Relay: Close Attention, Good Care

I threw my dad’s golf clubs out the other day. I pulled his old golf bag, with the red and white umbrella strapped to the side and a couple of wooden tees rattling around in the bottom, out the broken-down side wall of the shed, where it has been moldering.

The clubs, under a mound of leaves, vines, and collapsed roof debris, separated, shaft from wood, driver, putter head, or whatnot. Forgive me wrong nomenclature here; I am not a golfer, have never been, despite my father’s love of the game. Two were whole and I had to save them.

I can see him — in crisp, creased pants, a striped tee and one of his pastel Izod cardigans, wheeling his bag, on a hand cart, to the car, heading off for a tee time at one of the public courses — Sunken Meadow, Oyster Bay, Bethpage.

I can hear the aluminum clatter of the dish-like contraption that was always on the playroom floor — a gadget for practice putting with the club that balanced against the hutch next to the TV.

The bag, with irons and woods inside, has languished for 23 years, since the time I cleared out my parents’ house and moved into my own. I hadn’t the heart, then, to get rid of so many things: the golf clubs; my mother’s last purse, a cork-and-leather number that contained her plastic rain bonnet, her brush still holding strands of her hair, her keys, and the notes my father made in his last days, on morphine to mute the cancer pain, of what doses he took and when — a last desperate attempt, I think, to take care of things, to keep control.

He was always a list maker, the one who kept tabs, who ordered the family’s world. I used to laugh, as a crass teenager, at the files in his desk drawer: careful accountings of annual oil costs, a running tab titled “We have every appliance known to man,” where he recorded purchase dates and warranty information.

Perhaps that grew out of the uncertainty of his earlier days, a son of Italian immigrants who had to strive for their place in New York, for everything.

Dad paid close attention and took good care. As I left his driveway after a visit home, he’d be taking last swipes with a rag at my car, which he’d washed — checking the oil and tire pressure to boot. Off at college, I’d receive envelopes full of clippings about where I lived on the West Coast, and comments about the recent weather there, which he had tracked.

After World War II, when the returning G.I.s — silently carrying their war experience memories, things about which my father never spoke — began settling in the suburbs with their wartime brides, they were shooting for a future full of promise.

“Ginny, how ’bout it?” my father wrote in a note to my mother on an ad for Levitt houses clipped from a magazine, offering attractive financing terms for veterans, at, if I remember correctly, $13 a month.

Levittown it was, in the “W” section, on Wavy Lane, a house like so many others on streets that wound identically around deliberately spaced parks for the kids. By the time I came along my parents had moved ahead to the newer suburb a few miles next door.

He got a job with AT&T at 15, went to war, came back, returned to the company at its offices in Manhattan, and hung on until retiring with a half century under his belt. Mom, a raincoat thrown over her nightgown for the short hop, would buzz him down to the L.I.R.R. station and, dinner on the stove, pick him up at night, when he would, inevitably, disembark bitching about train delays.

He worked on perfecting his lawn and slowly, patiently building a scaffold that he hoped would deposit my sister and me in a better place, with advantages he never had. Company shares in AT&T, savings accrued bit by bit, paying off the house. The all-important “sheepskin,” as he called it — a college degree with my tuition paid.

College for him was at night while working, as he could. One generation on, Brooklyn-born and raised, he was not of the intellectual class, nor seemed to aspire to that, but he loved poetry and literature. He achieved an English degree and put together a collection of cloth and leather-bound classics, books with now-crumbling covers that I still have. Wordsworth, Longfellow, Whitman, Proust.

The house was filled with books, and more were constantly coming in. My parents were frugal, but books, apparently, were not a luxury. My older sister had the full run of Nancy Drews, and, for me, there was the Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club and later, Reader’s Digest abridged anthologies of the canon and popular works. They signed up for the Time-Life science series, a Walt Disney nature/adventure series for me. Some pulp fiction paperbacks lined the shelf along the basement stairs; downstairs, poking around the basement, I would pull out the large volume of Thurber’s cartoons, the mod, splashy looking ’60s issues of “Up the Down Staircase” and “Valley of the Dolls.”

Growing up that way, with parents who read and fed the habit in me, profoundly shaped my life, and I am so grateful.

I never viewed my father as a sentimental man. But looking back, I see a man — not a young father when I was born, by any means — who spent his down time building the battery-powered hot rod I drove up and down the driveway as a toddler, chucking balls into a Mickey Mantle pitching machine for me to bat, boosting me up into the maple tree with my book or over the backyard fence into the woods where we would go walking and cross the stream, and taking up fishing down at the Jones Beach pier (the details of a disastrous attempt to bait hooks with leeches will not be recounted here).

On Sundays, before anyone else was up, he’d already been to the German bakery and back: a cruller for Mom, crumb cake for him, a jelly doughnut for me.

He meticulously documented our lives in snapshots, deckle-edged black and whites or Kodachrome prints taken with his Brownie box camera and mounted into construction paper albums using stick-on corners, always with witty, handwritten captions beneath. There are family albums, and others dedicated to me, or my sister, or trips. “Imp the Shrimp in Action,” Dad titled mine.

He loved poetry and wrote his own, in handwritten, long, narrative rhyming lines, on scraps of paper that I still find, now and then, slipped into his books. I only just realized how much of him is in me.

From Europe in the ’40s, where he served as an Army captain, he wrote letters home to my mom with poems. In my dresser drawer is a silk handkerchief square printed with a map of Belgium, where in careful ink script he signed “Billy” in the square under the words “With love from. . . .” I keep meaning to have that framed.

He never shared any of the war papers or artifacts piled, mysteriously in my mind, in a deep drawer of the hutch — a trove I now have and will someday mine.

But before he died, he wrote down where he was and when. In an otherwise dry list his entry for April 9, 1945, says: “Crossing the Rhine River. We all stopped to pee in it.”

Hmm. Cheeky humor, something new revealed about my “square” dad. Again, the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.

Last weekend, over Father’s Day, I put a picture on Facebook of my dad and me at age 3. Without thinking much, I wrote that “He had a hard time dealing with my generation, and understanding me — everything had become so different.”

In the picture he’s sitting in the yard and I am standing, enveloped by his two hands around me, next to his knee. He’s leaning in to kiss my cheek and I’ve got, yes, an impish smile and my two little hands together across my chest. A friend and venerated writer commented that there is “so much tenderness and eagerness here.”

He was born William Anthony Pellegrini in 1912 and so would, on Veterans Day in the fall, have been 103.

Before he died we had a rare heart-to-heart talk. “You were a horrible teenager,” he said. I told him that, similarly, it wasn’t easy for me. We both cried, and something was healed.

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.