Daddy

May 2, 2000, my Father Solomon Lipman Chernin passed away at the age of 81.

From a novel(unpublished) I wrote in Los Angeles in the 70ies called THE BEDSIDE ALICE:

DADDY'S BIRTHDAY CARD from Alice:

Today, of all days is Daddy's Birthday and on the verge of tears I rock myself to sleep, because in the end and on the day of your Father's Birthday, you GROW UP, because Daddy's fifty and you're not a kid anymore.

It's raining. It's 5:30 in the morning and Daddy is 50.. Daddy is having his Birthday and I am giving birth to the day by staying up all night.

It's all in the shadows on the wall. Head in hands I write:

Happy Birthday Daddy,

saving the minutes of the only night when it will be Daddy's fiftieth Birthday...can't sleep on Daddy's Birthday.

Your little girl can't sleep, she's crying on your birthday. It's raining on your Birthday and your little girl's in pain on your birthday.

I'm tired. It's 5:30 in the morning, the night is gone until it comes again and if I don't get some sleep, I'll be even more tired and more tired and someday I'll be too tired to go on, and I don't want that to happen.

Let me sleep, Daddy, even though it's your only fiftieth birthday, especially because it's that day.

Love and Birthday xxxxx's

Alice.

Written On the occasion of the second anniversary of my Father’s death: May 2, 2002.

I have been talking to my Father incessantly for the past twenty four hours, on this day May 2, that marks the second anniversary of his passing in 2000. I have been talking to him about the two years without him, when I have not been able to pick up the phone to say, “Hi Daddy”, or been able to stop by and feel the comfort of his hugs and kisses. My father became much more demonstrative in his last years, showering his four daughters with affection and becoming the mellow companion of his wife of fifty plus years.
The last time I addressed a letter to my Father was on his 50ieth birthday. I was living in Los Angeles and I felt the impact of his ageing. I figured it was time for me to start maturing, because after all Daddy was 50 and I in my twenties saw it as a bench mark for my own growing up. That did not stop me from continuing to call him ‘Daddy’ except for a brief period in adolescence when it was ‘Father…yes Father, anything you say, Father’ a rather pathetic attempt at sarcasm as we waged a war over my life and his control over it. I wanted him to relinquish that control so I could follow my heart and I did so for many years, often to his distress.

So Daddy, thanks for hanging in with me. I know it was rough at times. My unconventional ways and needs were often a source of frustration and I know pain for you, but we survived, our love in tact. Of course I could never really say this to you, because as a man of few words you were not one for declarations. Au contraire, you were indeed, the strong silent type. There you sat behind your newspaper and in later years the ever present books that you read in your easy chair nightly. When you could no longer play tennis or even golf, it was the world of books and the beloved history channel that kept you gloriously occupied. You took to retirement very well, just another indication that all your years of dentistry were the sacrifice you made to raise your family – your girls. The four of us plus Mother were a constant source of amazement I know to your manly disposition. You were a man’s man and that’s what you understood. And I learned to understand you which was probably the greatest gift you gave me, although there were so many generous gifts – support for your artist daughter, whose mystifying commitment to the life of the imagination was if not always comprehended, never relinquished.

Dearest Father of mine, we struggled through my difficult high school years, my Hollywood sojourn which I know worried you and let me say, your concern was not unfounded. I was pretty ‘out there’ but I could always call home. Once when I phoned you, upset about a writing deadline, financial problems, building a career. You brought it down to a wonderful simplicity that gave me perspective: “You’re under pressure", you said, and it clicked and soothed me.

When the L.A. experience finally got the better of me and a billboard saying ‘Fly Toronto’ beckoned me home, you responded to my tearful ‘plaints with a ticket to come home. The first snowfall back in Toronto, we shovelled the walk and cleaned off the car together and some part of my brain that had been fried under the California sun was restored.

But Daddy, enough about me. You had 81 years of life, born on Armistice day, November 11, 1919, named Solomon for Peace. (My sister) Barbara wrote me from London England on one occasion in the year following your death when we corresponded by constant e mails that got me through the year: “I think a lot about how Daddy shaped my life and really how deep down good he was. He lived his life to the best of his ability. Let’s hope we all do”.

