“Tea?” asked Mamie, turning her head toward him, raising her eyebrows.
Solly glanced at her from the driver’s seat, seeing a slender woman, endearingly familiar, proffering a traveler’s mug with a dangling tea bag string. In the air conditioner’s gentle breeze, her graying hair stirred in rhythm with the string.
“Sure,” he said.
“Here,” said Mamie, handing him the cup, this tall, kind man she’d been with for many years.
“Good tea,” said Solly after taking a sip. “The driving is planned. What shall we talk about today?”
“How about fathers,” Mamie said. “Both of ours are gone. Tell me several memories while I fix my coffee.”
“Okay.” Solly plunged in. “Dad was inclined toward engineering. He puttered around building things for my whole childhood. He worked at a milling machine company. Worked with his hands. Smart man.”
“Of course he was.” Mamie stirred her cup. “That shows in his children. His interest in engineering probably led to you being interested in a STEM field.”
“True. Mine was math. It came easy early on. I struggled in some of the later math classes, especially the ones that didn’t use numbers.”
“Struggling means digging in, learning. That’s when we really get to know what we’re made of.” Mamie paused, then continued. “I struggled with math.”
“Hard to believe you struggled with anything,” said Solly.
“Tough topic. Tumultuous home life. Missed some math building blocks in those early years. No tutoring help in those days. Dad, an immigrant, was always worried about the future, about supporting us.”
“What did you do?”
Mamie sipped her coffee. “Best I could. Never did get over math anxiety. But Dad loved me. I knew that. Tell me another memory.”
Solly was ready. “I was very young. My mom and dad did what they could do themselves. A pipe ran from the garage center drain downward until it came out the back of the concrete garage foundation. Wasps had built a nest in that pipe. They were buzzing around. Dad had to do something.”
“What did he do, Solly?”
“He layered on old clothes, Mamie, and told me to stand far away. He put a hose down the garage drain to flush out the wasps, then went around back to dig out the wasp nest with a long metal pole. Got stung some but kept going. He got the nest out, killed the wasps, destroyed the nest.”
“He knew how to persist, didn’t he?”
“He taught me persistence. Did what he had to do.”
“Good parents do what they have to do. My dad had a great vocabulary, and English was his second language. He’d lived through two world wars, come to America, gone to school. But to be successful, he knew he had to get better at English. He built his vocabulary by reading Time Magazine cover-to-cover every single week. He knew current events, plus he read with a dictionary at his side, looking up every word he didn’t know. I thought every dad did that, so I looked up words, too.”
“Not every dad does that,” said Solly. “And not every dad cooks. Mine didn’t.”
“Your mom cooked, didn’t she?” Mamie asked.
“Usually,” said Solly. “But occasionally she had to be gone. Dad was faced with three hungry boys.”
“What did he make?” asked Mamie.
“He filled three glasses three-quarters full of milk, crumbled up about a quarter of a sleeve of salted crackers into each glass, gave us a long spoon normally used for mixing iced tea, said, ‘Stir,’ and that was dinner. We loved it.”
“Done? I’ll take your tea mug,” said Mamie. “Great story.”
“What boys wouldn’t like crackers and milk if they’re having it with their dad?”
“We’re lucky we had good dads.”
“They probably helped us become better parents and better people.”
“Do we know where we are, Solly? We’ve been driving a long time.”
“We could check the maps app, but we know better than most, Mamie. What matters is that we’re here, happy, talking, and together.”
Linda Lemery llemery@gmail.com welcomes reader comments.
