The closest people to you in the whole world usually are your parents. And you really don’t know that much about them.
Oh, you have childhood memories, then later your interactions with them in your teens and later their old age, but sometimes you really don’t know as much about them as you do about other people in your life.
I was born dying, hemorrhaging critically. With no time for testing for compatibility, my father gave of his blood for me to live. Clearly, and dramatically, both parents gave me life!
My Mom was the caregiver at home all the time; my Dad was the provider, away all day working. Naturally, I was a mother’s boy!
I’m sure my father was deeply concerned about my health and life all during my somewhat troubled childhood health wise—but, like most men of his day, he didn’t express his love and concern through any great show of affection. Perhaps he hadn’t received much from his father either and so didn’t quite know how to express it.
He was a good provider, but we lived modestly—it was the years in the aftermath of the great depression, after all.
The first nine years of my life we lived in the Bronx, the mainland borough of New York City. I remember living in three different apartments. In those days, we moved frequently.
I remember, variously, things of my early childhood: the play pen I was placed in, the baby carriage I rode when I couldn’t walk much, and a few year later, toys and books.
I loved making things—first with simple blocks, then Lincoln logs, then an Erector set. I loved reading, too—childhood picture books soon gave way to reading boys’ adventure novels, even before starting school.
The great event when I was small was at Christmas when Dad set up the train set for the Christmas season.
They were large, accurate models of real trains, running around a circular track that Dad assembled. Later, when I got a little older, he let me help putting it together, but it was always stowed away after a while until the next Christmas season.
Dad once bought me a small sled for wintertime walks or sledding in the nearby park. It was exciting to glide down a one- or two-foot snow covered hill when you’re only a few feet tall yourself!
Although my mother, a Catholic, and my father, a Jew, had agreed to raise any children Catholic, I went to the local public school and, when old enough, to weekly “released time” classes in the local parish for religious instructions in preparation for first communion.
When I was a child, Dad worked as a traveling salesman, so he was often away. Mom took care of me on a day-to-day basis.
As a disciplinarian, he was more bark than bite. Mostly, it involved finishing my food at mealtime, and the threatening punishment was going straight to bed!
Dad aspired to have his own business, and in 1942 with a partner to co-finance (and a loan from one of his aunts) he bought an old building in downtown Yonkers to start a small factory to make knitted wool gloves.
I remember him showing my mother and me the layout plans for the factory and seeking reactions and input from both of us!
That’s when we moved to Yonkers, just a block or so past the New York City line, and first lived in a private house: Dad, Mom, me, and, at the time, my two-year-old baby sister.
I was very fortunate to have a father who cared for me during my early years—and always.
2 January 2021