Somehow my grandmother had grown her business into a budding empire as a widowed woman in the South in the 1950s, which was a marvel to me. She had to be tough, and my father was too—handsome, charismatic, and ambitious, to be sure, but also tough. He prided himself on the accomplishments of his children. Even as a very little girl learning to jump rope, I knew I could win his approval through physical trials. A fifty-yard dash. Push-ups. Pull-ups. “How did you compare to the other kids?” he would ask me. Idleness was the devil’s work; hard work led to success.
His devotion was as fierce as his expectations were high. The absence in his life that his own father had left behind was vast. He was determined to be present, to never miss so much as a Little League game. He was home every day at five thirty, predictable as clockwork. He coached my softball and soccer teams in the park down the block. He had no playbook on how to be a father, because fatherhood had never been modeled for him. Yet somehow he figured it out in real time, never letting us see him sweat.
From my father, I learned what it meant to be a businessperson. I understood that his employees at the family business, where he came to work after he graduated from college, were a community that needed to see his leadership. On weekends and holidays, he would drive around and check in on the clerks to make sure business was running smoothly, then come home with a box of hot doughnuts from the Donut Stop, including a cherry glazed that, once I’d eaten it, made me look like I was wearing bright-red lipstick—which in my family was considered far too racy for a young girl. And on snow days a few times a year, when school was closed, we would go with my dad to help open up the stores so that people could get food, essentials, and gas. We took pride in providing a public service; we were part of the fabric of our town, and we must have looked like it, us kids trailing around after our dad in our hats and mittens, always introducing ourselves to each store clerk. In the snow, my father would attach a ladder on a rope to the back of his car and drive around the neighborhood, and we would pile onto the rungs of the ladder, clinging to it, making it a sled. When he drove just fast enough, it felt like we were riding a magic carpet. The sensation was one of controlled freedom—adventure, but without fear.
