Sunday, June 16, 2013

Dear Old Dad

June is a big month for fathers, and mine is no exception.

Lester Irving Gordon was born on June 12, 1912.  He passed away after just a 7-month battle with liver cancer in June, 1983, some 30 years ago.  We buried him on Father’s Day.  He would have been 101 years old this month. 

My father grew up in Jersey City, which I grew to consider the center of the universe.  Anywhere he went, or we went as a family, he would always run into someone he knew from Jersey City.  He suffered through the Great Depression, served in the Navy, and spent most of his life in women’s shoes.  No, his story is not the basis for “Kinky Boots.”  He sold shoes for a living, except for the brief period when he moved the family to Somerville to manage a dress store (we stayed, but the Centre Shop didn’t).  That’s the time I think of him in women’s clothing. 

My father knew everything there was to know about shoes (as we used to say,  "There's no business like shoe business") and I grew up never having to shop retail.  He would simply assess the shoe situation and bring me new shoes when I needed them.  He would slide the ubiquitous shoehorn out of the back pocket of his pants to place them gently on my feet and I’d walk around the living room to try them on.  We’d settle on a pair or two and he’d carefully put the others back in their boxes and take them with him to the store the next day.

Many nights, Dad would get home from work late, and his explanation always started the same way:  “A woman comes into the store,” he’d say, going on to detail what she wanted and how he couldn’t turn her away.  He was big on children’s shoes, too, and he made us wear Stride Rites as kids because they were the best.  Once in a while my sister and I would go to the stores where he worked in Summit and later Union so he could fit us or maybe even pick out something he wouldn’t have thought of.  It wasn’t just us he took care of, either.  When he became ill and had to leave his job, and after he died, we received countless cards and letters from his customers – undoubtedly the ones he had stayed late to help – thanking him for always taking care of their kids, or telling him about their lives.  He had a whole life outside our family where he knew what other kids were doing in school and how comfortable their shoes were.  Just like us.

That was vintage Lester Gordon, a kind, sweet man who never had a bad word to say about anyone.  Clearly, I am my mother’s daughter.  In fact, once, when my mother, sister and I were disparaging a particularly obnoxious woman we knew, my father just had to throw in something positive to say about her.  “I think she’s fluent in Spanish,” he offered.  From that point on, whenever I couldn’t stand someone, I’d often wonder – or hope – that she would be fluent in Spanish, my father’s version of finding some redeeming quality in everyone.

Always affable and congenial, my father lacked the sense of the absurd and the sense of humor that I inherited from my mother.  Mom and I would be convulsing over an episode of “I Love Lucy,” and Dad would walk through the room and say, “I can’t believe you can still laugh over a show you have seen so many times before.”  Though I can’t quote my mother’s retort, it was inevitably something snarky.  But, then, again, when my father would peer into the refrigerator looking for something to eat, my mother would admonish him with, “Jesus Christ, Lester, are you watching a movie in there?”

When it came time for me to learn to drive, driver’s ed wasn’t mandatory in my high school, and I couldn’t fit it into my schedule anyway, so Dad taught me how to drive, mostly by following the roads on the Duke Estate in Hillsborough – the same roads where he taught my mother to drive years earlier.  Our first time out was a Sunday, and he took me to the big, empty parking lot behind the Sears store at the Somerville Circle, which was closed on Sunday.  With infinite patience, he showed me how to step on the clutch and shift into first on the column.  Then it was my turn.  I put the car in gear and started to move forward, just in time to see a deer dart out of nowhere and run right in front of the car.  I calmly put the car in neutral – and then screamed, because I had never driven nor seen a deer before.  Until the day he died, Dad couldn’t believe I didn’t stall.

I remember my father taking me to the Cort Theater in Somerville to see not double but triple features, when the tickets were a quarter (you can see my movie obsession started young).  We had a tradition in our family of going into New York to see a show and have dinner on Christmas.  As prices for Broadway tickets went up, we would see a Broadway show but eat dinner in New Jersey to save money on Christmas.  Then it turned into a movie and the diner.  The year he died, we stayed home and watched “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows,” a far cry from the bright lights of Broadway.

In the summer, my father would take his first plunge of the season into the Jewish Community Center Pool (where my mother worked in the office and I was the kiddie pool lifeguard) and his ears would completely clog up.  You could find him on the concrete deck, hopping around on one foot and slapping his head, trying to coax the water out, until my mother – whose reaction was always, “Jesus Christ, Lester…” – would stop at Wald Drugs and get that little squeezie bulb thing to extract the wax and water so he could hear again.

As my sister and I got older, my parents would go away to the Catskills for a week’s vacation every summer.  My mother would over pack, and my father would enjoy the various programs and, especially, the food offered by the resorts where they stayed.  They would go to breakfast and scoop up what they referred to as “falata cakes.”  Huh?  See, “falata” means you take cake and save it “for later.”  One year, they moved to a different hotel.  When they returned, I inquired, “How was it?”  “Great,” said Dad.  “They had lots of good food.”  “What did you do there?” I asked.  “We ate, went to the pool, had dinner,” he explained.  I was curious.  “Would you go back again next year?” I wondered.  “I don’t think so,” said Dad.  “Why not?” I asked.  His answer was simple:  “Too much food.”

Dad was a generous and thoughtful man, kind to everyone and always ready to serve the Men’s Club at the Jewish Community Center or to swap stories with the owner of the local shoe store (where he didn’t work).  He joined SmokeEnders to quit smoking – and it worked! – and then had to join Overeaters Anonymous when he packed on a few pounds after he quit.  He loved to schmooze – maybe it was the salesman in him – though I can’t remember him ever telling a joke.  The only career advice he ever gave me was straightforward:  “Don’t go into retail,” he warned.  Too many late dinners, I guess, and too many hours at the store.  Labor Day was sacrosanct to my father, since it was the one day all year when no one should have to work, he reasoned.  To this day, if my sister and I venture to the mall to shop the Labor Day sales, we first look wistfully to the sky and softly utter, “Sorry, Dad.”

Many Sundays, he and my mother would go for a ride with their best friends, Abe and Diana Watkin, driving around the area, maybe stopping for ice cream.  My father was a consistent driver – 35 mph in town and on the highway – and annoyed my mother by looking around at everything, even when he was the driver.  Both of my parents are gone now, as are the Watkins, but as Abe said in my father’s eulogy, they would be together again someday, taking those rides in Heaven.

There were two things my father always had in his pocket.  One was a very old silver dollar, so old, in fact, that it was almost worn smooth.  We’d borrow it and put in on the crack in the sidewalk and try to hit it with a rubber ball.  The other thing he always carried was his shoe horn.  Today these two cherished reminders of Dad are in a box frame, hanging on the wall in my bedroom.

But I also remember my father in an olfactory way.  The man spent his life in shoes, and, especially on a busy day, he would come home smelling like leather.  He didn’t need English Leather cologne, because he smelled like the real thing.  On the day of the summer Sidewalk Sale, you could smell the leather as soon as he came in the door.  To this day, I can’t go into a shoe store without taking a little sniff and thinking, “Dad.”  New shoes, old stories.  Dear old Dad.