Wisdom - a consequence of living

Mar 30 2010

Wisdom – a Consequence of Living

Post #18 in a series examining Understanding, its components & importance

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”
- Plato

Every human comes to his own understanding about what is important in life and what is not. It is his experience that forms the foundation of his wisdom; education and friends just add some nuance to it. The formative experience for me and for this series was my life with a man. Following is the story of how much he touched me.

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My father loved to fly. Every weekend he would fit the frames of his aviator sunglasses behind his ears, gather tools to tune his planes’ motors and then arrange them on the ground next to our 1956 Chevy station wagon, a model whose two shades of green stick in my mind almost as much as the fights it created with my older brothers as we wrestled to become “captains of the (rear) deck.”

But on his flying days, dad would reserve the Chevy’s back compartment for several containers of a special fuel blend that he believed would make his engines hum. He was serious about his planes yet also giddy because of the fun he knew was ahead of him. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to do more than watch, to somehow experience his joy.

Early on the entire family would accompany dad on his weekend flights. But eventually mom opted to stay home to clean up the house and prepare dinner and change diapers and wash the laundry and hang it up outside to dry and… well, do everything that kept a growing, barely middle class household together. And as more time went on, one or the other of my older brothers would also stay home, doing homework and helping with the chores they had been assigned.

But not me. I just wanted to be with my dad. On weekdays I would watch the clock intently so that at 6:50 every evening I could run up the hill to greet the city bus that would drop him off to end his daily 2 hour (each way) commute. As he descended onto the sidewalk, I would jump up and hug him, and we would both smile and laugh and walk funny walks as we returned down the hill to our railroad-style home on a postage stamp lot where he would eat his dinner and I would begin a bedtime ritual of TV, baths and books.

My dad was a meek man. He took great care to treat everything he touched gently and with respect. I felt it, and so did everyone who knew him. Even though he talked sparingly, knowledge that he cared was never in doubt. Any chance to get closer to him was a chance I took without hesitation.

And then one Saturday a dream came true: I was going to accompany my dad alone. This was one of those special moments when you feel a switch flip and some dormant part of your being comes alive, when the sensitivity of eyes, ears, nose and mind increase in an instant. I started recording everything that was happening around me as if my brain contained a 16-mm movie camera, the same type that my dad would fix in his job as an electronics repairman. I put on my sunglasses the same way my dad did, helped him load up the car and sat next to him on the front seat.

After we reached the flying field, I became aware of the number and diversity of trees surrounding it, each with varying heights, crisp outlines and unique green hues making our car’s two-shade design look bland in comparison. But what my 7-year-old eyes began to focus on more that day was the vastness of the field and surrounding sky, each displaying the promise that dad and me were about to embark on myriad adventures of fun and delight.

As he exited the car my father sensed the winds with his face, sniffing its essence, speed and direction. I did too. There was a slight breeze blowing as it typically did from west to east carrying a light sour odor from the nearby swamps and remnants of the crude oil being refined across the Arthur Kill, the polluted waterway that separated Staten Island from New Jersey. Only a strong wind could have stopped us. Luckily on this morning, it looked like we would be cleared for takeoff.

We took out the biplane. The image in my head was of Snoopy and the Red Baron whom I enjoyed reading about in the Sunday Funnies. I wouldn’t be surprised if dad was recalling images of World War I flying aces he read about during his 1930’s childhood.

My father wiped down the plane, fueled it up, and made sure all the wires that controlled the ailerons were taut so that the plane would climb or descend exactly when he told it to, at an angle neither too steep nor too shallow. He laid it out meticulously. He knew exactly what he was doing for he had been perfecting this type of flying for several decades. I was inherently drawn to learn from him. He had found something that truly made him happy. Maybe I could be happy like him, too.

My father’s last step was to connect the battery to the engine, give the propeller a turn, listen and adjust the choke until a spark ignited the fuel; at this point he could disconnect the battery and get ready to fly. Every time the propeller whirred, the noise and wind would scare me but not dad. He told me to hold the tail of the plane and when he gave the signal, let go and run way back.

After making sure I was comfortable and knew what to do, dad ran to the pilot’s position and grabbed the wire controls. He nodded his head. I let go and ran. The plane started moving on its own. He gave one wire a tug and the plane rose up, circling around him at a dizzying clip. Dad spun around and around, guiding this miniature replica of some ancient yet basic aircraft through a few simple gyrations. While I wanted fancier maneuvers, he focused on simple circles and minor altitude changes. This plane was too delicately constructed to risk a crash landing by putting it through loop-de-loops.

After it ran out of gas, dad guided the model down for a typically bumpy landing. I ran up to it excited because my dad was excited. We had a deeper bond now, and I was not going to let go.

