I’m going out to lunch for Father’s Day with Douglas (you remember him, my former husband), David (you’ve never met him, but you’d like him), Simone and Colby. Colby was telling me the other day that it makes him sad that he didn’t get to know you better, especially because you share a birthday. Your grandson inherited your smart genes, I can tell you that. You two would have had great debates together.
In case you don’t know, here’s a report on today’s whereabouts of your two other daughters: Heidi, Brian and grandson Jonathan are going to The Yankee/Mets game. Sitting behind home plate, I think. Their other son, Max, who is named after you, is in China for the summer. You would have adored Max. He’s an incredible young man with a deep soul.
Shelley and Rusty are barbecuing with Adam and his girlfriend, Nicole. Brian, your #1 grandchild, is with his wife in Springfield, MA. They saw Shelley and Rusty last weekend. Dad, I hate to tell you this now, but I can’t hold it in any longer. You were the world’s worst barbecuer. Remember how you’d keep crumpling newspaper around the coals and dousing it with lighter fluid, or whatever it was? You never had patience to wait for the coals to get hot.
As a matter of fact, you didn’t have much patience for much of anything, except listening to Mozart or Mahler. I inherited the impatience gene, although I’m learning all the time how to be more patient.
I also inherited scores of wonderful Sam genes, like the ones that control hard work and discipline and forging ahead, even when the going gets rough.
Your three daughters are all FOF. That means Fab Over Fifty, which happens to be a website I founded. Maybe you know about it already. If it weren’t for dads like you, there would be no such thing as FOF girls like us.
0 Responses to “Dear daddy,”
Nicole Ricci says:
This is adorable, Geri.
Toby Wollin says:
When my father died, I was the one who was nominated to tell all the stories that I thought of as funny at the memorial service. Now, I have a somewhat..mmmm…unusual sense of what is funny. I looked over that crowd of people who had known my father AFTER he’d become a doctor, far into maturity, and certainly not the way I’d known him when I was just a sprout and he’d take me to the hospital with him to distract his patients while he looked into the backs of their eyes (if I did a good job, I got ice cream – the bad news is that he’d take me to a place where there were only 4 flavors: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate and whatever Mrs. Goodale could come up with that day which tended to be things like rum raisin and maple walnut..both real kid favs, right?). But among other stories I told (and I always tell this one about my dad), I told the one where he was driving me to school – I think I was a senior in high school; it was spring and he obviously wanted to make sure he got this piece of advice transmitted to me before I launched off to college. We were at a light and he looked at me seriously and said, “You’ll be getting involved with boys now and you need to remember one thing. If you do this, you have a good shot at happiness; if not – well, you can always get divorced. Just do this: Never marry a hot tomato.”
Right, Dad. Didn’t. You were right.