Harold in Motion

Harold in Motion

Sports Dad

I remember my dad calling me back to his den. These were always significant occasions, and I ran a quick scan to figure out if I might be in trouble. I sat next to his tan office chair and looked at the squadron plaques ringing the walls, with military names like ComPatWingsPac Patrol 131. He folded his hands and leaned toward me.

            “Mike, I just wanted to check in with you on something. As you might have noticed, I’m coaching your brother’s team this season, and I wanted to make sure you were all right with that. The thing is, you kinda got ahead of me. I’m not really qualified to coach at your level.”

            Of course I was okay. I loved baseball. I was like a duck in water, and I really hadn’t thought much about my dad’s coaching pursuits. (In fact, I noticed that coaches’ kids got perhaps a little too much scrutiny.) But I was touched that my dad cared enough to ask.

            Especially in hindsight, I really appreciated my dad’s approach when he came to watch my games. As I neared the plate, he would give two handclaps and a brief encouragement: “All right, Mike! Let’s go.” Just enough to let me know he was there, but not so much that it messed with my focus. To this day, I hear parents trying to coach from the stands and I have to quash the desire to tell them to shut the hell up.

            Another aspect of my dad’s self-restraint was in the choice of sport. My dad was the captain of his high school football team, and when his eldest son shot up to six feet by freshman year, he must have had some hopes. But my stocky build almost guaranteed I would be on the line, knocking heads, and it just didn’t appeal to me.

            That said, I inherited my dad’s toughness in other ways, and his high threshold for pain. Third base and goalkeeping gave me plentiful opportunities to go airborne, and I wasn’t really happy unless I finished a game with some blood on my uniform. This trait showed itself in our other athletes, as well. Sister Carla would proudly display the raspberries she got sliding in shorts, and I have personally witnessed brother Larry performing flying somersaults in pursuit of a soccer ball.

            But my dad’s toughness was at a whole different level. When he finally went in for surgery on his long-injured rotator cuff, the doctor spent hours cleaning things up. Afterward he asked him, “How were you even walking around without screaming in pain?”

            It’s a long-standing joke that men talk about sports so they don’t have to talk about feelings. But the adjustment from son to fellow adult can be awkward, and I always appreciated the place of sports as a kind of conversational lubricant. During the various heydays of the Giants, ‘49ers and Warriors, we would use playoff games as male tribal events. We celebrated touchdowns, home runs and buzzer-beaters with silly high-fives as Dad’s monster poodle, Java, jumped and barked at all the excitement.

            My dad also had a reputation as an amateur football broadcaster. He would watch a play and say something like, “Well the tight end wasn’t sealing the three-four gap. Kaepernick should have optioned it outside.” Three seconds later, the guy on the TV would say, “Johnny, the tight end wasn’t sealing the three-four gap, so clearly Kaepernick should have taken that one outside.”

            The spectating occasion I most remember, though, came with the 2015 Super Bowl between the Patriots and Seahawks. Neither of us really cared about either team, but the ending was so stunning – a Patriots interception at the one-yard line – that I fell to the ground, slapping the carpet and exclaiming, “I can’t believe that just happened!” My dad was highly amused, watching his 50-year-old son roll around the floor like a teenager.

The Secret Musician

I recall a road trip in 1971. Big sis and I were headed to a family reunion in Indiana courtesy of Dad’s rotary-engine Mazda (Larry and Linda were flying there with Mom.) The hits of the day were Miss American Pie, Maggie May, Lean on Me and Sweet Caroline. Not that we were hearing any of these, because Dad was hunting down the oldies stations: Montavani, the Ray Coniff Singers, Englebert Humperdinck. We didn’t complain, because the man was in his element, driving across America, checking his maps and puffing on a cigar, the smoke escaping out the little triangular window vent.

            When he wasn’t smoking, he was whistling along with the radio. The Shadow of Your Smile. Moon River. I Left My Heart in San Francisco. My dad had a very pleasant whistle, rich and resonant. But he did things that I couldn’t quite figure out. He would craft little phrases in between the lines of the song. Then he’d whistle things that traveled over and under the melody. It reminded me of a movie scene I saw with Bing Crosby.

            Years later, after I came to understand more about music, I realized that my dad was riffing, and that this was not a common talent. Later, I learned that he played cornet in high school, and was a fan of trumpeters: Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, Herb Alpert. By sheer coincidence, his first and middle names made up the name of another famous trumpeter: Harry James.

            A few years later, as I began my life-long love affair with singing, I sort of wondered where I got my voice. (Mom was enthusiastic but not great.) One Christmas Eve, I stood next to Dad in church as we sang hymns. He was trying to blend in, but the talent was unmistakeable: a rich, resonant baritone.

            Dad was a huge Elvis fan but he had other favorites as well. One day, Ray Charles appeared on our television and Dad said, “Mike! Listen to this. This guy is the coolest man on the planet!” My military father was suddenly talking like a hipster.

            I never completely understood why a man with such apparent gifts didn’t pursue music more – although I suppose having four kids might have played a part. He also seemed pretty happy to be an aficionado, and he enjoyed playing with his reel-to-reel tape deck. He also seemed to enjoy the pursuits of his musical son, as I went from choir singer to opera critic to rock drummer. One night, I got the chance to pay him back big-time.

            I had attained a job as publicist for an arts center, and our gala performer was one of those trumpeters, Al Hirt. I checked with Al’s tour manager, and then, at intermission, I led my parents back to his dressing room.

