My Father, Through the Eyes of a Five-Year Old

When I was five years old, I thought my father was the biggest thing in the world. Literally. It’s not just that at 5 feet 10 inches, he was the biggest one in the family. Everything he did impressed me. You wouldn’t say that he was a hands-on kind of Dad. He never drove us to school or any other of our activities. He never changed a diaper as far as I knew, and there were many. With eight children in nine years and three months, for a long time my mother had three young ones in diapers, and not the disposable kind. My Dad never attended church with us, even though my mother took all eight of us to Mass at Holy Family every single Sunday. But this lack of involvement in everyday matters impressed me all the more, for to me, he was occupied with more important things. Mysterious things. For instance, he left home early every morning to do something called “making rounds” at a place called “Saineeze.” It was years before I realized that “Saineeze” was really “St. E’s,” short for St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. All I knew was that making rounds involved patients and “Saineeze” was the hospital where all of us were born. Sometimes the hospital would call and leave a message for Dad to call “The Floor.” I was not sure was The Floor was, but it seemed like they needed him all the time. After making rounds, he’d go to his office where he would tend to pregnant women, kids with the flu, elderly patients with failing bodies and memories. They all depended on him, just like we did.

Dad would return home each evening at 5:30 on the nose, just as my mother was putting dinner on the table. He sat at the head of the long table in the kitchen, my mother at the other end, the four boys on one side, and the four girls on the other, the one near the sink and the stove. That made sense, since the girls were the ones charged with kitchen duties while the boys occupied themselves with outside things, which usually involved engines. The riding mower. The dirt bikes. The Alfa or the MG. I knew nothing about such things, which only made Dad’s familiarity with them all the more impressive to my young mind.

You could say he was a little eccentric. In 1964, he planted 1,500 pine trees in the field behind our house. They grew into a pine forest where in later years we’d harvest our Christmas trees. That same year he went to Washingtonville, Ohio, and bought a barn, circa 1875, for $75, had it disassembled, transported to our house and reassembled on our property. He kept his car collection in there.

And he was fun to play with. So many times when he returned home we’d run to him, yelling “Swing me, Dad, swing me!!” He’d take us by the hands one by one and swing us around in a circle, making us dizzy. I’d reach into his suit pocket to see if he brought us any surprises and often I’d find my favorite gum, Juicy Fruit, waiting for me. I loved to stand on his black wingtip shoes, so much bigger than my feet, and hold onto his legs while he walked around the room. Before bed, sometimes Dad would lift me over his head and seat me on top of the refrigerator, where if I reached up I could touch the ceiling. He’d proclaim loudly, “Goodnight, I’m going to bed now,” and turn out the light and pretend to walk away, leaving me sitting up there. I’d laugh and say “Get me down! Get me down!” Of course he never left the room. We had another game where he’d tell us to pull on his ear. When we did, he’d stick his tongue out, like they were connected. We did this over and over and never got bored of it.

Sometimes he’d come home tired and had a short temper. He’d yell and carry on, and we knew we’d better tow the line or we’d be in for it. Like the time my oldest brother Ray refused to eat his beans. Dad gave him a sound spanking.

“Are you gonna eat your beans?” he bellowed.

“Yes,” replied Ray, who must have been around ten.

Then to each of us in turn: “Are you gonna eat your beans?”

“Yes,” we each replied, having learned from the example made of my brother. We ate our beans.

Or there was the time my older sister spilled her milk, night after night. Dad poured a whole bottle of milk over her head. She never spilled it again and I’m sure the rest of us didn’t either. From my viewpoint, if Dad was in “a bad mood,” as we euphemistically called it, I tried to be quiet. These times I thought he was scary.

He even looked different from most fathers I knew. He had Mediterranean skin and a scratchy face that looked blue when clean-shaven. He had big hands and black hair on his chest. He had big black eyebrows. Even his language was exotic to me. He attended medical school in Bologna and spoke Italian. Sometimes he’d answer the phone and say “Alvedio! Come Stai!” He’d call us capolavoro, Italian for masterpieces.

So yes, I guess you could say I thought him the biggest thing in the world, in lots of different ways.

Then one day Dad bought a tree he wanted to plant in honor of my brother’s birthday. It was a sapling, maple I think, and we were going to plant it in the backyard. I watched as Dad dug the hole just so and placed the big ball of roots into it. He replaced the dirt around the base of the tree and stood up next to it.

