MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER

"I've been staring at the page... for what seems like days.
I guess I put this one off for a while..."

My father died last year.  February 16, 2011.

Using a blog to write about my dad's death didn't feel right for me. Certainly not at that time.  The emotions were too real, too raw, too complex, and too personal to share with strangers.  And what began as the avoidance of one topic became a year away from writing anything.

But now it's almost a year later. I cannot process that a year has passed by so quickly because it felt like I was moving in slow motion underwater.  And all of a sudden, a year had passed.  I didn't make any plans for the month of February, unsure how I'd feel with the one-year anniversary approaching.  I expected to be overly emotional, sad, depressed, overwhelmed by memories, and prone to crying but, in reality, I had no idea what February would bring.   So, for the longest time, I avoided the whole idea of February. Didn't even make solid plans.  My FiloFax calendar pages were empty.  But, like it or not, the earth moves 'round the sun and here we are.  It's February.  The dreaded February.
I suppose it was bound to come, like it or not. And if February had to arrive at all, at least our family kicked off the saddest month with the most joyous event  -- a new baby boy.   A new cousin, Sean Ryder, was born. "Ryder" was in memory of my father, Robert (and the Hebrew middle name, "Reuven," was my father's.) So, a bittersweet celebration to kick off February.

And because I'm still unsure what to say about my dad that isn't either too pedestrian or too personal, I'm just going to share some random things I learned from my dad and some tidbits of Bob trivia those who knew and love him might know, or might be surprised to learn.

Lesson Learned: The only proper way to consume corn-on-the-cob.  Step one: boil fresh Long Island sweet corn.  Step two: open a loaf of bread & grab an end piece.  Step three: spread butter/margarine onto said piece of bread.  Step four: slap buttered bread onto corn cob and coat the ear completely; butter will melt onto corn.  Step five: consume bread now soaked in warm butter.  Step six: consume corn.

You do not change the channel if any movie starring Patrick Swayze is on.   Ever.  Especially if it co-stars Sam Elliott.

Any movie starring "his girls" is not to be interrupted.  "His girls" include Julia Roberts, Debra Winger, and Sandra Bullock.

He was addicted to the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, watching it whenever it was on (and often watching his DVR'd recording whenever there was nothing else on TV.)

The man loved M*A*S*H and made me into a crazed Hawkeye Pierce fan too.   Foghorn Leghorn and Wyle E. Coyote was appointment TV.  I can offer no explanation for his late-in-life fondness for Two & A Half Men.

Once he was in an elevator in a building on New York's Upper West Side.  The door opened.  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton got on.  Forever after, he'd always say her eyes really were violet and she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in the flesh.

He hated toes.  Hated when you showed him your new pedicure.  Really hated if you flexed your toes.  Which, naturally, was a favorite thing to do during flip-flop months.

Lesson Learned: My dad said, "The only way to ensure you don't work for a total asshole is to be your own boss.  And even that is no guarantee."

He was in a gang in high school.  No fights.  No turf wars.  But they had matching jackets.  They were "The Jokers" and they were a collective of wise-asses.

He lived in Florida for a year when he was four.  His family and doctors hoped it would cure his asthma.  It did.  It only returned when he was in his early 40's and he'd quit smoking cold turkey.

He longed for two vacation homes: an apartment in Jerusalem and a large cabin along Lake George.

He was the only person willing to play Trivial Pursuit with me on a regular basis.  It was a solid, ongoing rivalry.  We could go eye-to-eye at Rummy-O, and once he taught me to play gin, I won as often as I lost.  But he'd routinely kick my ass at Scrabble.

He was a diehard Brooklyn Dodgers fan.  Dodgers memorabilia fills the basement.  He never got over them abandoning Brooklyn and the destruction of Ebbetts Field, a second home to him.   The Dodgers' rivals were the Giants and the Yankees; clearly, there was no way I wasn't going to be raised in a household that was 200% behind the NY Mets.

