Dance With My Father (Luther Vandross) 7153 (371)
Sunday, March 18th, 2007-3:45 A.M.
My father passed away about an hour ago. I got the word from my sister who was down with him in Florida about 3:15 in the morning. I was still up, partially due to the adrenaline from two shows tonight at the Just Jokin' Comedy Cafe in Lima, Ohio, and partially due to a long phone conversation with my wife Pamela about trying to get down to see my Dad in Florida.
Dad was lingering for the last week or so, having taken no food and little water. Cancer had withered him away to skin and bones, and he was moving from states of consciousness according to my sister Nickki, who was spending as much time with him as she could. I was calling her and my mother, who is also down in Florida, a couple of times a day to be updated on Dad's condition, which was grim, being stage 4 cancer.
I've been crying on and off the last few months, since the word came down that the pain Dad was feeling in his back wasn't just a slipped disc, but cancer that had invaded his bones. He had tumors on both lungs, too, and his first tumor was removed four years ago....we thought he was out of the woods, then, and little did we know that cancer was going to continue to be a ticking time bomb.
I scheduled work in Florida each year so that I could go see him, and after the stage four prognosis, I made a trip down in January. We had a good visit, and he was still alert and spry and full of everything that made him Dad to me. I was due to visit again this May and into June, and I'll still go and do the work and spend time with my mother in between gigs, but I'm sure I'll be filled with pain that he won't be there.
I promised a eulogy in my last blog, and I don't think I'll sleep very well tonight as the news is cold and even though I knew it was coming, I guess I really wasn't as prepared for it as I thought I was. I'm reacting the way I did when my grandmother passed away...I felt distant for a long time, and then the emotions came all at once and I cried until my throat hurt. So I'm going to eulogize my father and hope that it brings me enough peace to sleep, and ready myself for the pain that tomorrow will bring.
Ralph Tetta was the only son of Adele Tetta and a man we would never know. My grandmother didn't speak of my grandfather, and no one seems to have any details, and I wonder if Dad isn't learning who his father was in whatever Great Beyond comes after life. My father married Linda Donroe and had three children, Ralph William, Christopher Joseph and Nickki Adele. As is the Italian tradition, we were named after family members, William being my mother's father, and of course, I being the oldest son, was named after my Dad.
My father was defined by his work, that is, that he always worked and took great pride in working hard and being a good provider. He was born of a generation that was defined more by their lack than their abundance, and he worked to make sure that his family never suffered that lack. He was not a social animal, but what friends he had more than likely were co-workers or people he knew in a professional capacity. My grandmother, who lived with us all of but the last few years of her life, was a very private person, and my father respected her privacy, and entertaining at the house was something that almost never happened.
My Dad was a closet comic; and in the years after he retired, we got along better than we ever had. I delighted in telling him jokes, making him laugh, and once I got a bead on his sense of humor, it was easy as pie. My father worked in movie theaters when he was young, and he enjoyed movies more than anything. When cable television was offered in our neighborhood, he subscribed immediately, and started videotaping movies. Right now, at his house in Florida, he has literally over a thousand movies on tape, many of dubious extraction. My father was not above watching a B-movie adventure or a Japanese karate film, he loved them all.
When I started doing comedy, he broke my balls a little bit, telling me that I was getting laughs because the audiences didn't know any better, and asking me when I was going to get a real job. One day, I visited him at his office, and there was a newspaper article that featured me thumbtacked to the corkboard. For all the trash talk, he was really proud of me, and wanted to show me off to his co-workers. He supported me and let me do what made me happy, although I'm pretty sure he would have rather seen me get into some field of work that was more steady, and perhaps offered some benefits.
My father was a shipping clerk, and later a shipping supervisor, for a company called Rochester Envelope, which during the go-go 1980's was chopped up, sold off and moved around to various companies, to the point that when my father retired in 1995, he was getting pension checks from three different places. A blue-collar guy in a white-collar job, he never wore a tie to work, and some summer days, if it was really hot, he'd wear Bermuda shorts to work. And even though he was a manager, he never really carried himself like a manager, he was more like the one working stiff who outranked all the other working stiffs, so they had to do what he said. One year, the union went on strike, and my Dad was working 12-hour shifts to keep the plant running. I went to work with him one morning, as I needed his car for some appointment during the day, and I was going to pick him up later. We approached the picket line and I watched in horror as these large men were pounding on cars, screaming and swearing at people crossing the picket line, and I was worried about getting pulled out of the car and beaten up or something. My father rolled his window down, and a big guy with a black beard looked in and yelled back over his shoulder, "It's Ralph! Let him through!" and nothing happened to us at all. I don't know if they did that out of respect or friendship, but Dad grew in my eyes that day from ten feet tall to just over 12.
Last year, I got hired to do comedy for a group called the Transportation Club, which is a group of Rochester businessmen who deal in trucking, shipping and related endeavors. Quite a few people remembered my father, even though he had been retired for ten years or so at that point, and one guy told me a story that I remember my father telling, but it was better hearing someone else tell it, because heroes sound less heroic when they're telling their own stories. As the story goes, the company was all aflutter from a new team of managers that were coming in, and they were going to install these different systems to make things run better, and they collected all of the supervisors in a meeting room to brief them on the basis of their new style of operation. After about 10 minutes, my father got up, walked to the back of the room and got himself a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and stood in the back while the managers were making their presentations. One of the managers took umbrage that Dad wasn't still sitting with the group, and said "Ralph, do you have any comments?" And my father, who was pretty unimpressed with what he heard, said "I've been here 30 years and I've seen 'em come and I've seen 'em go." which got the big laugh, because obviously, these guys were not the first crew who came in and thought they were going to reinvent the wheel. I guess I must get my disrespect for authority from my Dad, or at least the lack of good sense to keep that disrespect to myself.
