Dad never 'cut a hog'; I wish he'd applied same policy to 'withes'
Outliving your dad can cause you to think.
Date published: 9/26/2004
THOUGH THEY carry risks, unguard- ed conversations sometimes spark friendships. One of the reasons I'm so fond of Arch Di Peppe is that the two of us, unacquainted with prudence, discovered early on that we had the same kind of father.
"My dad would get mad at me and tell me, 'Son, I'm gonna make a Christian out of you,'" laughed Arch.
My dad, facing juvenile rebellion, would grit his teeth and vow, "Son, you're not gonna outdo me."
Arch is now a Buddhist. I'm not sure I've "outdone" my dad, but at least I've out-lived him.
Next month I'll turn 55, a birthday my dad never saw. Broken down by lupus and diabetes, he died at age 54 during my senior year in high school. Strangely, though I have lived more than twice as long on Earth without my father as with him, he is an abiding presence in my life, a reappearing yardstick against which I measure masculine conduct, not least my own.
This is not to say that the yardstick is without flaws, that it alone suffices as a guide to right behavior, or that its markings are useful to every bolt of cloth we cut to fashion a whole life.
In politics, for example, my dad never voted for a Republican because, even if he admitted the GOP candidate were "a good man," helping him get elected would "take a spoke out of the wheel," the metaphor implying that the Democratic Party rolled the general welfare forward. So adamantly did my father believe this that as a young man outside a polling precinct, he and his brothers "jumped on" some boastful Republicans.
When Ike, whom my father admired, ran for president on the GOP ticket, Dad voted for Adlai Stevenson, unenthusiastically but twice, on the ad hoc rationale that it was dangerous to elevate "a military man" to the presidency. (Right, Dad. Remember what a horrible leader George Washington was.)
His son, meanwhile, has seldom voted for a Democrat, though were I my dad's contemporary, I probably would have supported FDR and certainly Truman. (Would my dad, who died before the McGovernization of the Democratic Party, have cast a ballot for Nixon? Reagan? It's hard to imagine, but who knows?)
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