I wrote this eulogy the night he died but because the snowstorm forced us to cancel the final memorial at the funeral home that usually precedes the Mass at church-I didn't get to read it.
I don’t even
know where to begin when describing my dad to you. He was strength personified yet bawled like a
baby at weddings, births and 4th quarter interceptions. He was
serious and dedicated in his work and totally goofy at home. He shot a hole in one four times after he
took up golf. He cheated at
Monopoly. Dad coached every sport we
played between the ages of 8-15 and won championships in three sports for both
boys and girls. More than 35 years
later, former teammates that I run into will tell me they have fond memories of
him as coach.
Like my
grandmother before him, he was a practical joker. There are hilarious stories of our
childhood that probably would get him in trouble with child services today!
We started
to think of some of the best ones to describe him:
The first
one that comes to mind is the Anti-Valentine.
Every year on Valentine’s Day we would be called to the table for dinner
and on our plates would be these homemade Valentines from SalMark Cards, which must
have been a black ops division of Hallmark.
They were always made on his company's graph paper and
hand drawn. And they included everything
that deserved snarking about you that year.
For instance, the year my sister was 13 with teenage acne and braces was
especially brutal. And yet we loved them
and looked forward to them every year because it meant he was really in tune
with our lives. I mentioned to him a few
Christmases ago that I wished that I had saved them and then the next
Valentine’s Day, my anti-valentine came in the mail. Funny, I just found it last Sunday when going
through my desk.
Our kids
worshipped him.
When my
brother was old enough to go out drinking with his friends, Dad used to torture
him when he came home on the weekends a little on the intoxicated side. One night he put a life size cutout of Rambo
complete with gun and vest of bullets right on the inside of his bedroom door. My brother screamed like a girl. Another night, Dad hid under his bed and when bro stumbled in and collapsed on the bed, Dad reached his arm up from under
the bed to grab him-the manifestation of every kid’s nightmare. It’s a wonder my brother never ended up in
therapy!
This past
summer when Dad was in the hospital, he wasn’t eating much because he said the
food was awful. My sister started giving him
a hard time about eating so he said he would eat if she could be his official
taste-tester. She had to close her eyes
while he fed her what was brought on his tray and if she could correctly
identify what the food was supposed to be, he would agree to eat it. After that, she agreed that he didn’t have to
eat the thing they had labeled mashed potatoes.
Dad loved to
make up names for Mom. One day he just started
calling her “ Ichiro. He told her that
was Japanese for little lotus flower. A
year or so later they were at Dina’s house watching a game on TV where the Red Sox were playing
Seattle and Ichiro Suzuki (a Mariner at the time) came up to bat and Mom was
all happy and explained that was her nickname from Dad and it meant little
lotus flower. Everybody laughed and Dad confessed that he really started
calling her that because when she cleaned, she used to pull the front of her
hair up in a vertical ponytail and it reminded him of a Sumo wrestler. He absolutely loved telling that story. They bought a dog after that and named him
Ichiro.
It wasn’t all fun and games though,
so I started to make a list of things I learned from my Dad
#1 Nothing
is more important than Family and when you are Italian that means all your
family. We were very blessed to have a
very connected extended family for so long thanks to the 8 crazy brothers and
sisters that our grandparents raised. It gives me comfort to know that all ten
of them are together again.
#2. Practice,
practice, practice. I remember going
next door to Grandma’s backyard where he would hit groundballs to me for what
seems like hours. We would finally stop
after one of us was exhausted or Gram stuck her head out the window and yelled
at us in broken English about hitting her house.
#3. It’s OK
to round to the nearest dollar when recording
expenses in your checkbook and that Mom would understand that the entry marked Stop and Pee was actually this
week’s groceries from Stop and Shop. I
think he just wanted to make her laugh
to forget that the checkbook never balanced.
#4 Little
White Lies are OK, like when he took us out to dinner to celebrate when Mom had given birth to my sister and when Mom called from the hospital to see how we were, dad was cool as
a cucumber and said “fine” when in reality my brother and I were throwing up in
the sink from food poisoning from the dive he took us to.
#5 Sports
teaches you about life, whether you are a spectator or a player. There actually IS crying in baseball as he
was the first person I called after the Red Sox finally broke the curse in 2004
and we cried tears of joy together. #5B,
If mom is downstairs in the basement doing laundry and the team made a good
play, do not let her upstairs under any circumstances to avoid jinxing
anything.
#6 When you
turn 16-find a job. I actually think my
16th birthday greeting consisted of Happy Birthday-get a job. But between school, sports, band and that
job-boy did I learn time management and responsibility.
#7 You never
know if you are an alcoholic until you take your first drink. Now obviously with the aforementioned story,
my brother never had that talk. I think
it was probably just his way of scaring me away from doing what every teenager
does but it really worked because to this day, I don’t drink. I really wish he had somehow related that to
avoiding chocolate instead.
#8 Girls can
be anything they want to be. This may
not seem like a big deal to those of you under 35 but back in the 1970’s it was
unusual and very inspirational to me.
One of my favorite Dad stories was during my freshman year in
college. It was finals time and some clueless
person in the registrar department thought it was OK to schedule three of my finals
within one 24 hour block. I was tired
and stressed so he came up to the school to take me to lunch. As we sat there, he pointed over to another
table which was obviously a business lunch and said “see that, that’s going to
be you someday and this will all be worth it.”
And that finals week lunch became a tradition for those four years and
taught me how to deal with pressure just like sports did. By the way, that restaurant was also a dive
and it went out of business soon after.
My mother
always says that she raised three very different kids. I think those of you who know us will agree. Over the years people have often jokingly
labeled us since we are so very different from each other. My sister is the funny and kind one, I'm the
"smart" one (although my sister tried to cross that out and write the cheap one) and my brother is the good-looking, charming, debonair, athletic one with great hair. But Dad told me recently that my greatest strength
was my confidence. And he seemed to
worry most about me when my confidence waivered. That in itself often helped me to find it
again. I wonder if he ever knew that.
They say you
become what you learned from home. And
in thinking about my dad, I think about an old 90’s power ballad. (And no, I’m
not going to sing it. Dad used to joke that Mom and I never changed notes, we
just got louder). It ended with the
lines
You gave me strength, cuz you
believed
I’m everything I am, because you loved me.
And in the
end, those two lines are all you really need
to know to understand who dad was.
When we tried to think of a song to play at the end of the wake, we didn't want anything maudlin. Dad would have hated that. So, we chose a celebration of his life instead.
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