My Daddy’s Centennial

March 29, 2011. It would have been my father's hundredth birthday, and that's too big a milestone to let go without mention. There's something breathtaking about it. It makes me realize how much he was of a different time, a different world entirely.

He was born in Brooklyn just a few days after the horrific fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in Greenwich Village that took the lives of 146 workers, most of them young women, recent immigrants trying to make their way in a new country whose promise was difficult to access. I imagine the newspapers were still filled with the details of that tragedy and its aftermath when my father was an infant in his mother's arms. I try to picture the city as it must have been then, with its tenements and brownstones, peddlers and shopkeepers, street cars and horse drawn carriages. The New York Public Library Building on 5th Avenue was dedicated by President Taft that spring, and the song on everyone's lips was Alexander's Ragtime Band. Madame Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium, Italy attacked Libya, and the first U.S. transcontinental flight was completed...from Sheepshead Bay to Pasadena in 49 days.

When my father was a boy, in fact, airplanes were still rare and exciting enough to cause everyone to stop what they were doing, point upward, and stare in wonder. The airy-plane! That's what they would sing out...the airy-plane... (He told me that himself.)

He was the son of an immigrant from Naples and a first-generation Italian-American girl. He grew up in a rough neighborhood, the eldest of three surviving brothers, and he was tough and smart, but he had a lot of responsibility thrust upon him, and that seemed to be the pattern throughout his life.

At some point he and his brother Joe somehow managed to travel to Brazil and Argentina by getting jobs on a ship. One of my most cherished possessions today is a tray he brought back from that journey, butterfly wings arranged under glass. I love it not just because it is beautiful, but because it is evidence of something I am glad he got to do.

But South America was just a brief adventure. Even as a young man, his life was mostly hard, unglamorous work, though he was eloquent and brilliant and burning with dreams. He yearned to go to college, but the opportunity was not available to him. He spent some time in the military during World War II, stationed at Camp Cooke, and married my mother in the 1940s. Six kids, a great deal of struggle...he shelved his own dreams to take care of everyone.

Look. There is the kitchen ceiling he painted in the 1960s in our house on Long Island. Wild.

Painting was his livelihood. I remember him painting houses by day and at night attending school to become a chiropractor. He succeeded in the chiropractic program, even got his x-ray license, and although he was never able to build up a viable practice, he was rightfully proud of his accomplishment and known as Dr. Carbone thereafter. I still have the musty yearbook -- "The Atlantic Adjuster" -- from the Class of 1957, with his photograph among the graduates.

Even more precious, I still have the red-striped thermos he used to take to work with him...with a tiny drip of dried paint on it.

He endured more than his fair share of burdens and tragedies, and I know that he was disappointed and weary at the time of his death at the age of 67 in 1978. (I've written about him often in this blog.)

Try this link, for example:http://www.cynthiacarbone.com/core-ngrato/)

He was of the Old World.

And here I am, tapping words on a computer, remembering him on his hundredth birthday to everyone who happens by, in a medium he could not have begun to imagine or comprehend.

And I think about him every single day. Yeah, you would think that I'd be over it by now, but I still miss him so much it hurts sometimes.

The best in me, I trace to him.

Happy birthday, Daddy.