Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Valentine's Day

The other day was Valentine’s Day. It was also the anniversary of my father’s death. I was lucky this year. I got to drive up to Clearwater to spend a few days with my mom and my brothers, Kevin and Pat. On Saturday, Valentine’s Day, we went to Roman Catholic mass together, in remembrance of my father’s passing.

My dad has been dead for 13 years. I’m not sure how old he was when he died. That’s because history seems to show that he was born in either 1906 or 1907, in Ballinahinch, Ireland.

According to my old man, he was born in his family farmhouse on December 26, 1906. That’s the day we celebrated his birthday though we didn’t celebrate much since it was the day after Christmas.

According to his birth certificate, though, my father was born on February 20, 1907. My dad said the difference in dates arose because his birth wasn’t registered until his father, John Doherty, made a trip to Cashel, the town where such things were recorded.

That’s possible. After all, when my dad, Patrick, was born into an Irish Catholic family in what is now the Irish Republic, things like his birth date weren’t so important to the British who ruled the island. Neither were his freedom or his health or his education or his diet.

He loved potatoes. Once, in a fancy restaurant, after the waiter had listed all the vegetables he could order with his meal, my dad asked simply for a few boiled praties. That’s the Gaelic word for potatoes. He loved potatoes. My mom said that if she kept serving him spuds, he’d keep eating them until he exploded. That’s because when he was a boy he was never sure that any praties he ate might not be the last available for a time.

My father came to America as a young man. He worked as a handyman for a time, then as a meat-cutter for Harding’s Corn Beef, then as a salesman, and – finally – as a longshoreman, loading and unloading boats on the Chicago River. He left the house before dawn and never came home before sunset. He was a hard man, big and strong and tough. I heard he was quite a boxer as a young man, the champion of Cashel, taking on challengers from other villages. I know he had huge fists.

He was tough with his family, as well. But he loved us all. In his world, that love was best expressed by putting food on the table in a safe house. He wanted each of us, he often said, to climb higher up the ladder than he’d been able to climb.

My dad and I loved each other, but we didn’t get along well during all those years when booze ruled my life. I became things, drinking, he never wanted me to become. In fact, neither he nor my mom talked to me for more than a dozen years when my drinking was bad. I don’t blame them. Those were years when I couldn’t look in the mirror.

Anyway, after I got sober things improved.

"I don’t understand your being a drunk," my father told me. "I don’t know why you can’t just stop when you want to stop." I knew it would make no sense to try to explain. "Anyway," my father said, "you’re sure as hell doing better these days. Keep the plug in the damned jug." Then he hugged me. It’s the only time I can remember that he hugged me.

At the mass said at my father’s church on Valentine’s Day, I got to sit next to my mother. She’s 93 years old now and a bit deaf and very unsteady on her feet. She can’t kneel any more the way Catholics are supposed to kneel during mass. But she was there. And when the priest announced that the mass was being said in remembrance of Patrick Joseph Doherty, my mother grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

I’m glad I was there.