Emotionally Distant. Morally Questionable.

The son of Portuguese Brazillian immigrants, my dad grew up during the depression, and after dropping out of school in the sixth grade, this dirt poor little boy grew to be a slightly less than dirt poor man. What does a sixth-grade dropout do with his life? He finds work at the various mills that used to soil the skies of Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts, back in the 1930s.

Being dyslexic wasn’t a widely known thing back then, and being a bit challenged gave rise to some creative thinking. “Ambidextrous,” my dad would proclaim every time something required the other hand. My brother, Bruce, figured that being forced to be right-handed when naturally left-handed caused the dyslexia. Jury’s still out on that logic.

Growing up in the streets was a hard life for a little Portagee. Run with the rough boys, or be their target. My dad, Henry, was a bit of a runt, so, despite his older brother Alfred’s best attempts, Henry rolled with the toughies. Dad was never too specific about what sort of shenanigans that entailed, and by the time I was old enough to ask questions, he was old enough to have a hard time remembering.

Dad used to speak as a point of pride how he lied about his age in order to join the Navy in what my math tells me was 1941 or 1942. Apparently, young men of seventeen could enlist with parental consent, eighteen-year-olds without. Since he said he lied, either he was pretending to be eighteen, or he forged the consent form. I never did find out which. What I was told, on more than one occasion, was how he ended up on a Subchaser taking out U-Boats. He also regaled me with tales of the Battle of the Aleutian Islands, which he took part in. The history was always vague in that the keywords stuck in my head, but not a lot of details came with them. I do remember him claiming to be near Iwo Jima when that went down, as well as off the coast of Japan when the A-Bombs decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said only officers were allowed to bring home Japanese rifles (and other souvenirs), but he was buddies with one who managed to get him one. That gun sat, wrapped in oilcloth, in the attic of his first home after the war until he felt it was unsafe to keep with children in the house.

By the time Henry became my dad in 1970, he had already been married and had five children with his first wife and another with his second. I was kid number seven and the last born. Child number six was my brother, Bruce, born out of wedlock between Marianne and Lillian. My mother, Lillian, had three from her first marriage as well. A weird, wide age range of ten kids seemed to come and go as they needed a place to live. As the baby, the stories of varying degrees of questionable treatment only trickled into my ears years later.

As you might imagine, a middle-school dropout, and WWII Navy Veteran with potentially as many as ten mouths to feed, struggled to do so. Times were lean. Dad had the experiences of depression-era frugality to guide his thrift and the ingenuity of a dyslexic, ambidextrous street urchin to inform his fatherhood. If you recall that story in the Bible when Jesus fed 5,000 with just five loaves and two fish, then you understand how a man can boil ten gallons of generic spaghetti, douse it with one jar of Ragu and feed a family for a month. Let’s not get started on the recycled paper plates or the freezer filled with government cheese and ten-cent pot pies.

After the war, Dad found work selling cars. Austin-Healeys at first, and for some reason, Amphicars (an amphibious, West German car-boat) were what he sold until just before I came along. Despite the ten mouths, he managed to save enough to buy his own used car lot. ‘Mil Motors,’ he called it, after my grandmother Mildred. Why? No clue.

I remember days when I went to work with my dad, and although the whole place smelled of cigarette ash and grease, I always found dirty coffee cans of nuts and bolts to play with. Dad was artistic, too. That part of his brain, unencumbered-by-school-learning, soaked up so many other real-world skills over the years. When we would have to leave the car lot to pick up parts or another car, he would put these hand-drawn signs in the office window. All I wanted as a kid was to watch my dad draw a giant hand ‘picking up a car’ for the window. This inspired me to develop my own artistic skills.

I wish I could say, ‘my dad followed his dreams and lived a wonderful life,’ but I think that would be a false memory. He may have lived the typical post-war American life, but I don’t know what his dreams really were. He was a man that could draw, paint and play any instrument by ear. He could fix anything that broke. Whether that was car motors, bodywork, or repairing vinyl seats with patches from ladies' purses bought at a thrift store. I can’t tell you how many times he fixed the busted heating elements in his clothes dryer with wire coat hangers. Actually, I can, it was six.

In my eyes, he truly was a Renassaince man. A Jack of All Trades, Master of None. This bland variety of common-sense skills was his most significant asset and the thing I learned the most from him. The ability to make it work with or without help, with or without parts/tools. Creative thinking. Something that some folks painfully lack.

He had an exceptionally strong will. He believed in mind over matter. If you told him it couldn’t be done, he’d prove you wrong every time. He was a Johnnie Walker man, a Benson & Hedges man. When the doctor said stop drinking, stop smoking, or it’ll kill you, he just did. No relapses. No whining or complaining. We moved to Florida in 1985 and while the heart issues persisted, this man, living with a pacemaker on the remaining forty percent of his original heart, would often dig swimming pool sized holes in our yard to make a pit to burn and bury the roots and stumps he’d cleared by hand. I don’t think I need to remind anyone that Florida is very hot.

I was never sure exactly what motivated him to do everything himself, the hardest way, the cheapest way, and I can’t quite figure out why I am just like him in that regard. As I get older, I wonder if there was some sort of guilt, or self-loathing, perhaps related to leaving his first wife or the impact it had on his kids. No one is perfect, right? I think he did the best he could, considering the tools he had. I think his struggles shaped the choices he made and the actions he took, and that’s true for us all.

Not everyone becomes their father or mother. Not everyone learns to be or not be those things that are good or bad, and while my life seems to have mirrored certain aspects of his, I must take responsibility for my own actions. Is it genetic? Maybe a little. That kind of thinking takes the edge off, just a little, anyway. I am my father’s son, and I’m proud to say so.