Always a Time to Remember Dad

Hi Dad!  We are now in the calendar neighborhood of “Father’s Day,” making it totally appropriate to consider some of the many ways you shaped my life and laid down for me the educational and moral basis for joy, passion and giving. Of course, I think of you every day, not just on this rather artificial mercantile holiday our culture has created.

In this brief writing, I want to look specifically at a couple of things I learned by your example which have helped shape my career and outlook on life. These are things that will also constitute a legacy going way beyond my time and your time on our favorite planet Earth. The legacy will carry on in how the HR daughters, Elyse and Rachel, meet their responsibilities for future stewardship.

Though you left Earth more than 40 years ago, every time I think of you, two great visions still stand out. The first is your total lifelong passion for music. The second is your hard work and dedication to your public service job.

My fondest memories of you were those you created with your magnificent, early 19th-century violin. You literally made it sing and made it a magician’s tool. I remember how often you would bring our guests to tears at home recitals by playing Schubert’s Ave Maria or the “Meditation” from the opera Thais by Massenet. You could then seamlessly morph into a gypsy music master sitting around a campfire releasing your flying and accurate fingers playing Monti’s Czardas. 

Your artistry made you a centerpiece for our engagement with other people, waiting eagerly in the hope that they would be invited back for another musical evening. Your violin, mom’s lovely singing voice and my feeble attempts to play duets with you on the guitar helped me learn about how a person can be a hero in life by means of sensitivity rather than testosterone overdoses. You taught me how joy could be shared with many others. All these were lessons directly applicable to the career a person chooses and the degree to which they shape a life of happiness and success.  Without passion for what you do, there can be no real fulfillment. You are living the life of a robot simply wasting the precious time we have in life.

I have always carried the lesson of passion around with me and thought about it often as I shared learning, development and training activities with people at work and graduate students I taught. I carried that lesson — and its identical twin, humor — with me in doing seminars and conference presentations. Those seminars may have occurred in an auditorium or meeting room, but thanks to your lessons, I came to easily imagine that the audience and I were really in our small apartment living room enjoying snacks — preferably chocolate desserts — and the informality of being with friends.  I learned from you that it is always my duty to seek out the company of others to learn from them and hopefully to share with them life experiences and knowledge that I’ve gained over the years.

“Dad, the passionate musician” is always accompanied in my memory by “Dad, the hard-working public servant.” We lived in crowded Los Angeles and your near blindness prevented you from driving. The result was about an hour-and-a-half bus commute each way five days a week to work. You did all this not necessarily out of the challenge and enjoyment of being a journey-level clerk in a federal bureaucracy, but in order to earn an honorable living helping your colleagues be successful in their engineering and other technical work. You did it to produce a stable, though very modest income to pay mother’s medical bills and to make a life of joy in our small apartment.

Every day you would leave before dawn and every evening during the workweek you would come home after dark. How exhausting it was for you! You were always ready, however, to spend time with me and mom and to ask with honest enthusiasm about what we accomplished during the day and what was exciting about our adventures. I remember how happy we both were when I got my driver’s license and could use mom’s car early in the morning to give you a jumpstart on your bus trip by flying down Wilshire Boulevard, exceeding the speed limit, to catch up with the bus that would get you to the office 15 to 30 minutes earlier. I’m amazed that I was never stopped by the LAPD for speeding!

I also remember how happy you were to tell your work colleagues about what your only child was up to in school and how happy it made you feel by sharing my interest in music, government and science when I got to come to your office to visit. I doubtless blushed a lot as you went around introducing me to everybody! I tried hard never to disappoint you.

The concepts of that vision of “Dad, the hard worker” reflects well on any public servant who understands that their work affects the lives of others and that they have a duty to do that work effectively and caringly, no matter what their position in the organization might be. You did that work for many years proudly earning a government pension which, along with the access to post-retirement health insurance, allowed you to have a comfortable retirement. I only later came to realize that those seeds you planted by honorable employment made the rest of your life much more comfortable and much less stressful than it otherwise would have been. The importance of thinking now about the future and sacrificing now for a better future are lessons you taught me and lessons I have tried to impart to my beautiful daughters. 

These were also lessons I hope I imparted over the decades to the people that worked with me or reported to me as an HR director in city and county government and as a county chief administrative officer. Your lessons of personal sacrifice and accepting risks for larger goals also helped make me a better intelligence officer just as they certainly made me a better daddy and hubby. There are many lessons from your life of stewardship, service to others, humor, “husband-hood” and fatherhood that ring true as much today as they did decades ago when I was a growing kid.

Thank you for those incredibly great gifts to me, borne out of love and grown out of the crucible of your own life experiences as an immigrant child. With some slight apologies to Kipling, I hope that when I “…meet you later on at the place where we have gone” we will have an eternity to go over all of these things and to watch in awe as our great, great, great grandchildren and those of friends and family members develop their own strong legacies.