In celebration of one-of-a-kind dads

COMMENTARY /// Father’s Day



 

 

At my Thousand Oaks bank, I was waiting at the teller window when an audacious old guy tottered in, waving a cane and a bank statement and shouting to see “the manager or president” because he’d been cheated in some “bogus bonus deal!” His voice was a thin rasp, heavily tinged with a New York accent.

Despite the bluster, he seemed like a very nice gentleman, dressed in a gray suit, white shirt and yellow tie. On his feet were basketball sneakers with soles so thick they probably restored the height he’d lost due to the aging process.

“You!” he said, singling me out. “Are you from Brooklyn?”

“I was once, long ago,” I said.

“OK. I gotta sit down. Come over and help me figure this out. All the smart people come from Brooklyn.”

Everyone in the teller’s line tittered. I thanked him for the compliment and did as he asked. He waved off bank personnel trying to be of assistance, and I actually figured out his bogus bonus. The deal was legitimate but the language was unclear.

We fell into an easy rapport. His name was Herman. He lived in Westlake Village, was 93 years old, still drove, wore a “clean, classy” linen suit daily in tribute to his garment industry career, and knew his way around cellphones better than most teens.

“Oh, it’s the wife calling again. Seventy years married and she still thinks I’m off flirting with a showgirl,” Herman said, playing the crowd like a Borscht Belt comedian. Bank personnel laughed as he alternately threatened to sue or boasted of Brooklyn’s superiority.

“Banks back there, they’d give you a free toaster or umbrella; you trusted them with your precious dough,” he said.

Herman interrupted his Brooklyn rhapsodizing long enough to admit that he’d followed his “three terrific kids” to L.A. and that was reason enough to not complain about the way Angelenos ran their side of the country.

“I just like to poke fun sometimes,” he said. “C’mon, I’ll buy you a bagel across the street.”

Studying Herman in his dotage as we shared a “nosh,” the old man so cheerful and charming, I tried to imagine what my father, Al, would have been like had he lived beyond my 17th birthday.

All I could picture was the fitness nut Al with a jet black pompadour and geeky eyeglasses, posing like “Mr. Universe” in a skimpy leopard-print swimsuit. He may have looked foxy to my mother, but my brother and I were mortified when he’d dash into the ocean wearing this get-up with his expensive prescription eyeglasses secured around his head with shoelaces. He had poor vision, and if he lost his eyeglasses in the surf, the shore became a speckled blur. He was too powerful an ocean swimmer for me or my older brother to dare accompany him and serve as some kind of seeing eye otter should those costly specs fall into the foamy depths.

When Al jogged out of the water he’d return to our beach encampment, kiss our sleeping sunscreen-slathered mother, towel off his sandy calves, then don a plastic nose shield and goggles before sunbathing.

Past 45 years old when I was born, Al was a distant and moody man. Maybe he’d have grown into a cranky old guy with unwrinkled pecs and biceps. Or perhaps he’d have mellowed.

My focus returned to the jovial Herman. We shook hands in goodbye. He instructed me to love my family with all my heart “even if they may be a bunch of stinkers,” and to report back to him for “any wiseacre advice, it’s free.”

This Father’s Day, I’ll stop envying Herman’s kids for having such a warmhearted, outgoing guy for their dad, and accept Al for the enigmatic father he was: a man who looked a bit like Johnny Weissmuller in his Tarzan togs, moved through choppy ocean currents like a human torpedo, and on one rare occasion interrupted his weight lifting session to teach me how to write a haiku.

Glasser is a local freelance writer. Reach her via email at whirlawaygig@gmail.com.