To my astonishment, the tree towered over my father. I remember the moment so clearly. The baby tree is bigger than Dad. He was not the biggest thing in the world. He was bigger than me but not bigger than everything.

Over the years Dad made a big impression on everyone he met. Between his early career in general practice and his later one in psychiatry, it seemed like everyone in town had been his patient at one time or another. He put all eight children through college and graduate school but stepped back as we chose our various careers and spouses. Today he plays the tug-on-the-ear game with the youngest of his 28 grandchildren, though his arthritic shoulders don’t allow him to raise them over his head. I wonder if they think he’s the biggest thing in the world, or if they reserve that sentiment for their own fathers.

A Mother is Born

A seismic change occurred in my life on July 11, 1989. I thought I was prepared for it. I had planned for my whole life to be a mother someday. It was a given. And I had been pregnant for nine months already, after all. We had dutifully attended Lamaze classes in the preceding weeks, and learned how to breastfeed and change a diaper and even mastered the football hold, which is supposed to calm a colicky newborn. We listened attentively as the instructor recommended that during labor, we should use the hee hee whoo whoo breathing technique to manage the pain as long as possible before requesting drugs. If we really needed the drugs, we were told, we could request stadol, a narcotic that would “take the edge off.” If the pain was too great, we could request an epidural but the instructor was sure we could manage our pain effectively without resorting to such drastic measures. Oh yes, we could also try a tennis ball. Evidently rolling one around on your back is also helpful. The clear subtext in all of this was that nature’s way (read: pain) was vastly superior to that of modern medicine.

At work, I had arranged to take maternity leave beginning two weeks prior to my due date. I told my boss that while I was out of the office those three months, I thought I’d write a scholarly article for publication on the subject of insider trading. Even if I was becoming a mother, I was still a securities lawyer, dammit, and I was going to have all this free time on my hands. My boss, a woman with two preschool age boys, smiled and said, “Mmmm hmmmm.” Was that laughter I heard as I left the conference room?

At home, the crib was all set up in the nursery, the walls papered with yellow polka dots and pastel elephants marching around the border, at baby-eye level, the better to pique the infant’s interest in his surroundings. We were stocked up on diapers and onesies, those tiny one-piece T-shirts that snap at the bottom for easy changing. All that was left was to deliver the baby into the hands of his capable parents. We even knew it was a boy. If the doctor knew, we figured, so should we.

We waited. The due date of June 25, calculated with much precision, came and went without so much as a cramp. We waited some more. One week past the due date, the doctor suggested we start thinking about inducement. “If you say so,” we said, just to humor the man. In our hearts we believed this kid would arrive in his own good time and without the assistance of contraction-inducing chemicals. Another week passed. Nothing. By that time I thought those chemicals sounded rather inviting. We agreed to the inducement on July 11, the day of the All Star Game that featured Bo Jackson, the two-sport all-pro baseball/football legend who was America’s darling. “Bo knows babies.” That seemed like a good omen.

We arrived at Magee Women’s Hospital in Oakland at the appointed hour, 4:30 a.m. I was promptly connected to all sorts of tubes and wires and we settled in for a long day. We played cards and read the newspaper for a while. Wait, was that a contraction? That wasn’t so bad. Hee hee, whoo whoo. How was I supposed to go to the bathroom when I was all plugged in like some kind of kitchen appliance? My husband and I have no secrets. I used the bedpan. Around 2:00 I began to experience pain. Not a twinge but stabbing twisting contractions that wracked my body. Hee hee whoo whoo hee hee whoo whoo, my husband coached me. I can’t stand it, give me the stadol. I was sticking to the program.

I’m not a large woman. Even at nine months, from the back I looked normal, skinny even. When the label on the medicine bottle says take two every four hours, I take one every six, and even then it’s too much. No such adjustment was made when they administered the stadol directly into my veins, right next to the petocin and the saline. Stadol is supposed to make you feel relaxed so the contractions don’t bother you so much, while doing nothing to minimize the pain. Personally I didn’t find it very relaxing to hallucinate dinosaurs and vomit while my body was contracting in nature’s effort to expel the alien from my womb. But that’s just me.

