailor would prevent them from drowning -- the rooster meaning that you would live to see the dawn of a new day, and the pig for bounty and sustenance. On the tops of his fingers he had the words "HOLD" and "FAST"; a motto also for seamen, which reminded them to keep their grip as the ship was being bombed, lashed by winds and seas, or hailed with ice. Those very words were what I spoke of in my eulogy to my father at his wake, in 1981. Remarkably, many years later as I was watching the great, frightening "Night of the Hunter", there is a scene where the camera focuses on Robert Mitchum's clenched hands in the courtroom. On them were the very same words.
I know by family reminiscences that his own father was hell to live with. An angry Irishman. To everyone. My father never spoke of him, but everyone else who did never voiced a good word about this Irish grandfather of mine, who died by being crushed under the wheels of a horse-drawn cement truck one day on Second Avenue in New York City. He was screaming curses to the end I believe. But as with all family reminiscences, this has gone through a few revisions.
