My Two Dads

This past week, I commemorated my two dads: the yahrzeit of my biological father on Tuesday and on Thursday the birth date of my father-in-law, who saw me as a son.

I say “two dads” because my birth father, Peter Yaremko, died the year after I married. My second dad, Joe Caruso, stepped in to take his place in my life.

Like Dickens’ famous opening line describing “the best of times and the worst of times,” my two dads were as strikingly similar as they were resoundingly dissimilar.

Each had limited education, because as young men they were required to bring an additional salary into their families. Each was good with his hands, familiar with what went on under the hood of a car, and accustomed to moonlighting for extra money.

My father was a cop – physically imposing around lawbreakers and comfortable patrolling city streets at night. My father-in-law, an office worker, weighed in at 135 pounds and once cracked a bone in his arm attempting to throw a softball. 

To supplement his policeman’s pay, my father would take day jobs as an ironworker, raising buildings. To supplement his clerk’s pay, my father-in-law sang and played keyboards with a weekend band – The Top Hatters – at  weddings, bar mitzvahs, and senior centers.

My father brought his crude street ballet home with him. In his house, distrust of the larger world outside was a persistent odor, with the tools of conflict commonplace: guns, handcuffs, batons and badges and brass-buttoned uniforms.

My father-in-law’s living room, on the other hand, was dominated by a baby grand, sheet music, and a shelf of vinyls. His closet held tuxedos and top hats, the tools of his weekend trade.

When I was recruited by IBM, a mentor gave me this advice: "You will work for good managers and bad managers. Learn from both – the good and the bad – and  you will be a great manager."

Looking back, I realize how singularly fortunate I was to experience fatherhood in stereo. Most guys get a single blueprint for what a man, a husband, a father is supposed to be. I was given two – entirely mismatched, yet somehow painting the same portrait.

One of the few compliments my father had for me came when he read my first by-lined newspaper story: “At least you can write.” But it was my father-in-law who moved me to write this poem: 

A Good Joe

Because every day he gave a quarter or whatever 

jingly change from his jacket pocket to the homeless men 

between his office and car, they learned his name was Joe. 

Don’t call them bums, he’d correct his pals from the office. 

They’re not bums, just down on their luck. The men smiled

and called on the God of them all to bless him and his.

If you visit that black asphalt alley where the men congregated 

between hours of panhandling, you won’t see them anymore, 

Joe and the men he was kind to. They’re all dead and gone now.

But something lingers after all the windblown decades. If affection 

has an aroma, it’s here, reminiscent of men down on their luck

and a hapless man himself just getting by as best he could.

A poem for my father? I can’t write to a prompt.

(Image by Chris Edwards & Nathan Rush)