By 6:00 I was desperate. I was a weeping pathetic writhing sweaty wife with bad breath from all the hees and whoos, and truth be told, I felt in somewhat bad humor. I demanded the epidural. When the anesthesiologist arrived an hour later (Jesus H. Christ Where In The Hell Have You Been? Can’t You See I’m Having A Goddamn Baby In Here!) I was instructed to roll into a ball and not to move while the good doctor inserted an instrument roughly the dimensions of a knitting needle into my spine, excuse me, the epidural space, and if I had a contraction, he said, use my hees and whoos. My husband, the one who got me into this mess, was not allowed to be in the room during this procedure. There was no justice. The doctor succeeded on the second try and as my lower body went numb he was forgiven for his late arrival. In fact I felt like kissing him.

It was smooth sailing, more or less, for the next few hours, and we watched Bo catch a fly ball with his bare hands. My son will also be a star, I thought. A captain of industry. A brilliant scientist. A standout athlete. If he ever gets here.

Around ten p.m., I was wheeled into the delivery room so the obstetrician could perform his magic. I pushed when they told me to, and to my great relief the enormous hulk that had been my companion for months, pressing down on my lungs and bladder and kicking my husband in the stomach when we hugged in bed, was gone from my body. The doctor held up the infant, perfectly formed, wiggling, hot and wet. He looked like me.

“Omigod,” I thought, “it’s a baby!!” It was a miracle.

As I segued into my new role as mother, I was astonished at the transformation taking place in my body. If the baby cried, my body responded by producing milk. I would wake at night anticipating that he was about to cry, and my body made milk. Any gesture by my husband sent me into weeping fits of self-pity. (“Honey, do you want some ice cream?” “You don’t love me anymore!” “Yes, dear, I do still love you.”) These feelings lasted only around two weeks, so compared to some new mothers I got off easy.

When we first started taking the baby out in his stroller, people stopped to admire him. Yes, I thought, he is quite extraordinary. We ran into a woman from our Lamaze class, who had delivered her child a few weeks before ours was born. My God, I thought, that is one ugly baby. Not nearly as gorgeous as mine. I started noticing that no baby was as beautiful as mine. How clever was mother nature, to instill this sense of wonder in me, this sense of pride, this absolute love for a person I had known such a short time.

About a week into this adventure, one of my superiors from the office called.

“I have Mr. So-and-So on the line from Oklahoma City. Can you do a conference call right now on the blue sky implications of a private offering where a few of the investors reside out-of-state?”

“Ummmm….I guess so.” About a minute into the call, which I could barely hear anyway, I heard the baby wailing from his crib. It was chow time and the milk began to flow. I gracefully exited the call (“Bad connection, I’ll call you later.” Click.) and attended to the needs of my baby.

Clearly this new identity of mine was going to require some adjustments. Thank God I had my mother, who had successfully raised not one but eight children, and stayed with us for a week until I mastered the art of breastfeeding and made sure I got a nap every day. She even planted a garden for me. I returned to work full time after three months, having secured the childcare services of a wonderful experienced mother/grandmother from Homewood named Marlene Worlds. She introduced the baby to mashed potatoes and Jerry Springer and Gospel music. She made sure I knew when the baby was not dressed warmly enough. I could not have survived my return to the land of lawyering without her. She arrived early in the morning and stayed until I or my husband returned, often twelve hours later.

I did have a lactating incident at the office, in which my silk lavender blouse acquired two dark purple stains strategically placed so there was no doubt about the state of my body, but I got past that and survived the transition, at least until baby number two came along 21 months later.

I wistfully recall those days of new motherhood. When I see a newborn I want to hold him, smell him...and give him back. Not that I didn't love having an infant (four of them as it turned out) in my life but my joy and pride in them has only increased with every passing year. I would hold my baby and think "how could life be any better than this?" Then my child would learn to walk, to talk, to question, to love. It only got better. It's still getting better. So to new mothers I usually say "How wonderful! You have so much to look forward to!" And it is the voice of experience.

A Childhood Fear: Astraphobia, or Fear of Lightning

My husband loves a good storm. He thinks nothing of sitting on the porch in the midst of a drenching rain, lightning flashing and thunder crashing all around him. I, on the other hand, am likely to be found in the innermost room of the house, the one farthest away from any window and most insulated from the noise. If the Weather Channel so much as hints at the remote possibility of a tornado anywhere within 50 miles, that’s a good enough reason for me to start doing laundry, which is conveniently located in the basement, right next to the stairs that I can hide under when the funnel cloud touches down. Not if but when. My kids can’t understand why I have this phobia, but I have a pretty good idea where it came from.

