When Dads Were Models for All of Us

Happy Fathers Day to all the dads on DU!


When Dads Were Models for All of Us


From left, Jerome Applebome, the writer’s father, with Bunny and Jesse Biblowitz, Elvira and Gilbert Isaacs, and Sydel Applebome, the writer’s mother.


By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: June 15, 2008



Long ago, I grew up with three dads: my own and two neighbors who had enough left over after dealing with their own kids to feel like dads to us as well. They lived in split-level houses next to one another that they bought around 1953 for about $30,000 at 39, 35 and 31 Tanners Road in Great Neck. Back then, they were too busy with the grand and quotidian duties of fatherhood to meditate too much about it. So, on Father’s Day 2008, a respectful salute to fatherhood before play dates, before anything 24/7, or 2.0.

Gilbert Isaacs, next door to us, never went to college, but he was the smartest man we knew — exotic and mysterious in his brazen detachment from Little League, pro sports and the other defining elements of suburban life. Instead of a lawn in the backyard there was the Japanese pebble garden he had designed and the 10-foot-tall copy of a famous Isamu Noguchi sculpture he had fabricated in his basement.

He knew about everything — orchids, the paintings of Emil Nolde, medicine and astronomy — not in the showy, keeping-score, intellectual résumé-building of today, but just because he wanted to know.

Once, he diagnosed his barber’s eye ailment, and was always greeted from then on with a respectful, “Good afternoon, Doc,” under the assumption that he was a physician, not someone who owned two jewelry stores in Queens with his brother.

Jesse Biblowitz could have been his opposite, someone so comfortable with the rhythms of our little cul-de-sac, it was hard to imagine him anywhere else. Where Gilbert’s eye was sardonic and clinical, Jesse had an unerring ability to see the best in everyone and radiated a sweetness hard to square with his big, stooped frame.

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There were, then as now, endless varieties of fatherhood, and it’s not as if they were all saints then and we’re all distant Hummer-driving power dads now. But on Tanners Road, there did seem to be more time, more grace, more of a center, more very visible models of the way to do it right than most kids, urban or suburban, grow up with today. People moved less often, they didn’t have P.D.A.’s to check on weekends, they had less fancy jobs but perhaps richer lives. You can postulate reasons, but Google can’t tell you exactly why.

Then or now, the one thing that doesn’t change is that it doesn’t last long. There we were in Jesse’s car, looking through Gilbert’s telescope or playing catch with my father, and poof, then we weren’t.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/nyregion/15towns.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

Copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden, from Collected
Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher.
Liveright Publishing Corporation.

This mythology has been repeated by every generation, stretching way back into the past. I suppose it will go on way into the future.

That's the point. PDAs and the rest are tools. To my mind, such tools haven't complicated our lives but in fact simplified them.

I remember the 50s as a complex and difficult era. Men and women were more restricted by predefined social roles than now.