It’s harder to do without you, Daddy. I understand how Mother felt when she said “how could he go and leave me now”..I just wanted you to go on forever, taking your simple pleasures, your shelf of best sellers, your chair at the head of the Passover table, your wonderful recalcitrant monosyllabic ‘don’t bother me now’ replies as you rushed back to the TV with your plate of sliced apple, “a healthy snack” gleefully anticipating the conclusion of ‘Catherine The Great’….

To say I miss you is inadequate, but I have so many memories that live on in me daily so many indications that what Barbara said is so, that you shaped my life and now in my maturity I can be grateful.

When you took your last breath I was beside you, my heart breaking. I felt you were frightened and very confused. I felt helpless and terrified. I felt so much love for you. And you died like a man. You just suddenly died, no last minute capitulation’s or changes of character, somehow without ceremony your heart stopped. No last words, because you didn’t need words, that had been established in your lifetime.

It was your presence, Daddy that was so compelling for me always: your strong capable hands, your dear bald head, the layers of life that deepened your face and form, the warmth of your embrace that drew me close to your signature sweater vests, the sound of your voice, the humour that would surface and surprise us all and the laughter we shared in our little circle of Sol and his girls, Beryl and Cayle and Franky and Barbara and Nancy.

The other day I used up the last of the shirt cardboards that you used to save up for me from your laundered shirts because you knew I liked to use them for mailings. My source is gone.
My source is gone.

SOME ADDITIONAL NOTES -

Later when I again came to live with my parents, now a ‘maturer person’ and way too old to be living at home, but in spite of minor embarrassment on my Mother’s part, “it didn’t look right”, it was heavenly. It was my busiest year to date, if we don’t count my ignominious Hollywood movie experience, otherwise known as ‘survive and stay alive in ’75’, advise from Nick Ray, the director of ‘Rebel Without A cause’, but that’s another story (alluded to in a previous blog). One I couldn’t tell my Father.

I am so curious about the stories that he couldn’t tell me. Wish I could pry some ‘Solly’ stories out of the nephews he was so close with, who accompanied him on his once-a-year trips to Vegas. Sharing my parents house with them in adulthood was fantastic. Perhaps as someone wrote the prodigal daughter returns home because she has found no one to love out there. Basically I loved the service, dinner on the table, the air conditioner turned on in my room when I got home from late night editing sessions, because Daddy knew it would be too hot for me to sleep..living with people who love you is the best.

I am so grateful to be able to experience it now with my husband, my now love. But it was Daddy who was my first love, my friend, who drove me to airports, got the woeful calls, slipped me the twenties, bought me a car in L.A. We, Chernin girls are considered independent, and we are because we had that secret weapon, a Father who loved us through thick and thin. He didn’t speak to me once for three years because he thought I was in the process of ruining my life..his love was killing him. My Grandmother of course blamed it on me. When the relationship that he reviled broke up, (my five years with Eli Rill) in no small measure because I had a continual nightmare that I would wake up one day and someone would call and tell me that my father had died and I wouldn’t have known him for years. I couldn’t bear the thought and it was eliminated when he once more welcomed me into the bosom of the family – from which my Mother never allowed him to exile me from anyway.

Daddy, my first love, my friend, first shoulder I cried on, the first lap I sat in, my first man, the only man in what eventually became a house full of women. A funny place for a guy like Sol Chernin. The guy who hid his hockey skates from his mother and played hockey under an assumed name til he got busted when a Halifax paper showed a picture of him with the bogus name underneath. This was hidden from Grandma Chernin whose wrath or displeasure was not courted by her four boys, (Daddy being the second oldest) or two daughters for that matter. They were a tight knit bunch, Daddy and my Aunts and Uncles.

Solly, I wish you could have seen me holding the Torah at the service for you today. I could feel Mother’s proud and grateful eyes…’she is going to be alright, Sol. You don’t have to worry about her anymore”.

I miss your physical presence so much...after all, the alternative title for THE BEDSIDE ALICE was >"Daddy you should have told me you were already taken"