It was a Friday night, the 4th of July, 1969, and the town of Poland, Ohio, was celebrating our nation’s birth with its annual fireworks display. My father had taken three of my brothers fishing at a mysterious Canadian locale called Lift-the-Latch. They would be gone for three days. My mother stayed home over the long weekend with us four girls and my youngest brother, Bobby, who was then four. It was a hot sticky day and we decided to walk to the village to see the fireworks, about a mile away. Bobby was wary; he didn’t like loud noises, but we assured him it would be exciting. More exciting than we could have imagined, as it turned out.

My Mom walked with the five of us through Poland, passing historic wood frame houses and Wittenauers, the local pharmacy where we were regular buyers of five cent candy sticks. We walked with dozens of other families down College Lane toward Poland Seminary High School where the whole village would turn out to watch the show.

We bought tickets and sat on the grass. The air was heavy and still, and it was hot. As we waited for the festivities to begin, my mother looked up at the darkening sky. Strange. It was turning red.

“We’d better start back,” she said. It was around 8:30. The fireworks hadn’t even begun. We looked at the sky again. One side was black. It bore no semblance of clouds, but rather a blanket of black rolling toward us, as if some invisible hand was drawing it across the sky above, enveloping all that lay in its ominous shadow below.

There was no time to run. We made it a few yards to the ticket booth, where we cowered against the wall and my mother’s legs as the air exploded around us. My mother pulled us all close to her and tried to shield Bobby’s ears. He was terrified. No one expected a tornado. Had there ever been one in Poland?

There was a brief lull after a few minutes and we ran all the way home. Trees were down everywhere. Electrical and phone lines too. The storm raged on but at least we were home. Others weren’t so lucky. One girl was killed. She had been running from the fireworks to her home on College Lane where we had all been shortly before when she was struck by a falling tree limb that she never saw in the pitch black air around her. Her friends lifted the limb and carried her home. When the ambulance couldn’t reach the house because of a tree blocking the road, her friends delivered her to the ambulance on a mattress they carried from her house. She died during the night. We learned later that the storm killed 41 people across Northern Ohio.

We had no electricity for three days, and used kerosene lamps to light our old Victorian house at night. There was no power to supply the pump, so we had no water either. “Don’t flush,” my mother said, but we kids forgot and soon the toilets were empty of water but we used them anyway. Our neighbors didn’t use a well, so they shared their water supply with us, by running a hose across the street from their house to ours. All five kids slept in the king size bed with my mother. It felt safe, and the dark wasn’t as scary when we were so close to her. Mothers can soothe even nature’s fury.

The phone lines were down but functional that first day, until the police cut those too. People did not like driving over them. I picture the sheriff with a giant pair of scissors severing our connection with my father, still in Canada.

Thankfully, no harm came to any of us but I knew from that day that a storm can be something dangerous.

When I was a teenager, I worked as a camp counselor at a YMCA camp near Erie, situated on a cliff above Lake Erie. One day I was in the Nature Pavilion, a wooden structure with picnic tables, a roof and no walls. A sudden storm rolled in off the lake and the kids cowered around me, clinging to my legs much as I clung to my mother in 1969. I couldn’t let them know I was as scared as they were. Hugging them close to me helped me as much as it helped them. As I reassured them that we were safe, an ear-splitting crack rang out and everyone screamed. Lightning had struck the big tree hanging over the Pavilion, splitting it in two.

That was a close one that fed into my fear, no, my certain knowledge, that one day I would be struck by lightning. I feel this way even now. Whenever there’s a storm, I remember stories I’ve heard over the years that lightning striking the ground can travel through the water supply of a house; I won’t turn on the water. It can travel through phone lines and shock your ear (this actually happened to me); I won’t use the phone. The house in Squirrel Hill where lightning struck through a window and lit the bed on fire; I pull the covers over my head. The time lightning struck so close to our house it destroyed our TV; I unplug the appliances. I file these tales away in my brain, retrieving them unwillingly whenever the rumbling begins. We had a dog named Jezebel when I was a teenager. She used to cower under the bed at the first hint of rain. I can relate.

I had a dream once that I was in a field behind my house. Lightning struck and killed me. I watched the scene from above as my body lay in the field and my family gathered around. I felt no fear or pain. When I woke up, I was no longer afraid of death. But I was still afraid of lightning.