Holidays Frightened My Father

Abstract

holidays frightened my father. They were invitations to enjoyment, when the mind lets down its guard and happiness is allowed to creep into the heart. On Christmas, on Thanksgiving, on the Fourth of July, he was driven to undertake any available and unappealing chore. As we opened our presents, or lingered over dinner, or played checkers, he would go off, in his work shoes and his oldest sweater, to move heaps of furniture in the attic or to worry at a year's accumulation of junk in the cellar. My mother never protested, but sometimes I would say, Why do you have to do it today, Dad? Hurt would come into his voice. It's got to be done, he would say. Who's going to do it? And no logic could answer him. Hating him, despising myself, I would follow him and offer to help. True to the holiday spirit, he worked happily at such times, relaxed as he seldom relaxed, as though we two now understood one another and, in spite of myself, I felt a kind of peace. The lessons my father learned were few, but he returned to them doggedly. Like some humble, bewildered traveler, eyeing the ticket collector who seems to control his fate, my father repeated over and over that he had paid his passage, held his receipt, and could not in fairness be asked to pay again. Hard work, for twelve or fourteen hours a day, was his religion?almost a ritual by which he hoped, perhaps, to appeal to some terrible celestial taskmas ter, watching the human race, irritated if he glimpsed an arrogant mortal enjoying himself. My father lived as though watched. He came from a poor, first-generation Polish family that lived in New Bedford during his boyhood. His father worked in the flour mills and his mother in the textile mills for most of their lives: his father lugging the fat, dead sacks of flour, his mother tending the looms. Only late in life did his father save enough money to buy a little, hilly farm, too raw and rocky for most gardening, but suitable for raising temperamental and astonishingly disease-prone turkeys that lived, it seemed, on a strict diet of human devotion and corn.