My father was born & died on a Tuesday
At a young 63-years-old, my father passed away Tuesday and as devastated as I am, it wasn’t a surprise. My father had been sick for several months, years actually. But it was years before, 22 to be exact, that I and my brothers came home from spending a weekend at my father’s apartment, where we said with strange maturity and clarity, “Dad will die young.”
He was a functional alcoholic, and when his liver started to fail in April we knew that it wouldn’t be too long.
A six-pack a night kind of man, he kept himself relatively restrained and hidden away from us. As my brothers and I got older, we set boundaries with our father. “Don’t call us when you’re drunk,” we pleaded. Which he typically respected, but meant that he started calling less and less — maybe a mixture of the fact he was sober less often or more afraid of hurting us.
But as painful as that all is, it’s not what I want to focus on. It’s not what I want to tell you about the man who was my father. I want to focus on all that I loved, but temper any perceived ideology with a clear understanding of the flaws that strained our relationship and killed him.
My dad’s name was John. John William Randazza Jr., the oldest of five children born in to a middle class first generation Italian family. He inherited my nonno’s (his father) work ethic — consistent and constant. As a chef he worked long and hard hours on his feet to provide for his family.
We would go months, sometimes even years, without talking or seeing one another due to his disease. But whenever I visited him at work there would be some new grouping of photos and newspaper clippings of me and my brothers that he had downloaded and printed off in his office in a proud display. His entire staff knew everything about us, down to boyfriends or girlfriends, and our picky eating habits which you knew because he’d have his cooks whip us up something to eat the moment we walked in.
He’d order 25 lbs. bags of gummy bears for the kitchen’s pastry chef, but spend any time he was sitting down at his desk to pick through them pulling out all of the clear ones to set aside and ship to me because they were my favorite. Along with the shipment there was Royal Cup coffee, a delicacy only found in the South East, which he knew I loved more than any other.
True to Italian, he showed us he loved us through food.
Before my parents divorced I would sit with him on the sofa, pushing well past bedtime, so I could curl up next to him watching Star Trek Next Generation as he smoked cigarettes and drank beer. I loved being next to him though hated the smell, and would sneak water into his cigarettes to try to force him to quit and eventually he did some 15 years later.
He told me that only princesses have beauty marks all over their skin, as I do and hated even as a child.
He took me to Blair Witch Project when I was 14, because all of my friends had seen it, but I was too scared to go with them.
He grew vegetables in a garden out back, and would urge me to stop and smell the freshness of the herbs he would also plant around his work’s kitchen.
He encouraged me in sports, and dedicated time to my competitive ice skating as a child and on to my tennis playing as teenager. Hiring pros to try to give me an extra edge. Though pushing against him hard because of his relentless encouragement.
He loved hole in the wall restaurants, like a hidden Mexican restaurant in side of Ashley’s Furniture or a Chinese restaurant tucked in behind a hoarder’s Chinese food store.
He was one of the only people to ever take my ambitions to step up my culinary game seriously. And some years ago gave me a set of chef knives with a print of out a list of knife skills classes in New York he had looked up. For my birthday he sent a Joy of Cooking full of his notes in the margin, along with post-its of what I had to learn in order to become a more skilled chef. Something I’m still working myself through.
And while Tuesday may have been my dad’s day, Monday was ours. The only closed day of many of my dad’s restaurants and the country clubs where he served as Executive Chef, he would pick me up early from school or be waiting as the bell rang to take me off to Lag’s Diner for milkshakes and french fries. He always let me dip them in, when my mom was always horrified and never did.
On the day my father died, I had the first milkshake I had had in nearly a decade. My step sister holding up the phone next to him, while he was losing consciousness.
“I am drinking a milkshake, Dad,” I sobbed. “They remind me of you, and how you let me dip my fries in to them. Remember our Mondays together?” His blood pressure spiked in reaction.
“I love you, Dad,” I said. “I have always loved you, and you were the best dad you could have been. Know that I will forever love you.”
Only moments later he faded away, as the ice cream melted in the bottom of my cup as if impersonating some type of hourglass. I threw it away and sobbed.
I miss you Dad, as I have always missed you. I love you, as I have always loved you. But this isn’t our end, Dad, because we will always have milkshakes and Mondays.
