June 11, 2014 Article

An Old Coot wishes his pop a Happy Father’s day!

by Merlin Lessler

I stumbled on an old picture of my father the other day. It lay hidden for decades in a box of memorabilia. It was taken in 1970, a few months before he died. He was sixty-eight. Something about the picture struck a chord in me. It looked familiar in a new way. Then it dawned on me. I’ve been seeing a semblance of his face in my mirror for several years, when I really looked. Usually, I’m not paying close attention; I see myself in a memory haze. We all do. None of us can believe how old we really are. Even a thirty-year-old sees a younger face in the mirror. Every once in a while the haze clears and we’re startled. “Who the heck is that?” That’s the way it was for me when I looked at my father’s picture. He’d been appearing in my mirror of late and I didn’t know it.

I was in my twenties when he died. His face showing up in my mirror has been a long time coming. So long that I didn’t expect it. It’s why the long-lost snapshot gave me such a start. I came face to face with my mortality. I can remember being irked with him when he died. The national life expectancy for a male at the time was sixty-nine. He died short of the mark. I thought he should have stayed around longer. We’d just started to develop a nice friendship. The salad days of suffering through the “old man’s” unsolicited advice had finally worn away; we both had come to realize that each had a unique perspective on life, to value, to treasure. Then he was gone.

Now it’s my turn. The face in my mirror is looking very much like his. I’ve got to hang on longer than he did. My son is a few years from discovering that his “old man” is okay. I can’t rush the process. I couldn’t with his sisters and I can’t with him. He won’t grow up right unless he goes through the transition, rejects the nurturing and flies from the nest. It’s nature’s way and you can’t mess with Mother Nature.

My father would be 111 if he were still alive. I know he would get a real kick out of the technology we take for granted today. He was a technocrat himself, an inventor. His name is on dozens of the patents for Ansco cameras. He loved to tinker, especially with cars. His favorite vacation was driving us to the Jersey shore. We almost always ran into car trouble. He’d somehow patch things together so we could limp to the motel. While we enjoyed the beach he took on the car problem. He’d spend all day leaning in, or lying under, the vehicle. If you stood within hearing range you’d hear him yell, “Sucker,” every once in a while, when his hand slipped off the wrench and he skinned his knuckles. He never swore; he just yelled sucker.  The whole thing is easier to understand when you realize that our car was a Ford Edsel. He bought it brand new, the first year they made it. He liked being on the cutting edge. It was the lemon of the century. The repair bills added up. He didn’t care. He loved it. I did too. It was the car I got to drive when I turned sixteen.

It was one of the few things we agreed on during my teen years. When I bought my first car, a well used, 1953 Ford convertible, for sixty dollars, it made two things we agreed on. It made me a Ford man too. Cars had magic in those days. They brought fathers and sons together, under the hood, taking on the beast. It was a time when a regular Joe could fix a car - change the spark plugs, replace the generator, adjust the brakes. You could even pull the engine and overhaul it if you were especially handy. The automobile had a social context. That’s gone now. The manufacturers have put the backyard mechanics out of business. The secrets of today’s automobiles can’t be passed on from father to son. The secrets are locked up in computer chips and buried in a web of pollution control components. Even the design engineers aren’t sure how it all works.  It’s too bad. Cars helped fathers and sons stay in touch through the difficult teen years. Now that bridge is gone. Happy father’s day Pop! I hope the Edsel is hitting all eight cylinders.