91 

 My father and Bill Clinton share the same birthday. Imagine that.

I, on the other, hand, share a birthday with Leonid Brezhnev.

This would be my father's 91st birthday. Seven times thirteen, with one of those thirteen on the farther shore. 

Just a few things about my father:

He had bad eyesight, enough to keep him out of World War II, and enough so that in later years he wore what we called Menachem Begin glasses. He would tell us he was 'so nearsighted I'm farsighted." However, he had perhaps the best color vision of any man alive, and I'm not exaggerating: it was his eyes that American Art Textile Printing Co. relied upon to be the custom printers for the highest-end fabric printers in the world. None of us kids have inherited the trait, as far as I know. 

I never knew my father swore until I actually hung around the Shop as a teenager. He swore a blue streak, as did everyone there. But it was absolutely completely shut off around us--even when he got his hand tangled in a tractor's fan belt. Not once.

I was spanked exactly once by my father. I remember my face pressed down against my orange bedspread, and the impacts, but not the pain. I also don't remember how old I was---I've never been good at that--and I don't remember why. I think it might have been the time I nearly set the house on fire, but that's just deductive reasoning. He never hit me, pushed me, or even yelled at me. His voice was hard and authoritative--a family trait, all his brothers and sisters had the same hard edge to the voice--but while he ordered us around, he never threatened, never insulted--and never cajoled or begged. I tried to get out of as much as I could--but my attempted escapes were only greeted with a repetition of the order. That was it--and that, by and large, was enough.

Every so often the idea comes to me that we were part of the last paragraph of a story of my father. The part we never knew about--his first marriage to a woman who was clinically insane, his fight to keep my half-brother--all could be seen as big, dark, dramatic--at least from the peeks around the corner we've gotten. The laws of tough 1950's fiction would by rights have relegated us to the last couple of sentences, about how he remarried a good woman, and raised three kids. The End. And today it's the prose paragraph right before the credits at the end of the movie.

But that's just why fiction is so often unrecognizable. All the stuff of that life: the additions to the house, the apple trees, the cherry trees, the fig tree we had to bury each fall--the blueberry bushes and their unmanageable netting--the hand sprayers full of Malathion--the rough-hewn swimming pool and the latterly introduced filter and the unending battle against leaks--and that's not even talking about the side business ventures and the skyrocketing problems of running an industrial plant in Manhattan--are not big, dark, or dramatic as far as fiction is concerned--it was big enough for a life, and rich enough for six.

Happy Birthday, Dad.