Essay #5 - Example Essay

Essay #5 - Example Essay

Fathers can have a great influence on their children.  No father is perfect, and some are better than others.  I know I was exceptionally blessed to have a father like mine.  My dad came to this country alone at the age of 16 from Germany.  Already in this country were his aunt and uncle, and a brother.  Left behind were his own parents, another brother, and a sister.  This was shortly before Hitler closed the border to emigrating young men.  His last brother never made it to the US.  My dad brought with him strong morals, passed on to him by his parents and generations before them.  They were values of faith, integrity, and family.

My dad was Catholic and we lived only two blocks from the Catholic Church.  In our family, mass was an everyday affair.  I doubt I missed more than a few from the time I was brought home from the hospital until I finally entered college and schedules conflicted.  My dad was an active part of the church.  Even though he couldn’t go to mass with us during the week, he participated in every church activity he could.  He belonged to the Nocturnal Adoration Society, an organization that was dedicated to a once-a-month all-night vigil of adoration to Jesus.  Although he had to leave for work at 6am every morning, he would give up several precious hours of sleep in the middle of the night to go to church for his assigned time slot.  He was also part of the Counting Committee that met Monday evenings to count and record the weekly donations.  His fellow counters would joke with him that he wore suit pants with wide cuffs, even when they were out of style, just to slip some money into them when no one was looking.  He’d laugh, and everyone knew Honest John would never even consider such a suggestion.  When I was little, he’d often let me go with him, and I’d help open the envelopes.  I was fascinated with the machine that sorted and counted the change.  Since this was New York City, a place with many new arrivals from other countries, often foreign coins were kicked out of the machine, and if I was there I was the lucky recipient of that precious coin.  I still have every one of those coins along with the memories that come with them.  Priests and nuns were almost a part of the family, each knowing our family well, often invited to special family occasions, especially those that were church-related, such as first Communions and Confirmations, but also those memorable occasions like my parents’ 50^th Wedding Anniversary.  Dad took his faith seriously and made sure each of us did the same.  While I did not remain with his Catholic faith, I do hold on tightly to my own faith, which is also an integral part of my life, and which I am passing on to my children.

My father was also a man of intense integrity.  He did the right thing, no matter the consequences, and he expected others to do the same.  I can still remember him coming home from the grocery store and comparing his bill with the change received, then later going back to return the extra ten cents the cashier had accidentally given him.  His strong sense of right and wrong traveled with him into all parts of his life.  Principles were important.  He never had a credit card until my siblings purchased a Florida vacation for my parents.  Faced with the need for one in order to rent a car, he went to his bank and applied.  He was shocked and enraged when he was denied a credit card!  He had no credit history.  His house was paid off.  He had no loans.  He paid his bills on time.  His sense of right and wrong knew that was wrong, and he closed every account he had with that bank.  He had a gift for handling finances.  This gift, plus his exceptional memory for keeping track of accounts and his trustworthiness, served him well as treasurer for many organizations.  In fact, he was either treasurer or vice president for each of the dozen or so organizations of which he was a part.  He always felt that if you belonged to something, you should do your part to help out, and we were expected to do the same.  While now I don’t even bother to count my change, and I realize that unfortunately  not everyone shares his honesty and sense of service, these  are values that I try to pass on to my own children.  

Family was extremely important to my dad.  Although he left home at such a young age, he kept in close contact with those he left behind.  He used to write home regularly, sending a dollar each week of his hard-earned money along with the letter.  That doesn’t sound like much now, but wages back then were only $15 a week, so that was a lot.  After he married and his family grew to include children, he gave up his motorcycle and singles activities and dedicated himself to fatherhood.  I can hardly remember a Sunday, his only day off, when we didn’t do something together, even if it was only going for a long walk that included stops along the way to admire beautiful gardens, perhaps meandering to the little church where he and my mom were married, farther away than our own local church.  He often took us to the Little Park, a concrete-floored city park with swings, slides, see-saws, and monkey bars.  He would spend hours pushing the four of us kids (later five) as high as we desired.  I’ll never forget the Sunday, when he bundled us all together in the old ’53 Plymouth, never telling us kids where we were going.  You can’t imagine the whoops and hollers when we saw Coney Island Amusement Park in sight!  My dad was the only wage-earner, and it wasn’t a high-paying wage either, so I know it took a long time to scrimp and save for such an extravagant event, but it was a memory that is etched in my mind forever.  Even after we were all grown and gone, family was a top priority, and he never forgot a birthday or anniversary, or Christmas, not only for his own kids, but also for the growing number of grandkids, something I have to admit, I wish I was better at doing.  But the high priority on family has continued, though I also continued the tradition of moving away from home.  I realize that friends may come and go, but family is forever, for better or worse, so I try to emphasize the better.  My kids know how much I value family, both my own little family here in Maine, and my larger family, still mostly in NY, but now starting to extend to the far corners of the US.  Just this past Christmas, my youngest daughter gave me a bracelet, with a delicately branched tree encircled with an inscription saying, “Family is a link to our past and a bridge to our future.”  She knows.  I have done my job.

My dad wasn’t perfect.  No one is.  This hard-working, mild-mannered man became transformed into another creature when behind the wheel.  I remember him driving us to a wake – an all-day wake, where we had no definite arrival time, where the body definitely wasn’t going anywhere soon, and where we intended to stay all day.  We got stuck behind some poor tourists in New York City who were obviously intimidated by the traffic, ambiguous road signs, and one-way streets.  Instead of patiently allowing the unfortunate travelers to weave their way through an already difficult situation, he blasted on his car horn, trying to push them off the road so he could hurry on his way!  My kids will never forget that.  And, while I’ve never experienced road rage, I’m sorry to say that I have “inherited” some of that flaw, losing my temper when I shouldn’t, a fact of which I am not proud.  But on the whole, I think I had a great dad.  I learned a lot from him, a lot of things that have served me well in my life.  I’ve tried to do as he did, passing those values on to my own family, and I hope his tradition of faith, integrity, and family will continue for generations to come.