Over the next several years I would explore my father’s love of models. I would build a new one every few weeks, mostly plastic replicas of WWII fighters and bombers, plus the occasional battleship, racecar, even MAD magazine icon on a motorcycle. The sweet smell of the plastic cement was alluring, and the time it took to paint details on the rigid parts taught patience. I even enjoyed getting sick and staying home from school not so much because I could work on the models, but because my dad would come home from his job in New York City with a new model for me to start constructing.

I got good at model building. I adorned the bedroom my brothers and I shared with as many model creations as I could. Eventually dad graduated me out of plastics to simple rubber band-powered, balsa-framed models of single-winged Piper Cubs and Cessnas. These were much more complex. It was necessary to keep them light by minimizing the amount of wood and glue used, and it was essential to secure the wings on a flat surface while they dried so that they would not bow or warp. Then we would attach and shrink paper around the balsa slats to create a smooth skin, one that wind could glide over when the time came for the model to slice through the air. These looked and felt so much more sophisticated, and I felt good as I conquered balsa construction.

But as another year went by, the newness and excitement of building toy ships and airplanes began to fade. I had been doing this for nearly 4 years, easily 1/3 of my existence to that point. Maybe it was the lack of real power in any of these models. Maybe it was that my father could not afford the more expensive remote-control models that were beginning to appear at the flying fields. Maybe it was that my school friends did not have any interest in model building. No matter what it was, I found it was taking me longer to finish each new project.

I guess my dad sensed that I needed a change too because again he graduated me. This time he gave me a model-airplane engine and told me to choose a new kit from the hobby shop that it could be mounted on. It was clear to me that he envisioned us flying our own gasoline-powered airplanes side-by-side. I remembered never wanting to let go of my dad when I was younger. Now I had an inkling that he did not want to let go of me, and that was uncomfortable.

Still, I bought and glued together a solid-framed replica of a Messerschmidt, one that would accept wire controlled ailerons and the single-piston engine he gifted me. I painted it deep, shiny black and decaled it with Third Reich symbols. The model was not about valuing or devaluing what the symbols stood for; it was about experiencing flight, albeit in small scale, or so I kept telling myself.

I was then almost 11. I wanted to like this model, but sadly it did not tap any new well of personal excitement. I was no longer sure what it was that I liked. Model airplanes seemed less and less relevant. Learning in school was relatively easy, but being the “smart kid” made getting along with some classmates more difficult. Annoyingly, girls whom I had started noticing as being interestingly different also caused confusion. Two girls from my class lured me after lunch past friends scaling their baseball cards against the wall of the school, past another group playing wall ball, and into a schoolyard cove where they proceeded to grab my arms and hold me against a wall so another girl could kiss me. I didn’t resist much because I was almost as curious as them what lips touching lips would really be like (my report: our lips were dry and the feeling was very disappointing), but then I realized that many of my classmates had left their games behind, followed us and saw the whole thing, leading to deep and embarrassing laughter. I just wanted to run away. Nothing felt right. I was increasingly uncomfortable everywhere I went.

Then I memorized President Kennedy’s inaugural speech for a school oratory contest; it stuck in my heart much more tightly than my head especially his most famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Looking at it from today’s perspective, when that line is played over and over again thus diluting its gravity, it may seem funny to think that words a politician could say, could have actually influenced anybody to change. But honestly, at that time, those words were right in line with what my parents, my priests, my teachers were also telling me. It made sense. It moved me. It made me feel alive and hopeful, feel that I, a small and simple boy, had a destiny. Plus the memories of President Kennedy’s assassination a year and a half earlier were still vivid: the tears on Mrs. Burke’s cheeks when the PA broke into our 4th grade math class with news that the President had been shot and was being rushed to the hospital; the rosary that the entire school started reciting; the sobs of Sister Thomas, our principal, when the radio she was letting the entire school listen to gave the news that he had died, the somber walk home after an unplanned early dismissal; watching his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot by Jack Ruby a few days later on live TV. Those of us who were young feared that we couldn’t remain children much longer. Those who were already parents cried that the better world they overwhelmingly wanted to give their children was still dangerous, unpredictable and maybe even unattainable.

Anyway, I won the speech-giving contest apparently because I came across as believing the words I had memorized. I must have because I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to contribute. I was aware that I liked science. Maybe it was because I kept winning prizes in the school’s science fairs by taking science tricks my dad taught me and figuring out how to apply them to make machines work better or plants grow stronger. So it became easy to dream that what I could do for my country was excel in science; I even harbored dreams that maybe one day I would travel to the moon and the planets. In other words, airplanes were old and increasingly boring; I thought that newer science, rocket science is what could define me.

