Daddy

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton

There are so many images running through my mind, that I am not sure exactly where to begin. Not snapshots, perhaps more like mini-movies. I don't really know. Just images of Daddy.

Perhaps it's best to work as much in chronological order as I can, and try to bring clarity and cohesion to some of those images. Here are some of the things I see when I think of my father:

• Untangling the lights for the Christmas tree.
• Taking our pictures with a camera that had HUGE lights on it.
• Setting up the movie projector in the living room and patiently showing us the home movies he had taken of us.
• Going to the bakery with him after Mass on Sunday mornings.
• Communion breakfasts downstairs in the school hall with him & my older sister.
• Taking me clamming, and teaching how to clam both using a clam rake and my feet.
• Buying me a Sunfish because I wanted to sail on the bay.
• Coaching my brothers' Little League teams, while Mom, me, and my sister sat in the bleachers.
• Going to work with him on school holidays, and getting to eat lunch at the counter of a luncheonette, just like a grown up.
• Carrying me in his arms from the cabin in Connecticut down to the lake the summer I was 7 because I had mono and couldn't walk.
• Taking pictures of us in our Easter outfits, and on the first day of school every year, always coming out the front door and down the steps.
• Putting up an ice-skating rink of corrugated metal in the back yard for me, after Santa brought me that AND ice skates the same year!
• Watching him and my mother smooching in the kitchen while she was trying to cook dinner.
• Standing on a ladder, cleaning the outside of the windows while mom cleaned the inside of them.
• Swimming like a fish.
• Getting up very early and going to play golf with my Uncle Tom, then coming home, showering, and going to work.
• Telling jokes and doing silly things to make us laugh.
• Holding me in his arms when I was 5 years old, at the casket of his father. I remember asking him why Grandpa was sleeping there.

Starting to get a tiny bit weepy, and I've only barely scratched the surface. More next time.