MY OLD MAN

For Father's Day weekend I got to see all my kids and grandkids up in The Berkshires, including hearing my oldest son play at The Red Lion Den in Stockbirdge last night with the Transmitters, a mostly instrumental trio that reinterpreted some funk, rock'n'roll, surfer and soundtrack music like great jazz improvisers.

But today I'm thinking of my old man and since I love all the shots friends have posted of their fathers, and I just dig old photos and what they reveal about us and the people and styles and times that we come out of, I thought I'd share some photos of him, starting with before I was born:

Oldest known photo of my father, we guess in his late teens or early twenties with a cousin and aunt that was given to my daughter by an old woman she got to know in The Berkshires who turned out to be my father's cousin, this taken when he visited them in Massachusetts.

My old man and a buddy behind him on a trip in the 1920s in what may be Florida, where he spent the week between Xmas and New Years all his life as his only vacation, cause he could go to the track there in winter. 

My three brothers (who survived childhood) with our father in the '30s at my maternal grandma's down the Jersey shore in Belmar.

Around the time I was born, down the Jersey shore with his youngest brother John behind him and a friend behind him, c. 1941.

1942, me in my baby dress on my mother's lap and all my siblings (except the one who passed as an infant before I was born)—this photo disappeared with the printer who printed one of my early books (chapbook) THE SOUTH ORANGE SONNETS.

Me in my mother's arms with my siblings and old man WWII.

Jersey shore at my mother's mother with her, some siblings, my mother, and my father with his hands touching the big troublemakers in the family, my brother Robert, before he became a cop, and me with my summer burnt toast tan 1950s.

Me and my sister Irene in front of my old man's home repair business, where I worked and she had obviously stopped by maybe to visit me, 1950s.

In the 1960s, after I left home, my old man was given a political appointment job for being a great ward healer, getting out the vote for the Essex County Democratic machine in the 1950s and early '60s, so they made this seventh grade dropout "secretary and executive assistant to the Essex County Shade Tree commission"—but being a stand up guy, he actually did the work and taught himself the names of all the trees, and had more planted which he's pretending to be part of here by standing in the street with a shovel!