Tag Archives: fathers

The Man In The Room.

classical music, contemplative essays, nostalgia, , , , , , , ,

I am a woman. Always have been; had no choice in the matter. My fetus did not grow external gonads.

At birth, how was I to know that I would never really be alone? No; wherever I would be, go, or do, there would always be a man in the room.

******

The first man in the room was late.

He was sitting at a bar, drinking, on a Friday night – shirking the very responsibility for which any woman in his position, at least in those days, would have immediately jumped to respond. He was an obstetrician. He was my mother’s doctor. And, he was definitely On Call.

When the phone reached him, he likely chuckled with the bartender about cervical dilation and other, baser aspects of the female anatomy over which he claimed domain. And, he probably ordered another beer. After all, who was this infant to proclaim any birth rite at prime time on a Friday night in April? It was pouring rain. Time out.

Back in labor and delivery, my mother was practicing female obedience. No woman, in the history of the world, did this better. I was crowning, and the nurses, frantic to enact their version of submission, pecked about, insisting that the doctor would be there “any minute”. To my mother, the directive was unanimous:  “Just  hold ON!”

So, my mother obeyed the nurses, who were obeying the doctor, who was calling for shots by now in the bar. And, she held a birthing baby in her vagina until it felt certain her entire body would explode. The man was not yet present in the room but, at that interminable moment, he was everywhere. He was squeezing my mother’s abdomen, suffocating me, and holding lit matches to every nurse in the wing. What a masterful grasp wielded that drunken sailor on such a wet and inconvenient night.

When he finally appeared, as doctor, the gurney carrying my mother and me was propelled so fast down the hallway toward delivery that it nearly toppled and, at about 8:45 pm (well after the downbeat), the next baby girl was finally permitted entry into the world. Through the caul that draped my soaking face, I screamed bloody, spitting murder at the man in the room.

The second man in the room was just returning from work.

He was my father.

To hear him tell it, I would be the embodiment of his every gift…a “born” artist and musician, a singer like him, his – for all practical purposes – first-born child. He would hold me with tender arms and soft hands, feed me, sing to me. I would love him with my whole heart. He would go to work, come home, bring the money with him, count it on the kitchen table, and share with me a teaspoon of his hot tea with milk and sugar.

On his day off, he would come and go as he pleased. And, he would take me with him. I would sit in the car, singing to myself, while he did what he had to do inside the store or the other man’s house. He would eat his supper after dark, make his lunch, go to bed, and get up before everybody else in the house was even awake to walk to work. He owned his own barber shop, made his own hours and, when his day was over, he was done.

Mom’s day was never done. She’d stay up til after midnight, finishing the sewing that needed to be ready by the next day’s pick up, and get up before we would in the morning to prepare our breakfast, shrieking us awake so that we’d be ready for school before she was nearly late for work.

On the weekends, not otherwise pulling a shift at the machine shop, she’d run the sweeper and dust around us as we tried to practice our piano lesson or read. On Sunday, she’d get us ready for morning worship at the Gospel Hall and we’d all go, to spend most of the day there listening to: men. Mom finally took her nap, on Sunday afternoon, while Dad would spend the afternoon chewing on a toothpick seated on a park bench watching us pet the small animals at the zoo.

The third man in the room reached puberty when I was almost a toddler. He was my elder brother.

A very ripe 11 at my birth, he had been the only child for those first ten precocious years, surrounded by adoring adults substituting for the father who was not yet there. I was an intrusion, a stray dog, a reluctant pet, an object of derision. I was in the spot reserved for him, and this was not to be.

My brother would manifest as the man in the room for the rest of my life in that house. He would ride his bike wherever he pleased, growing to be an active teen with the capacity to socially organize and initiate all manner of events in the basement, where he held court. I grew, too, but the playpen that corralled me was the only point of view from which I could define the world. He was, when not placed in my exclusive care, always outside of the box – and, ever-present, in the room.

If there were rules, they never applied to him; if there was law, he learned to rule it. When I came of age, he dictated to my parents just what the outside world was all about and, in spite of my creative gifts clearly matching or surpassing his, my choices were decreed: for the daughter, there would be no further education. Doctorate degrees were there for the men to take; girls should get a job, learn to cook, and prepare for the husband God had in mind.

God, on the other hand, frightfully busy making more men and the women intended to serve them, tried to present the man for me on more than one occasion. In the first offering, there were other men with power in their laps who determined that the man God had clearly chosen for me should stay away. Because they were in a position to claim their dictates as from God directly, the fact that they weren’t listening to what I was hearing seemed to have no bearing on the outcome God intended. I just chalked it up to the men themselves, and peered at them, from across the room.

From that point forward, the man in the room took many forms. He was a boss, or a hired hand, or a curious customer, or a band mate. And, I was ready to pass his test. When I graduated to the ranks of professional, Union card carrying musician, he became the Maestro – an object of my adoration. If I couldn’t please God anymore, then perhaps I could revere the baton in his hand.

******

The man is still there. He still waits to tell me when to speak, when to act, and when to acquiesce. He decides my value. He directs my course. He expects me to be there when he needs me, and to disappear when the time is right. He may not have any idea how much power he holds because, to him, he is just in his world – the world he inherited from his mother’s womb.

