Sorrow is a Dreary January

But pitchers and catchers report in just a few weeks.

I painted this a year after Dad died of Covid. It contains my feelings of loss a year out and the persistent dreariness of the month of January, and I think I left the grave open not because it was waiting for someone but because the loss was still fresh, still uncovered up by snow or life. The planets move, the calendar marches forward: Saturday will be three years. And even if life fills itself up with dinner parties and art openings, dentist appointments and ideas for new paintings, January’s relentless gray and cold is always an oblique reminder. But as if that weren’t enough, yesterday I took out my Tarot deck for the first time in months, thinking I might find inspiration for a new painting, and what did I pull but the Three of Swords, a card so full of dread I hastily put it back. It was a few hours before I realized the card wasn’t there as an omen but as a reminder.

But Dad wasn’t anything like January.

Dad was August with the Cubs in the running for the pennant. Dad was a smile you could feel on a long-distance call. Dad was my date on Father-Daughter Night at the National Press Club when I was 10. Dad taught me how to score a baseball game, choke up on my bat, dive under waves, write a lede, type -30- at the end of a story. He timed me running around the yard and speed-reading Hebrew. Dad took me to protests against the Vietnam War, introduced me to Paul Harvey (and mocking Paul Harvey), hated Richard Nixon with me. When I visited him and Mom in Florida, he always wrote me a check to cover my plane fare and then handed me a thick wad of “walking-around money.” Well into my 60s.

Dad was a lifelong benediction, a green light, a cheerleader, my first fan. And as he was for me, he was for my brother and sister and Mom, for aunts and uncles, for nieces and nephews, for his grandchildren. I wanted to inscribe just one word on his tombstone — “mensch” — but my siblings overruled me. Dad, my first editor, would have overruled them: Stet.

Dad in our Duncan Drive house, circa 1980s

Dad loved sports and especially the Chicago Cubs in a way that was endearing and spent as many Saturdays at the track as he could. He kept a little notebook where he recorded his weekly earnings and losses, and was up something like $12.50 the last time I remember him tallying it.

I hope I can find that notebook, sometime, but until then my favorite piece of Dad memorabilia is this recording about his lifelong regret for calling five errors on a guy while announcing a minor league baseball game in his hometown of Mahanoy City, Pa.

Dad, I love you always. Your loss leaves a hole in my life. But what you gave me was much, much bigger than that.