He used to attend NY Jets home games at Shea Stadium.  He had a large radio which he used to listen to the play by play during the game.  Best part?  It was a combination radio and FLASK.   He never forgave the NY Jets for leaving Shea and moving over to the Meadowlands.  He never bought Hess gas again.

Lesson Learned: Important culinary destinations in Brooklyn -- the original Lundy Brothers and the original Brennan & Carr.  Accept no imitations.

My father never celebrated New Year's Eve the entire time I knew him.  When my Dad was 20, his own father died on New Year's Day.   The most celebratory thing my father ever did on New Year's Eve was propose to my mother in 1964.  From that time on, it was a lowkey evening with friends or at home.

No one made better chicken salad than my dad.  No one ever will.

No one made better scrambled eggs than my dad.  No one ever will.

No one made better matzoh brei than my dad.  No one ever will.

My father was an Architectural Draftsman in the Department of Public Works for Nassau County on Long Island.  (When I was little, I had trouble pronouncing his job title and told people my daddy was an "artificial draftsman.")  I loved visiting his office and pretending his drafting table was my own personal art easel.  When a county building was being built or renovated, he did the blueprints and was on site to inspect during the construction/renovation process, often in a trailer.  When a first-grade field trip took the school bus past the Nassau County Jail, I yelled out, "my daddy's in there!"  This prompted my teacher to phone my mother at home that night and ask, "is there anything about Ilene's home life we should know?"  My daddy was AT the jail - overseeing renovations - but was not currently serving time IN the facility.   Back when the Nassau County Veterans' Memorial Coliseum was first being built, my mother would visit him - with me and my brother, in a stroller - and walk along the venue floor while my dad was up above us walking on the catwalks in the rafters.  The last time he was inside the Coliseum was in December 2005 to see a Bon Jovi concert.  Talk about full circle.

Because of his background in drafting and work on blueprints, he had the most perfect handwriting.

He had been accepted to Cooper Union.   He parents didn't allow him to go; they didn't understand the opportunity it was.

He let us wet his hair, part it in the middle, and slick down the sides.  We put a black construction paper mustache on him, tied a shoelace around his arm and had him pose for photos holding a frozen steak.   Yes, we dressed my dad up as Beefsteak Charlie. 

My father loved to travel, especially loved to road trip.  He loved maps, loved finding back roads.  My parents took day trips with friends where the direction my father turned the car was based on whether the quarter landed on heads or tails.  My love of road trips?  I got that from my dad.

The man loved halavah.  Put on a tuxedo.  Endure the black tie-event.  Ignore the Viennese table.  Just bring him some halavah.  Or pumpkin pie.  The man asked for very little but the simple pleasure of fresh pumpkin pie when it was pumpkin pie season was his indulgence.

He could make his thumb disappear and make his mouth pop with his finger.

He didn't have a middle name.   As children, we thought this a travesty.  So we assigned him the middle name "Darren."

My dad loved taking photographs.  My childhood is very well documented.  A three week family vacation to Israel yielded 28 rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film (well how else could my mother schlep back 28 canisters of soil from Eretz Yisrael for future burials, including my dad's?) My love of photography and my tendency to over chronicle everything with images is entirely the influence of my father.

My dad loved to read.  His appetite for books was voracious.  It was usually intrigue and mystery - Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, Nelson DeMille, John LeCarre, Tom Clancy, and later John Grisham...  I didn't inherit his taste in books, but I got his hunger.  I blame my love of reading (and hoarding like tendencies when it comes to books) entirely on my dad.

From the launch of the NY Islanders franchise, my parents shared two sets of season tickets with a group of friends.   They usually went to games together but it was such an 'event' when my Dad took me or my brother to the game instead.  Bryan Trottier was my father's player.  Always Trotts.  #19.

My father dated my mother, on and off, for eight years.  When he finally proposed, my Grandma Sara (my mom's mom) asked him why it had taken him so long.  His reply?  "I stutter."