He’d best preserve that power for as long as he remains strong; a world without a woman in it would change his forever.
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© Ruth Ann Scanzillo

2013  all rights reserved. Thank you, sir.

littlebarefeetblog.com

Superhero.

contemplative essays, tributes, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Superhero.

He was my lifeline to sanity.

By his model, I learned to love.

It is no wonder, then, that I would have died for my Dad.

Now, being a girl, of course, my feelings toward my own differed from those of a son for his father. For me, Dad was my affirmation – of talent, personality, desireability, value. He was my nurturer and my affection. He was my wink and smile. He was my honesty, my truth, my sure thing.

Tony didn’t know how to hide. He could play a character with the best Hollywood had to offer, but there wasn’t a deceitful bone in his body. He didn’t hide, because he had no reason to do so. Everything he had to give was always apparent, and presented, liberally, with heavy doses of joy.

When the Ken Burns special on WW II aired the first time, and we watched footage of Patton – standing over the bed of the raven haired soldier found cowering there – I recognized that my father was the first, and most brave, defender of pacifism. He wasn’t afraid, at all, to be honest about his feelings: fear, bewilderment, and lack of willingness to follow through on the rage of war. He thought that, if he stayed in a bed at the infirmary, he could escape the horror of man against man. Lord knew he’d not escaped a childhood of abuse and neglect as cast off to the state of Massachusetts, a ward of the county, both a resident of the Fernald School and lightweight defender against Mrs. Bracchi’s burly boys. Unfortunately, Patton, who couldn’t face the truth that Private embodied, held tight to all his power and convinced the man, who would become my father, to get up, go back to the front lines, and fight. And, God, the Infinite Wisdom, took care of the rest. God brought the remnants through, to the end of that monstrosity and home again – to grieve the bloody losses, to tremble at the memories, to blindly venerate the war leaders and, ultimately, to move on with the lives God had preserved for them. I’ll never forget Dad’s own words, at my reminder that he’d earned the Bronze Star for Valour in the Battle of the Bulge: “I wasn’t brave; I was scared to death.”  The voice of truth, in every other man’s denial.

Perhaps my father speaks through me, in those moments when I am most emboldened. The truth persists, at the top of my list of reasons to keep on living; I want to be true to truth, live it out in my every, breathing moment, and open up its nourishments to those who are prisoners to the lies of dogma, denial, resignation, and defeat.

When Dad stepped into a room, he brought with him a burst of irrepressible, inner sunshine and slightly musty air – the air that carried a little of the day’s sweat and blood, the body’s casting off of fuss and care, and a mind’s treasured ability to turn away from all imposing forces. He was self-possessed; he knew what he could do, he knew how well he could, and he was ever willing, every day, to do it. He made his own lunch the evening before; went to bed “at a decent hour” (or, as he so fondly intoned with reference to Mum, a night owl : “the same day I got up”); rose with the sun; walked, all the way, to work in his own barbershop; stayed there, not leaving until he was finished; and, walked home again with his lone companion, the setting sun, carrying the cash money with him – under the trestle bridge, and up the long hill past the street vermin and what would later become the prison – all the way to his own driveway, and up the steps, and into the kitchen to meet a hot supper waiting on the stove.

As a toddler, I would bring my love to his table. Up on my knees on the chair at the head, I’d lean toward him, his back to the window, watching that brown hand stir the milk and sugar into his hot tea. He’d look at me with his twinkling eyes, take the first spoon of tea, swallow it, smack his lips when it was just right, and then put the spoon back into the cup to fill carefully, “not too full”, and then put his other soft hand underneath as he held it out to my open mouth. And, I’d swallow my single spoonful of warm sweetness – supping with him, and he with me.

His stories were ever ready. While he could read aloud like a grand orator, he preferred the realm of his own imagination, which he shared at a moment’s notice and, usually, at the head of the Saturday morning breakfast table. Eagerly accepting his unique blend of missionary fortitude and Pop-eye, we’d travel with him in a small, prop plane, deep into the African jungle, to face Sabre tooth tigers and all manner of associated beasts, only to meet Pop-eye’s spinach fed muscle and save-the-day bravado, always finishing with a song, always his theme: “I’m Pop-eye, the Sailorman!” Somehow, he knew that, in the face of every pompous pious or power-mad tyrant, all stories should always end with a laugh, a wink, and the salvation of a true Superhero.

In fact, on the morning of his death, he was still laughing. His final earthly yarn was spinning away inside his delirious, fevered head, and I am hoping he just slept it off into the ether. I know that everyone who ever truly loved, even for a minute, was there waiting for him.

And so, I can only give what he left with me. Truth, affection, mirth, music, deep knowing, and devotion. I hope I can even touch what he gave me as I bring of myself to the place where I am destined to love. I will not bear a child, or know that bond; but, perhaps, God permits the grace to love, even still – unconditionally, and always in the name of truth.
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© Ruth Ann Scanzillo
6/26/15  All rights those of the author, whose name appears above this line. Thank you.
littlebarefeetblog.com