The blessing of having the father I needed, not the one I deserved | Mullane

There’s a picture on my desk at home of me and my father, Jack. It’s black and white, Kodak, and in its white border is “1962.”

It’s sunny August. We’re at the Jersey Shore, Stone Harbor. A Camelot summer. My dad’s kneeling on the beach, wearing a baseball cap and JFK-style sunglasses. He’s holding me. I’m 18 months old. He’s smiling. I’m squinting.

It’s my favorite picture of us together, and I don’t have a lot of them. People didn’t take as many photos back then as they do today. But it radiates the warmth of our relationship, which was a good one. He never hit me. Never lectured, hectored or preached. He never threatened, or said things like, “Under my roof you’ll follow my rules!”

Of course, I rarely gave him a reason to do any of those things when I was a kid. A parent-child relationship is a two-way street. I liked him, and he liked me.

The only time he said anything mildly disparaging was when, as a teenager, I grew my hair out, parted it in the middle and “feathered” it back on the sides, a popular style in the late 1970s. He was a Vitalis World War II guy. He didn’t get the shaggy look.

“You look like you’re looking through a bush all the time,” he said.

He dispensed advice. It was spare, but stuck.

“Let the past bury its own.”

“Never get emotional about money.”

“Don’t believe anti-Catholics went away because of Kennedy.”

“If you can’t ignore or laugh at an insult, it’s probably true.”

He was humble. He enjoyed cutting the lawn. He was a golfer and a Jack Niklaus fan, and I swear he spent years trying to make our front yard look like Augusta National. He loved washing and Simonizing his aging Crown Sapphire blue ’59 Chevy Impala two-door, with its immense rear batwings and equally big Tri-Power 348 V8. He insisted I learn how to gap spark plugs, change a tire, and top off fluids which, in those days, included filling the battery with distilled water.

“Be careful, that’s acid in there,” he’d say about the battery. “If you splash some in your eye, just have the hose ready to wash it out.”

I was 10.

He never imposed a curfew, never insisted on knowing where I was going, with who, or what we were doing. In my late teens and twenties, he never blew his top when I rolled in late stoned or buzzed, though I know he didn’t like it. He was silent but not cold when I quit going to Mass.

When I was 18, I bought an old VW bus. It had green shag carpeting, and curtains in the rear windows.

“Looks like a bread box,” he said. Then, suspiciously, “Why do you need curtains in the windows?”

I removed them, so he wouldn’t ask more questions.

Each morning I’d see him kneeling at his bedside, praying, sometimes with the rosary a North African priest gave him during the war. He never missed Sunday Mass or the Holy Days of Obligation. Most Thursdays he sat before the Blessed Sacrament at our parish church. Years after his death, I asked my mother why he spent so much time praying and praying. She looked quizzical.

“Who do you think he was praying for?” she said.

This made me realize why he always had a stockpile of Alka Seltzer in his medicine cabinet, too. And it sparked a memory.

In my 30s, when I realized a man cannot live by sex, weed and rock n roll alone, I returned to the practice of the faith, seeking important answers. One day, I popped in on him and asked if he could write down the Mysteries of the Rosary, which I had forgotten. His reaction was joyful. He stood up from his chair at the small desk in his bedroom, grabbed a pencil and searched for paper. He couldn’t find any, so he fished a paper scrap from a small trash can by the desk. He wrote them down. I still have it. He must have felt like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son.

He’ll be gone 27 years this August, and I still miss him. In the years after his death, I married, had three kids, got a 30-year mortgage and maintained a demanding, stressful job over long and stressful years for my business. I was up to my neck in problems in my middle years. So many times I wished he was here so I could ask, “Dad, what should I do?”

But I always figured it out. Looking back from age 61, I know why.

The greatest thing he gave me was the freedom to make dumb mistakes. School gives you knowledge, mistakes give you wisdom.

He wasn’t perfect, he was wise. And when I look at that old photo of us, it’s all there, the father I needed, not the one I deserved. Sunny, smiling, protected in his arms, a faith that things always work out, a good life ahead.

Columnist JD Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@couriertimes.com.

This article originally appeared on Burlington County Times: Father's Day: Recalling a dad who was kind and loved to cut his lawn