Noticing what today is, it occurs to me that while I often mention my mother here, I don't write a lot about my father. I guess that's because she's still (happily) here and he (unhappily) passed away in 1991.
A lot of people say "My father is/was the nicest man in the world" but mine really was. In all the years we were together, he lost his temper at me about six times…and in two of those instances, he later realized he was in the wrong and he came to me to apologize. I'd go to friends' homes to play and I'd literally hear more yelling between parents and children in one afternoon than I endured in my entire childhood. My friends' fathers were mostly the kind who would never, ever humble themselves to apologize to their kids. They thought it was a sign of weakness. In Bernie Evanier, it meant nothing but strength.
We hear a lot about dysfunctional families…so much so that I sometimes feel like I came from one of the last functional ones. There was almost no drinking. There was absolutely no hitting. There was, as I said, minimal shouting. At times, my father fretted he wasn't doing his job as a parent because I never got in trouble: Nothing to scold me about, no reason to administer spankings to try and put me on the right path. I was already there…in large part because of the example he set. He was also very, very encouraging without ever trying to force me into any career of his choosing.
My father didn't like at all what he had to do for a living, which was to work for the Internal Revenue. Didn't like it one bit. Because of that, he encouraged me to find and pursue something I wanted to do — anything so long as I could get up each morning and look forward to my job. There are times when I don't like what I have to write or who I'm writing it for…but I've only had this one profession and I've never yearned to do anything else. I have my father to thank for that.
He was a very compassionate man. Like most Depression-era kids, he was enormously frugal with regard to his own needs but generous to others. His forced occupation didn't yield much of a paycheck but there was nothing my mother or I ever required or ever really wanted that we didn't get. When in my late teen years I started making decent bucks, I tried to use some of them to give my folks a little luxury. This usually made both uncomfortable at first but especially my father. "I don't want you spending your money on me" was a phrase I heard constantly. A couple times, I had to fib to him, understating what something cost to get him to accept it or permit him to enjoy it.
He didn't hate very many or very much. Richard Nixon is the only subject that comes to mind, and some of that was personal because as an Internal Revenue officer, my father saw firsthand what the White House was doing while Nixon was in it. They wanted, my father said, to consciously and deliberately nail the poorer taxpayers for every cent possible while letting rich people — especially rich people who'd donated to the Nixon campaign — get away without paying what the law expected. Picking on the little, helpless guy…that was the kind of thing that got my father mad. If you didn't do that, he liked you. Which meant he liked most people.
He loved the Dodgers and the Lakers and was half-convinced that they couldn't win a televised game without him yelling at the screen. He loved my mother's cooking (and everything else she did) and the family cat and a great joke and…well, darn near everything except his job, Nixon and the kinds of things that any decent person abhors like prejudice and cruelty. He loved his friends, his family and all parts of his life that did not involve tax collection.
I lost him in '91 with only the normal regrets. After a parent passes, you often hear the child say, "Oh, if only we'd done this" or "If only we'd talked about that." I had none of those "if only"s. We got along great. There were no lingering, unresolved issues. He left this world, content that I could and would see that my mother always had everything she required. In a sense, I think he willed himself to go then…not that he didn't love life and want to stick around. Trouble was, if he'd left that hospital, he would have needed nurses and constant care and someone to help him dress. Perhaps worst of all, he wouldn't have been able to drive, which was something he loved — chauffeuring friends and family around. It wasn't that he liked cars. He just liked doing things for people.
I was so sorry to see him go but so glad he didn't have to live his last years like that. A close neighbor had and that was my father's worst nightmare: To be a crippling burden to his loved ones. Since I was an only child, he only left a couple of loved ones — essentially just my mother and me — but we miss him…and not just on Father's Day. We miss him every day. Father's Day is just a good excuse to say it in front of everyone and it feels so good to write this that I don't know why I had to wait for a holiday to do it.