A paean to Pop, 18 years later

My father died just two weeks before Father’s Day, back in 1988. He was 88 years old, and had lived a large chunk of the century, and was ready to go. After spending a week at home with Mom in Florida, and absorbing the first great loss of my life, I came back to Puerto Rico in a state of shock. But San Juan STAR Editor Andy Viglucci gave me an hour to write a column for Father’s Day, and through my tears and numbness, I came up with one and the copy desk entitled it “Without Pop, poetry will never be the same.”. It has been nearly 18 years since that life-changing experience, a whole generation, and I humbly offer the same column again, in honor of my father.

Pop told me to write this, and I was brought up to do what I was told.

Only a few weeks ago, from his hospital bed, the dying editor the world knew as Burt Bliss was mapping out my approach to the story of his life, illness and death.

He wasn’t counting on the fact that I might see it differently, and that life would write the ending anyway.

Pop had already written and addressed seven copies of his obituary, and put his affairs in order, as his eyes and his strength failed him. He wanted to go, but last month when I visited him, nobody thought it would be so soon.

We spent more time together in those days than we had in the previous four decades. I read him poetry and reported the American League standings every day. Pop decided to give Browning another chance, especially when we read the “Song” from “Pippa Passes”(God’s in His Heaven; all’s right with the world.) And I learned all about the Detroit Tigers, who since then moved up from third to second place, apparently to please him.

Briefly a professional football player, Pop learned his lifelong love for baseball on the rough diamond in the tiny town of Bolivar, in western New York, where the kids sometimes had to wait for a horse and carriage to cross. I learned that from his memoirs.

In 1983, Pop started writing them just for us two kids with his unfailing hunt-and-peck system on his heavy manual typewriter. He abandoned the job a few years ago, but later returned to it. He only got to age 10, but that was enough to give me the insight I needed into the man whose life had shaped my own values. He was a little boy who shared my love of cats more than he’d ever told me, and one who had known death early, serving as casket bearer for a boy who had drowned in the old swimming hole.

As he lay almost helpless in his hospital bed, he reminisced about a hay ride with a sweetheart. Later we unearthed a poignant poem he had written on the death of his first wife, at age 23, in New Mexico, where he worked as a journalist.

Those were the glamour years of the silent movies, and he would interview Mary Pickford and other luminaries as their train passed through Albuquerque on their way to Hollywood.

During his last days, he became smitten by a petite Filipino therapist named Premalyn, and talked about her incessantly. When Mom and I feigned jealousy, he replied that there was love enough for all of us.

Some nurses complained that he mistreated them in those last days. “I don’t yell unless I’m mad,” he justified, convinced, nevertheless, that the whole staff was out to get him.

“I’m a good guy, I just figure funny,” he said in self defense. His wry humor was self-deprecating, even macabre, as he talked about how death would “cure”his arthritis.

In those last days, he and I would play a simple game of cards, or talk about racism or politics. We alternated between the absurd doggerel of Ogden Nash, and the poignant symbolism of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.”

"I used to recite all these poems by heart,” he said as we read Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Kipling’s “Gunga Din” in the book my grandmother bought him in 1907 from an itinerant vendor. I still have the old tome, but the new large-print anthology I took him was stolen from his hospital room.

Although a childhood speech defect kept him from learning Spanish, my father had a deep respect for the Hispanics he knew in the Southwest and later in New York and Puerto Rico.

He and Mom visited me often and even traveled to Mayagüez by bus to visit Bob Sawyer, an old Bolivar friend. But Pop never could get used to sitting around until midnight waiting for the roast pork at Christmas.

Another year when he visited us on a farm in Aibonito where my late husband Guillermo worked, we put him to work painting the house.

His last appearance in San Juan was in November 1984, when the STAR was in the middle of a long, painful strike. I don’t think an old newspaperman ever understood what we were doing out on that picket line, but he and Mother joined us there for Thanksgiving dinner.

Since then, I have traveled more to Florida, as Dad settled into his armchair, watching TV and playing scrabble. He had given up his job as president of their co-op apartment building three years before. He still liked to hear about my exploits, but his own reporter’s instinct seemed to have burned itself out.

Some people said he had lost interest in life, but I knew better. He had relegated it to another corner of his mind, for people who had the time.

Toward the end, he wasn’t the same old Pop that I had grown up with, but I discovered something even more valuable. I discovered a man no longer influenced by deadlines, bills and the stiff-upper-lip philosophy. Here at last was a man who could say "I love you” without embarrassment and without haste. A man who had the generosity of spirit to tell his only daughter, “look what I’ve accomplished – you.”

I have no regrets, Pop, and I’m proud. I told you “thanks” and “I love you” and “see you later.”

Poetry will never be the same without you.