            Al couldn’t have been more perfect, sitting behind a desk in a ruffled tuxedo, smoking a big ol’ stogie, looking a little like Orson Welles. My dad was more nervous than I’d ever seen him. He told Al how much he admired his music, and then handed him an old album for an autograph.

            “Wow!” said Al. “I haven’t seen this one in years!”

            If you ever get the chance to turn your fiftysomething father into a wide-eyed youngster, don’t pass it up. It’s priceless.

The Example

As most good parents know, setting an example is so much more important than speaking the words. And this doesn’t just happen early in life. As I entered college, I decided to study journalism, but I was actually considering something riskier. At the same time, my father was retiring from the Navy. His weakening eyesight had ruled out flight time, and he decided it was time to go.

            Following the path of his work as Moffett Field’s safety officer, he got a job as a safety manager at a major corporation. Within six months, things weren’t going so well. He was being asked to “work around” safety regulations, rules that in the Navy were considered ironclad. Also, he wasn’t crazy about sitting at a desk

            So, he got a job driving buses for Santa Clara County Transit. My dad loved driving, had even toyed with the idea of being a cross-country trucker. The transit union guaranteed good pay and benefits. And, as it turned out, Dad was also good at customer relations. At dinner, he would regale us with stories of his devoted regulars, as well as the dicey characters who rode the infamous 22 line. He joked that bus-driving was much more hazardous than flying, since the air didn’t have so much traffic.

            Dad’s new job was also good for me. Dependents got free rides, and I rode that same 22 line to San Jose State. I attribute some of my good grades to all the reading time afforded by those trips, and every once in a while the door would open to reveal my very own father at the wheel.

            But the stronger benefit was the example, and its inherent message: do what you love in life. When I got my journalism degree, I started freelancing for a local weekly, but I also began my first novel. My dad expressed due concern about my finances, but along about novel number five I guess he decided I was serious about this. My dad was not much of a fiction reader, but he supported my ambition nonetheless.

            Years later, we boarded Dad’s bus on his final shift with a birthday cake and balloons. Soon after, he bought an RV (which he described as “much smaller” than his usual rides) and drove his second wife, Sharon, across Canada and the United States. It was, quite literally, a busman’s holiday.

No Pack of Lifesavers for this Father-Son Talk

From the Sunnyvale Sun, June 12, 1996

I was sitting in front of the wood stove reading the paper one evening when my father came by and set a bright yellow box next to me on the end table. Condoms. An unopened box of 12 – ribbed, with spermicidal lubricant (Dad’s a devotee of Consumer Reports and buys only the best).

            “These are left over from my brief dating period,” he said. “I thought you might be able to use them.”

            My father has an uncanny ability to endow small actions with volumes of meaning, and this was one of them.

            I’ll start from the beginning.

            When my mother died two and a half years ago, my relationship with my father was destined to go through large changes. In hindsight, it seems that my mother served as an unwitting screen between us.

            Mom and I were both extroverted, verbal types, given to gossip, amateur psychology and hours-long philosophy sessions; we were both obsessed with the nature of human character and human characters. In a typical visit to the house, I would share a couple of sentences with my father – a question about work, a reference to some Bay Area sports team – and then adjourn to the kitchen table for a marathon chat session with Mom. Dad, given an understated, more introspective nature by genes, a tough childhood and 20-odd years in the Navy, would retreat to the den with his newspaper.

            When my mother passed away, my relationship with my father would necessarily become more direct. But that was only the beginning. After being accepted at three different artists’ colonies, I realized that keeping up rent on my apartment at the same time would be an impossibility and asked my father if I could move back into the house. And so, we were housemates.

            And what’s more, we were single guys. As the time of mourning wore on and my dad thought about the idea of dating again (something my mother had insisted on, instructing us to “get his butt out of the house” if he began to mope), I found myself in the unsettling position of counselor. The sum of my dating experience was, after all, approximately four times that of my father, and he was returning to a radically changed landscape. Young men in the ‘50s didn’t have to worry about dying if they slept with the wrong partner.

            The strangeness of the situation was intensified when Dad went on his first date with the widow around the corner – whose daugher had been my sixth-grade crush.

            I’m not saying I sat around giving my dad great advice like some Babe Ruth Westheimer – I’m too smart to say I really understand much about this thing we call love – but one time I did hit the bullseye. On the eve of my departure for my first artist’s residency in Wyoming, he had begun dating an old family friend – high on my mother’s list of recommended successors – and he found himself surprised and alarmed at the strength of his feelings for her.

            “There are no rules to this game, Dad,” I said. “I’ve been looking for the right woman for nearly two decades. You may have found her after two months.”

            When I came back from Wyoming six weeks later, before I could even pull in all my bags, my dad came up to me with a boyish grin and a different kind of energy about him. “I’m getting married,” he said. Six months later, I sang at my father’s wedding.

            It may have been something my mother said or something I thought up myself (the two are not very different), but you don’t have to worry about life bringing you changes. It will, and in very unexpected ways. The best you can hope to do with these curveballs is go with the pitch, try to hit a single the other way or at least move up the runner.

            In the last few years, my family – new and old – has been facing curveballs, sliders and knucklers, and in a very twisted ‘90s sort of way, they all seem to be summed up within this bright yellow box of condoms. These little rings of latex represent health, safety and love, after all, and I couldn’t think of a better gift a father could bring to a son.