The first time I saw my father cry was the day his father died. I was twenty-five and in the middle of recording my fifth album. Mom called with the news early Sunday morning that Granddad had died, and I was at my parents’ house within fifteen minutes. When I walked up to their bedroom, Dad was alone. He had the phone cradled between the crook of his neck and his shoulder, on hold with the airline, waiting to book a flight to his parents’ home in Washington, D.C., while he neatly folded clothes into one side of an open suitcase on the bed. The tears streaming down his cheeks seemed detached from the rest of him. His physical movements were as purposeful as ever, and his voice, though slightly clipped, was steady. I stood frozen in the doorway. He looked at me impatiently and motioned for me to come in.
“I have to get all this crying out of my system so I can be strong for my mother,” he said, as if he was deliberately plotting out the sequence of his emotions for the next few days. With his right hand he started jotting something down on a pad of paper. With his left hand he continued packing. He was on to his socks, all black, and his various diabetes paraphernalia.
When the flight reservations person said there were no flights available, Dad replied, “But my dad just died.” In that second, he lost his bearing, if only slightly. The puzzlement in his voice threw me off more than seeing him cry. Dad’s voice could express any number of emotions quite vividly, but puzzled was rarely one of them.
Dad hung up the phone and continued packing. I could tell that he needed to keep busy, the more banal the task, the better. I kept expecting him to run out of tears, but it was as if a tap that had been shut off for as long as I’d known him had now been opened, and as the endless tears continued glistening down his face, I felt that familiar urge to protect him. More than anything, though, I wanted him to stop crying.
“Can I get you a Kleenex, Dad?”
“What for?”
Perfect. Now that we could both proceed as if his weeping was a kind of mirage, I asked where Mom was. After explaining she’d gone to the drugstore to pick up more insulin for his trip, he asked me to go down to the kitchen and bring him back some cheese and crackers. I could hear him talking when I walked back up the stairs. I wasn’t sure if he was carrying on a conversation with himself, booking his flight on another airline, or simply trying to tell me something, until I saw him standing in the adjoining bathroom fixing his tie in the mirror. When he caught me staring at his reflection he fell silent, as if he was waiting for me to respond to something he’d asked.
“Sorry, Dad, I didn’t hear you.”
“I was telling you that your granddad lent me five thousand dollars to help me buy this house in 1965. It cost eighteen thousand. Your mother was convinced we were getting in too deep. Dad only charged us one percent interest. I paid him back in two years. Paid off the whole mortgage just a few years later.”
Although Dad had told me this before, I knew he was telling it again for his own benefit. He’d always possessed an ability to boost his spirits by recalling one of his past feats. As he talked his way through the various raises he was awarded while at the OHRC and his dad’s corresponding praise, he seemed to regain a semblance of his trademark pluck. I got the feeling Dad didn’t want me to say much of anything. Or maybe it was that I didn’t want to risk saying the wrong thing. He just needed me to be there.
“I don’t expect your brother or sister to make it to your granddad’s funeral. They’re up to their ears in exams right now. But I’m counting on you to represent the family, Danny.”
“Of course, Dad.”
(Larry ended up attending Granddad’s funeral after all.)
Driving home, I thought of all the musicians I’d flown to Toronto to play on my record. I would have to pay their salaries and expenses, as well as the prebooked recording studio, to sit around idle for the next several days while I was at Granddad’s funeral. It was easier for me to think of the details of my day-to-day life than to come to terms with these larger, inconvenient and messy events: Granddad’s death, Dad’s corresponding grief. With Granddad gone, I felt one step closer to losing Dad.
As I prepared to fly to Granddad’s funeral, I distracted myself by conjuring up every recollection I had of Granddad, starting from my earliest. In 1959, Dad had chosen me, not Larry or Karen or even Mom, to accompany him to Washington, D.C., where we’d be visiting my grandparents.
From my four-year-old perspective, it felt as if Dad had just handed me the world’s greatest prize. (Dad, in his take-charge way, had instructed Granddad, in a letter shortly preceding our visit, to “kindly re-arrange your schedule so you can spend considerable time with Dobbie and me.”) Our car trip was to take sixteen hours. Imagine, sixteen hours with Dad all to myself. I’d have been thrilled to have driven to the end of the world and back with Dad, never leaving the car.
