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?)
No, the paternal criterion I mean concerns character. One thing my father had was a quiet dignity, the adjective infusing the noun. I never, ever saw him make a public scene--what the old black ballplayers called cutting a hog. When another's rudeness might have provoked a justified verbal retaliation, my dad held his peace, got the kind of look on his face you get when you're out to eat and you open the restroom door to a dirty toilet, and silently walked away, not out of fear but in recognition of the First Rule of Pigs: Never wrestle with a pig; he likes it and you get dirty.
I think of my dad's quiet, Gary Cooper-like way whenever the phone rings and a putative male on the other end starts shrieking in high-decibel, angry hysteria, or when such a fellow writes a letter to the editor that thrashes and flops around, spewing invective, like an unmanned fire hose.
A "horse trader," my dad loved to prevail in a deal, but I never knew him to deceive anyone, much less lie. He hated to get "beat"--that is, cheated--and he never "beat" anyone. I heard him swear twice and I saw him drink one can of beer. I am tolerably honest, at least when low stakes are involved, but I have lapped him several times in the other areas.
My dad had an eighth-grade education--the Appalachian standard during the Depression--and knew he suffered from it and instilled in me the assumption that my schooling would last 16 years. A truck driver at a Union Carbide plant, he offset his limited earning power with a painful frugality--I remember several threats to remove our home telephone and observations that we could do our talking for a lot less on a corner pay phone--and a disciplined commitment to saving. He never paid a mortgage or a car payment, and when he died he left my mother without a single family debt. In his chest-of-drawers was a stack of savings bonds for my college.
My father was not always gentle with his family, and he was unempathetic with many of their desires. (My mom did not drive a car until after he died, and at one point, for spending money, took in the laundry of a doless aunt.) Life to him was not a game, it was a war, and if you weren't careful you would be a casualty and so would your family. A Prussian discipline, imposed on yourself and others under your roof, was the key to survival.
Although my dad never cut a hog, he had no hesitation to "cut a withe" off the backyard tree with his pocketknife to sting the bare legs of an unruly boy. This kind of thing did not make him especially beloved in the eyes of the "troops." But it kept everyone fed and sheltered and clothed, and if you were his son you imagined you were just as middle-class as the architect's son who lived one street over.
So my dad went to work every weekday, did his job, kept out of trouble, curbed any expensive temptations he felt, even sacrificing much of the affection of his family in order to keep it materially comfortable. He did this for as long as I could remember, in health and in sickness--during his last few years, after dinner, he would slump into his living-room chair and simply shut his eyes for hours, squeezed into profound weariness by two life-shortening diseases--until he died.
So now, on the threshold of territory my dad never entered, I reflect that I have a few virtues, chiefly in the area of family interaction, that he lacked--but maybe only because I can afford them while he couldn't. He had strengths, meanwhile, that I can but envy. Well, as Mencken said, only the cockroaches are perfect.
And could it be that an earlier, more famous writer had it wrong? Maybe it's the good that men do, if the men are fathers, that lives after them, uninterred with their bones. All I know is that I feel surprising gratitude--and the hope that 30-odd years from now my own children, considering my influence on their lives, will reach a similar conclusion.
PAUL AKERS is editor of the opinion pages of The Free Lance-Star.