Still I did not want to hurt my dad. It was my duty to at least fly the Messerschmidt. I had become quite good at recognizing which of my actions would stop my mom from yelling and which would make my dad smile. He worked so hard yet he was always so nice to us. I had to continue to make him happy. He wanted that. That was part of my job no matter how I felt.

So with the blackened German fighter in hand, dad and I again went to the field, this time for me to earn, or rather test my new wings. We set it up just the way dad always did. He checked the wires, made sure I had not overfilled the fuel tank and then let me take over. I hooked the battery to the spark plug. I placed the index and middle fingers of my right hand along the backside of the propeller blade, pushing it counterclockwise with a jerk. I did this again and again, until finally, there was a momentary sputter. Dad adjusted the choke and I flipped the blade one more time. This time the fuel caught and the propeller angrily sliced the air.

I went to remove the wires from the spark plug. Sitting in front of the plane, my left hand firmly holding the fuselage behind the cockpit, I moved my right hand behind the propeller to grab the clip embracing the spark plug. As I did, my pinky crossed paths with the blurred plastic.

The propeller stopped dead. It cut my skin deeply. It exposed the finger’s outermost joint.

It happened fast, so fast that I didn’t feel anything right away. All I could do was look at dad, and all he could do was look at me. Then I saw the blood, and my eyes started filling with tears.

I was afraid and I was embarrassed. As emotions overwhelmed me, I directed my anger at the only man who ever loved me. I told him, “These models are crap. I hate them.” I don’t remember if I said anything about him too. All I know is that I hurt him and I could never take that back.

He held my hand using a clean hanky and a firm grip to stop the bleeding. He walked me to the car and let me lay down. He packed up the equipment, quickly loaded the car, and drove us home. We didn’t say very much which was typical, but the air between us became heavy with a new feeling, a feeling of loneliness, and a hint of betrayal.

At home, mom in a way that typically fed my own panic screamed, “Oh my God! Does he need stitches? Is he going to be okay?” Dad didn’t think stitches were necessary, and he used a butterfly patch to close the wound. This was the first time I heard that there was a bandage named after the insects with beautiful wings that I often tried to catch and display. My mind started to wander to many other things now that it was clear I didn’t need to go to the doctor and get (gasp) a shot. However, as opportunities arose I continued to ask for and get sympathy.

My finger healed over the next several days. Like many an almost-teen, I also showed off the scar whenever it felt appropriate. But this physical wound inflicted on me by a model, a model I built because I loved my father, turned out to be much less important or consequential than the wound that opened up that day between my father and me.

I adored him, but I began to see his obsession with models as childish. I did not want to be a child any longer. Instead of rejecting his toys, I began to reject him. He embarrassed me. I just couldn’t be involved with his models any more. And in my childlike mind, this meant I couldn’t be involved with him either. Adolescence had begun. More and more, I treated my entire family including mother, brothers and sisters as if they were diseased. I was too young to realize that I was the one who had become dis – eased.

Clearly my outbursts and withdrawal hurt my father. After all, he was only trying to share all that made him happy, all the tricks he used to cope with the pressures and demands of providing for a wife, by now 6 children and our 2-bedroom house in Staten Island. Model building obviously worked for him. He was able to see beauty in small details. He was able to build gorgeous replicas of real world vehicles that he could only dream of flying in full-scale. And he was able not just to control what he built and how it worked, he was able to experiment with it and make it better, not based on somebody else telling him anything, not based on a formal education in aeronautics, but based on reading and his own imagination. But I would not and could not recognize any of this until decades later. Instead, I kept a cautious distance from those whom I thought I knew, and became increasingly quiet as I tried to figure out what it was that could make me happy.

While I got the separation I thought I wanted, dad continued to work on his models. But he never again asked me to join him because he thought that was what I wanted. Eventually he was able to buy one, then many radio-controlled planes. While these looked interesting out of the side of my eye, I had made my decision… no more models for me. So I suffered in arrogance while he grew in his love of aeronautics.

As I entered adulthood I would again make attempts to approach my dad just to ask him about his life, but not to share too much about mine. He quietly told me about his earliest memory: being held by his mom when he was no more than a toddler, pointing to a plane flying overhead and shouting “Lindy, Lindy!” Lindbergh had first crossed the Atlantic the year before my father’s birth. Once, he even whispered to me his deepest fear: he was not sure how to be a good dad because he had lost his father when he was only 7. He had no role model to emulate; he had to make it up as he went along. All he really remembered about his dad was that when he came home from working as a Polish immigrant at the Stock Yards of Chicago, he would tell his sons (including my dad) to fill a pail with beer from the local pub after rubbing the sides with butter so the beer wouldn’t foam. Then the grandfather I never knew would drink, sing and cry himself to sleep. My father believed he died of a heart attack; in my mind, I thought of the abysmal work conditions described by Sinclair Lewis in “The Jungle” and wondered if the crappy way that the powerful tend to treat the less fortunate could have contributed, even though new government regulation was supposed to have erased the biggest abuses in the slaughterhouse and meat packing industries over the quarter century that elapsed between the book’s publication and my grandfather’s death.

