So today my fabulous old man would have been 87. Salud, Pops. Salud.
His was a life of dogged perseverance, launched into a chaotic world, 1932, the final child in a family of 10, to dirt-poor immigrant parents who died early, from grueling sweatshop work and, in my grandfather’s case, from general hard living that often compounded their already strained circumstances. My dad was shuffled then through siblings, though with most of the six brothers gone during wartime, sometimes feeding himself from fishing the local river or by working for meals at a kindly neighborhood Jewish family’s grocery, until he was old enough for the Army to scoop him up and ship him off to Korea, bang, bang, shoot, shoot. Later, there would also be Vietnam, and a medical deferment home, and family turmoil to navigate.
He had a long and fertile run at retirement, my dad, passionately exploring his own family’s problematic Eastern European past, and taking to being a grandad with the same dedication and fervor he put into anything he felt valuable; he held family and loyalty above all. He suffered neither stupidity nor religion; he would have bluntly told you, if you asked, that they were far too often the same. He indulged, fervently, his love of the performing arts; he was a classical music acolyte, and a fervent devotee of the stage, and of the golden years of the great American songbook. Too, he loved his Pilsner Urquell beer (I am proud of introducing him to it, a living product of his own heritage), and his pets, above all his dogs, those sweet and goofy golden retrievers. And he grew the damn best tomatoes. My dad favored the Big Boy variety, which seems somehow appropriate; he was already an adult coming out of the womb, I’m pretty well convinced.
My Pops survived two wartime deployments, and those said family hardships, which not inconsequentially included three wildly independent children who tested his own wise-ass stubbornness and sass through ceaselessly manifesting it back at him, and a second often maddening career of university teaching, which vastly improved the quality of hospital laboratory work across this region, and bolstered him to levels of stress he could not easily shake. He retired only to have a heart attack that nearly took him out, as if his body had been waiting for the chance to slow down long enough to try to quit. But Frank Sr. was hardly a man to so easily quit. His problematic ticker, with its unique and crazy rhythms, would eventually get him. But thankfully, not then.
In his retirement, he and my mom had nearly 20 years of enriching time together before the onset of her own cognitive decline, and my Pops’ Dylan Thomas-esque exit, late September, 2017; he did not shake off this mortal coil without rattling it hard there at the end, as befitting his whole life, I suppose. And it was a rich and complicated life, well spent.
And one celebrated by all of us who were lucky enough to be a part of it.
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