My father was a collector, never threw anything out. It wasn't until he had really established himself and I guess felt safe in his wealth that he finally threw away the stack of miscellaneous lumber that was stored in the eaves of our garage. I remember helping him carry old moldings, planks and dowels out to the curb, and I know a part of him feared that he would someday need one of those pieces of wood and he would have to go into a hardware store and pony up the money for something he already had and threw away. He collected good things, too, like comic books, and I grew up in a house with literally thousands of comics that he sold in one fell swoop. I used to go down into the basement where he kept them stored, in large wooden shelves with doors that he tried to lock, but I figured out how to unscrew the hinges and get in anyway. I would pull piles of comics out and dump them into a big rolling U.S. Mail bin (not sure how we got our hands on that) that we used for laundry (big family, lots of laundry), and sit in a pile of sheets and blankets, warm from the dryer, and read the comics for hours. Sometimes I would drape a sheet over the top of the bin, and nobody would find me for a long time and once they thought I ran away from home. I became a comic collector myself, putting my first collection together when I was eight, first collecting a few books that I kept in a Dunkin Donuts box (they fit perfectly if you lay them flat), and then later a paper shopping bag, then finally into the acid-free boxes that comic shops happily sell you for $9.95 or more. Currently, I have thousands, and it's all because of my Dad.
Dad collected coins, too, and later in life, stamps. Somewhere along the line, he acquired our dogs, two miniature poodles named Alex and Giddy. We always had pets, mostly cats, when I was growing up, but those two lasted the longest and made the greatest impact on our lives. The dogs used to like to hop up on the back of one of our sofas in the living room, which was up near a bay window facing out on our street. The dogs were clearly visible to anyone walking down Seneca Parkway or Dewey Avenue (we lived on the corner), and even though the dogs weren't related, they looked (and acted) like twins. My Mom and Dad would walk them after dinner up and down Seneca Parkway, which had a big meridian filled with trees (a dog's best friend) and I'm sure that Dad liked the attention of our neighbors who loved to comment on how cute our dogs were (they were very cute). Later, when I got a cat (SnaxTheCat), my Dad would take care of him when I was on the road, and Snax would hop up on Dad's shoulders and rub his face on the earpiece of my father's glasses and purr. Snax is very affectionate, and again, I'm sure my Dad liked the attention.
My father was never a sports fan of any kind, never played catch with me and rarely came to any plays or school events that I was in. My mother would come out and support, and my father would stay home with Grandma, who was sure that if everyone left her alone, she would die. My father grilled steaks on Sunday, outside, even if it was raining or snowing. My father loved sandwiches from Amiel's Roast Beef in Rochester, and hated moving down south because the supermarkets and food generally sucked down there in comparison to home. My father worked five days a week at Rochester Envelope, later Boise Cascade, later MailWell Envelope, and then on Saturday, he worked at a small supermarket next to our house called Dewey Super, cutting coldcuts from 9 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon. My father loved James Bond films, probably because he got the women, and had nice cars and gadgets
Our house on Seneca Parkway was a double, with two addresses. We lived in 400, right on the corner, and my father rented out 396 to a variety of tenants. One group of tenants we called "the girls." I was about 10 years old then, and the three girls who were roommates next door were of college age or maybe a little older. One night, one of the girls' ex-boyfriends came around and started yelling. My father and I went next door and lo and behold, the ex-boyfriend had a gun. My father sent me back home next door while he talked to the guy. I didn't go home as told, I stayed in the back hallway and listened. He told the guy "Listen, she doesn't want to be with you, it's over, and waving a gun around isn't going to change anything. Now the cops are on their way, so get the hell out of here. You don't want to go to jail, and you aren't going to shoot anybody." The guy calmed down and left, and then Dad came back home, poured a shot of Anisette, and shook for an hour. It was one of the bravest things I ever saw, and that's when Dad became ten feet tall, by the way.
My father loved comic books, as I mentioned before, but he really, REALLY enjoyed the ducks. His favorite was Scrooge McDuck, I guess, because he kept all of his money in a big vault, and he could dive into a pool of coins without getting a concussion. Dad also liked Jack Benny, I think because of the "cheap" jokes, and even though Dad wasn't cheap, he certainly thought a few minutes more than normal when he was making a purchase. He never skimped when it came to his family, and as a kid, I never remember going without anything that I wanted or needed.
But my favorite memory that I'd like to share isn't a memory at all, it's a story. When I was first born, I was very small. I was about six weeks premature, and I weighed about four pounds. My father worked during the day and my mother worked at night, so when Dad would come home from work, he would feed me dinner. He bragged for years about how much baby food I would suck down, a jar of meat, a jar of vegetables, a jar of dessert, and big bottle of milk. There is a picture we have in a family photo album of my father holding me and giving me a bottle, and there's a look on his face that I never fully understood until my daughter was born a few years ago; it's the look of a man looking at his child and knowing that he would jump in front of a bullet for that child, like he wants to take that child's hand and show him every bit of good in the world, shelter him from every bit of bad in the world, and teach him everything there is to know. It's the look of a man who loves his child more than he loves himself, and I have that look now for my daughter.
My father has requested to be cremated, and the ashes scattered. There won't be a memorial, or a service for him, but he will be remembered in the lives he has created and nurtured and shaped and molded, my sister and brother and me.
I love you, Dad. You did a great job, and to your credit, you did it without a father to show you how it was done.
Rest in peace.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