As the two of us drove up to my grandparents’ beautiful red-brick home on the magical-sounding Chainbridge Drive, I could hear their welcoming cries before they’d even opened the front door.
“Get a load of this, Mom and Dad, your grandson here is the perfect travel companion, he made sure I stayed alert through the entire trip.” Dad rested his hand gently on my shoulder.
“Didn’t that poor boy get tired?” Grandma May asked reprovingly.
“Nope. Danny was brave as could be.”
Granddad reached in with one arm and scooped me out of the passenger seat of Dad’s rusted Plymouth. In one smooth motion he had me flopped over his shoulder—I could feel one of his knobby bones sticking deep into my stomach—and carried me, as I kicked and shrieked with joy, into his home. “No, Granddad, don’t drop me. Don’t put me down, keep me up—up high.”
“Welcome home, grandson,” Granddad said, pretending not to hear my pleas as he deposited me on the floor of his study. He reached into the breast pocket of his white dress shirt and pulled something out. It was shiny.
“For me, Granddad, for me?” I squealed greedily, reaching for this small, silvery toy. Granddad stepped away from my grasping fingers and placed his mouth against the sparkling thing, like he was going to eat it. Thinking he wasn’t going to share his toy, I started to cry.
“Listen, Danny.” Then Granddad blew and amazing and unfamiliar sounds filled the room. For the next hour there was no one but Granddad and me, as he improvised, sucking and blowing out music on the spot. Each thirty-second solo would segue into Granddad singing some wonderfully loony, improvised verse, concluding with “I’m going to play my harmonica, cha-cha-cha.”
I laughed till my sides hurt. “Again, Granddad, again,” I’d demand whenever he paused for a breath. It was the first time I’d witnessed spontaneous musical creativity. It was like standing in the middle of a magic trick, only better. When Granddad eventually tired—”My mouth is weary son, it needs a rest”—he handed me his harmonica and patiently showed me how to blow into it: “Easy now, no hurry, the harmonica isn’t going to run away on you,” and suck out, “Release, slow, that way the music lasts longer.”
Now it was twenty years later, and I was walking into the same gracious Chainbridge home. Long-forgotten smells of homemade almond butter and apple jelly left my legs feeling hollow as I plodded into the hallway, suitcase in hand, following the muffled cries of Grandma May. Grandma’s bedroom door was open wide. She was lying on top of her bed, her straight black wig pushed halfway off her head to reveal a patchy greyish scalp, as she sobbed and sobbed into her pillow. A radio was playing softly on the night table beside her bed. Dad was going through the closet, silently removing Granddad’s clothes and packing them into large cardboard boxes. He was speaking gently to his mother, calm and in control, taking charge. Throughout the day I rarely took my eyes off him, following his lead, not only so that I could conduct myself properly over the next few days, but also for later, hopefully many, many years later, when I’d be going through Dad’s closet, and trying my best to comfort my own mother.
I have no idea what was going through my father’s mind as he busied himself in his parents’ home and the funeral parlour, propping up his family in the days following his father’s death. I like to imagine that he made it through by summoning his own special memories of his father. Like the ones so lovingly detailed in a letter he wrote home when he was nineteen, in the U.S. Army.
Dear Dad:
I went to church today, and heard a good sermon from Chaplain Gross… the only thing wrong with him is that he is too much mouth. You see Dad, I’m so used to you and your intelligent viewpoint to everything, that if a man or minister does not measure up to you in my eyes, then I either immediately put him down, or I completely ignore him … Last week after four days on the rifle range sleeping in snow and mud, I picked up a rifle, shot for record and made 160 out of a possible 180, which is sharpshooter. The medal is supposed to be awarded to me soon. I don’t give the army credit for that, not a d bit. That credit goes to you. Remember when you bought me a BB gun and showed me how to hold my breath, squeeze the trigger and get a correct sight picture. I’ve never forgotten.