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That wedding photo….the first thing I thought about was my father’s sense of humor…and how much my parents just absolutely despised each other on every level.  That photo seem’s as though it was beamed down from Mar’s surely.  My father used to be a rather quiet guy when I was growing up.  He spent his day’s down in the basement fixing cars (he would take two wrecked cars and make one fantastic intact one out of them).  He was a genius.  He was an electrician by trade.  He was smarter than anyone I’ve ever met since.  My father spoiled me and made me falsely believe that all men would always be as ingenious as he was.  I would quickly and repeatedly learn that this is far from the truth.  My father could fix a broken curling iron with a paperclip, he could plaster, lay tile, do plumbing, fix a motor, lay cement, grow a garden, etc. The only two things I never saw him perfect were 1. changing diapers and 2. doing laundry. 

But yes, he was McGyver before McGyver was conceived of. He worked 30+ years at Bethelem Steel as an electrician. He never went to college, but we had a nice little middle class suburban upbringing.  My mother did not work until I was 14.  My mother always had a new car to drive and money in her purse.  He liked beer…a lot. But she sat on her butt a lot on the phone drinking Pepsi. I can still remember walking over the long phone cord to get through the living room.  My dad liked beer as much as she liked Pepsi.  In fact, he has dozens of beer pic’s and cigarette pic’s littered throughout his extensive floppy disc collection.  This picture brought tears to my eyes..because this was him my whole life.  This image is horrible..fuzzy and just surely from a 1st generation digital camera, or a copy or scan.  But….this is the image I get of my Dad in my head when I think back…  He was a jeans/sneakers kinda guy.  Never wore a tie in his life.  Probably only for that wedding photo.  He had tons of catch phrases. “Where are you going Dad, I wanna go” he’d reply “Up Mikes and down Jakes”.  It took me years to figure out that there was no Mike and no Jake.  He used to change words and make up words (hmm think I inherited my love of doing that from him?)  He called rubber bands “gubber-rumbands”, directions were “indesctructions” and when I got my tongue pierced he asked “why put a tie tack in your mouth, huh?” but he wasn’t judgemental..just chuckled.  My Dad used to blow his nose and you could hear it outside of the house in a deep snow storm.  It was a fog horn.  He also never used kleenex, he was one of the last of the hankie carrying kind.  He went nowhere without a roll of lifesavers or a well worn chapstick. (the black plastic label would turn completely white in his pocket…and yet he used them up.)  I spent years of my childhood wrapping chapstick and lifesavers in birthday, father’s day and christmas wrapping paper.  My father always drove a truck, and he never bought anything but American made.  He was a steelworker afterall.  A Toyota would have never lasted in the mill parking lot.  I never asked my father what he really did at work.  I just know they called him “Ski” because they could not pronounce our long long last name….cept for the last syllable.  The word “SKI” was on his lunchbox (same one for 20+ years!) and his safety helmet.  In my mind my Dad was quiet, elusive, yet he could do anything. He took immaculate care of our house, our cars, the garden, the yard (several acres) as well as categorized every last of his tools (thousands of them really) in the basement.  He could build a bathroom, erect a patio, put up a roof. My childhood home had a brass placket nailed to it that said ‘Built by Richard C******sky & Friends’ in the attic.  That brass placket always made me proud.  My Daddy could do anything..he could do everything.  But my father had one flaw.  One big flaw…that took him away at age 52. 

I have countless memories of my upbringing and most of them get suppressed because they are not always funny ones.  But my father was funny…in a rather dry humor sort of way. When my mother would come downstairs into his man-garage he would begin to sing this song

I didn’t get it until I got a lot older.  When I was 7 I just thought he liked that song because they played it at every big Catholic family wedding I attended.

Now…every time I think of how he broke out cheerfully in song…it may be politically incorrect and I hate fatism…but the truth be known, my mom was a bitch and I love that my father did this in return.  Yah…too much dysfunction in your childhood gives you a whack sense of humor.
I grew up on polka music…hated it my entire life…but the minute I hear some of those songs I am transformed back to my non-idyllic childhood and my happy memories that are dispersed within.  My Dad was like this decent person stuck with a mentally ill woman.  She told him she was pregnant…they planned a wedding and told no one.  Two nights before the wedding she told him ‘oh yah..so I got my period”.  It was 1967, you didn’t back out back then.  I guess he dealt with feeling trapped by singing passive aggressive songs.

I still think it’s funny.  There’s not going to be enough therapy for me to stop chuckling when I think of him busting out in tune holding his craftsman tools as microphones when she walked down the steps into his man-garage.  There probably will also never be enough therapy to make me stop expecting every man I marry to be as smart as he was.

I don’t blog a lot about my family because the topic…it can be painful and it can destroy me sometimes.  Today, for the first time in a long long time, I saw these images and it felt good to remember.  Good to laugh at good memories.  I am healing, and that’s a lovely thing. I will always miss my Daddy. I will always remember both the good and the bad.  I wish he was still here.