My father was so creative. He could draw, copy, doodle - it was magic to a kid.  When I was born, he'd written to the Walt Disney Company and asked for pictures of their famous characters.  They mailed him little cut-outs of Mickey and Pluto and Goofy and Donald and Snow White... and instead of sticking them to the wall with some scotch tape, my father painstakingly copied each character onto the wall above my crib in pencil and then painted the characters onto the wall.   When my parents moved us from the Cathedral Avenue apartment in Hempstead to a house in East Meadow, they had to leave his artwork behind.  The family who took over the lease on the Hempstead apartment refused to paint over his work so it remained.

My father regularly played taxi driver to me and my friends whenever we had tickets to a concert at Nassau Coliseum (and before any of us had drivers' licenses of our own.)  Once he dropped a friend and me off for the Billy Idol concert.  I was 14.  He returned later to retrieve us after the show and we met him outside by the Players' Parking lot and climbed into the car.  He didn't say a word.  He'd been watching the other concertgoers pouring out of the venue.  Finally, he shifted the car into drive and said, "that girl's skirt is shorter than her tampon string" and drove away.  He never mentioned the concert again.

Lesson Learned: Know the masters -- he introduced us to the genius of Buddy Hackett ("Peggy don't do alligator jokes") and George Carlin and Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner and Sid Caesar and Red Skelton and The Marx Brothers.

Lesson Learned: View the classics -- he introduced me to An Affair To Remember, Oklahoma!, Meet Me In St. Louis, the glory of Irene Dunne... For years, whenever I'd be watching TCM, I'd call him to tell him what classic film was on so he could tune in also.  I still have that instinct to go for the phone now when watching a classic movie... but then I remember.

Lesson Learned: Listen to the icons -- he introduced me to Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne, Rogers & Hammerstein and Frank Sinatra. I still don't understand the allure of Steve & Edye.

Never really understood his seemingly random dislike of Pat Benatar or why he got so hooked on  the song "Karma Chameleon."   Easy to understand why hearing "Copacabana" made him twitch (you try a one week road trip with two kids who sang it non-stop the whole time, you'd twitch too.) 

He was an excellent whistler.

He was an exceptional snorer, especially in the 80's.   So much so, Ginger, the family hundt, would wake me up during the night, go outside, then refuse to come back in the house.  He didn't believe us, so we broke out the tape recorder as proof.

He looked like the secret offspring of Buddy Hackett and Charles Durning.

He always dreamed of visiting the American Southwest and was so envious of my 2001 roadtrip and my brother's many cross-country adventures.   He finally got to Sedona and The Grand Canyon in September 2006.  But the ultimate destination on that trip was visiting Monument Valley... home of John Ford movies and the place which held such fascination for my dad.  As far as he was concerned, he'd been to Israel and he'd been to Monument Valley.  He was good.  Sure, he wended up being med-evac-ed out of Monument Valley (the altitude wreaked havoc on his oxygen issues) but when I spoke to him in his Phoenix hospital room, he sounded like an exuberant 10-year-old boy.  "... but at least I got there... I got to see it!" he said.  (And trust me, there was no other way he'd have gotten my mother up on a tiny prop plane, ever.)

He was incredibly loyal to friends and family.  Friends at his funeral knew him for 20, 30, 40, even 50+years.

He left me with words I hold dear, which I still can hear in his voice in my head, and which I cling to.  During the roughest patch I'd known in life, he told me... "Ilene, you're THE most capable person I've ever known.  You will figure this out."

Well, I haven't figured it out entirely.  And I haven't figured out how to process his absence although I know he'll never really be gone.  And there aren't enough words to fully express what he meant (means, and always will mean) to me.  Nor do I think this is best forum.  This is merely a small tribute to a man big in laugh, big in smile, big in heart, lingering big in my memory and forever in my identity.

I am my father's daughter.  And so proud of it.

Robert "Darren" Schreibman

With us Feb. 25, 1937 until  Feb. 16, 2011 

  (Thank you, Mom & Neal, for letting me share.)