I did not know how to respond to any of my dad’s stories though I knew he was sharing secrets, things I don’t know he ever told anyone else. There were times he even reached out to touch my soul in ways that I didn’t expect. He once told me that his mother, known to us as “Busia,” had a special place in her heart for me even after I started avoiding her in my pre-school years in fear since she spoke no English. She said I thought too much and felt too much at the same time, a dangerous combination unless I learned to understand the difference. She told him she wanted to reduce my burden, if she could figure out how.

“Dad, I am sorry I treated her like that. I still feel really bad about that.”

“It’s okay son. She knew you better than you did at that time. And I understood you too.”

Then he would laugh about how my great Aunt Mae, the only Irish soul in my mother’s family would say the same things. That is why she nicknamed me “Sunshine,” because she thought that if I learned to stop being so serious about everything, I would start lighting up everybody else’s life.

I liked those stories, but felt awkward saying much more than “thanks.” I knew I wanted to be close to him again, to hug him just like when he hopped off the bus, but I was still afraid. That’s not what adult men did, right? While I walked away feeling somewhat special from the brief exchanges we shared, I also feared that I had become an emotional cripple.

After I married and my own sons and daughter entered the world, we would continue these incomplete exchanges. I acknowledged how difficult it was raising a family and knowing how to parent no matter what your history… but the awkwardness remained and because of that I did not seek his deeper wisdoms to help me with my growing laments. Though I was chronologically an adult I remained stuck in a pre-adolescent mindset, still fearing contamination by that which I didn’t want to be.

The last time I experienced my father as a living, caring man he whispered in my ear, “I am so proud of you. Oh, and happy 40th!” I had just returned from leading a weeklong Boy Scout adventure in the Canadian wilderness during which my oldest son unveiled a birthday cake by a campfire 50 miles away from any civilization on the shore of a mountaintop lake that we had spent two days carrying and paddling our canoes upstream to reach. My son declared to the world I was now, officially old. And my cadre of 9 other men, for all the boys earned that title on this trip, sang “Happy Birthday.” I was in pain from the pure physical strain of the climb, and emotionally exhausted because of my need to ensure safety for the members of our party, a skill I needed to hone constantly. But I laughed with them. And when I retreated inside my tent, I cried. My son’s sincerity and amazing ability to carry his own canoe and his own weight through very rough terrain, all while singing and smiling, left me in awe. I began to feel that my eldest offspring was growing into a fantastic young man. Now back at home and hearing my dad state his love for me so simply, so honestly, I felt as if he had seen through my bravado all along. On one hand I felt relieved; on the other I felt guilty. I gave my father a long hug and mouthed a simple, soft “thank you.”

My dad knew better than I that he was dying. Though he had experienced 2 decades of serious heart attacks and experimental surgeries, he always seemed to recover even when the doctor’s told us to expect the worst. So I got used to believing that we would always have time to really talk. But all hopes have only a small period of time in which to live, and this one was already blessed with a longer life than most hopes receive.

Four weeks later, I was scheduled to see my dad in the hospital while he awaited a heart transplant. But on the morning of my scheduled visit, mom called and said, “It’s your dad. He had a bad attack last night right after we left. He’s not waking up. I think this is it. Really. I’m sorry. You better come as soon as you can.”

I rushed to his hospital bed in the Bronx. He was lying in a coma, waiting for the heart that had been restarted the night before to fail one last time. I knew that we no longer would have that chance to talk at length, that I would no longer have the chance to apologize for the hurt I caused. All I could think to do was put my lips to his ears and whisper back, “I am proud of you too. You succeeded. You were a great father. Please make this next flight your best one yet. Tell your mom I said hi. I am sorry daddy, for everything I ever did to hurt you… I love you.” As my cheek rubbed against his, I felt the stubble of his beard scratch my face. I remembered the exact same feeling from all the hugs we shared when I was no more than a toddler and when we first went to the fields to fly. Grief ripped me apart and left behind a pit that grew bigger as tears further eroded my gut. I had never felt anything so miserable, so horrible, so painful in my entire life. My dad was dying, and it was dreadfully clear, I would never get him back.

It was time for the man who modeled so much so well for me and for others, to move on.