DAD'S ARMY CAP
“It instantly conjured him in full dad mode, building or fixing something, making something better.”
I didn’t notice it on the basement doorknob until nearly two years after my father died. Paint-stained and well-worn, it instantly conjured Dad in full dad mode, building or fixing something, making something better. It’s his army cap from Korea, where he avoided combat solely because he happened to be a fast typist. In those days, records of the soldiers who came and went and lived and died were typed by men like my father who traveled with their company into battle zones. In civilian life, at least in my memories, Dad wore the cap when he was attempting a physical task and meant business. I wonder if it gave him courage.
Dad laughed easily and always had joy in his eyes. He was an accountant by profession, but he’d grown up during the Great Depression on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, so beneath the suit and tie there was always a core of street kid.
It wasn’t until his later years that I heard stories of his impoverished youth. Not that he ever used the words “poor” or “poverty.” The stories involved the multitude of odd jobs he started doing by the time he was eight or nine: sweeping floors, shining shoes, fetching sandwiches for the men in the barbershop on Saturdays. Whatever money he earned, he spent on food. He described the perfect corned-beef sandwich and the proper way to make an egg cream as only one who’s known childhood hunger can.
I hung on every word, imagining the flights of stairs he climbed daily, the bed he shared with his three brothers. I asked him why he always studied at the library instead of going home after school. “There was no room to do homework in the apartment,” he said matter-of-factly. It wasn’t until I went on a Tenement Museum tour, after his death, that I got the full picture of the life he came from.
Dad was the only college graduate in his family. He learned to dance at the Henry Street Settlement. He had a beautiful singing voice, and Man of La Mancha was his favorite musical. “The Impossible Dream” would become my subliminal blueprint for living, though I didn’t know it as Richard Kiley’s baritone blasted through our house. All I knew was that my dad dreamed a better life for us than he had growing up, and he worked hard to make that dream come true.
After he retired, he did people’s taxes for free at the library. He liked being around people, joking, laughing, enjoying life. Judging by what mattered to him, his life was a success, though the radius of his fame didn’t extend much past the gas station where he bought his lotto tickets and the diner where he held court daily with his cronies. Marvin Levy loved a good meal, a good half-sour pickle, a Yankees game, going to the movies. One time when the lights went down and the movie started, there was picture but no sound, and Marvin, being Marvin, said, “I didn’t know this was a silent film.” The whole audience burst out laughing. Oh, Dad.
I have vivid recollections of him in this hat, standing on a ladder, paint roller in hand, having meticulously prepped as his own father, a painter, taught him. I live in Dad’s house now, the house he painted, the house I grew up in, the house I moved back to at the end—not just to care for him but to hear him sing as we ate breakfast. He taught me a lot in that house: to keep a song in my heart, to keep my word, to properly balance my checkbook, to have all the necessary elements at hand before starting any project. I view this cap as a necessity for the lifelong project of remembering him, which is why I’ll never let it go.
—Ilene Angel
Ilene Angel is a New York-based author and award-winning songwriter who became her father’s full-time caregiver in the final years of his life. Her fourth book, Caregiving for Your Parents—A Step-by-Step Guide for the Overwhelmed and Unprepared, is forthcoming in April.
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You have described well a beautiful man!
Such a sweet remembering! I love that an accountant's story is being told during tax season. 😊