Walk Like A Man

There’s a Springsteen song I keep circling back to this time of year.

Not one of the anthems — not “Born to Run,” not “Thunder Road.” A quieter one, off  the album Tunnel of Love, called “Walk Like a Man.”

It’s about a son standing at the threshold of his own grown-up life, thinking about the man who taught him how to stand. Bruce isn’t singing about a hero in the comic book sense. He’s singing about a father. About a boy who watched his dad move through the world and then spent the rest of his life trying to match the stride.

That’s the song I’d play for my father, who turned 88 last week.

My dad was a pharmacist. Had his own store — Maple Pharmacy in Smithtown, N.Y.

If you’re under a certain age, you may not understand the importance of an independent pharmacy, because we’ve mostly traded it away, although Maple Pharmacy still exists, the oldest pharmacy in that corner of Long Island.

During my dad’s career, the independent pharmacist wasn’t a clerk behind a counter. He was a fixture. He knew your name, your mother’s name, which kid had the ear infections and which one couldn’t take penicillin. He was the guy you called when the baby spiked a fever at ten o’clock at night and you weren’t sure whether to panic. Half medicine, half ministry. People walked in scared and walked out feeling better because people like my dad came around the counter and gave them comfort.

“The baby is going to be just fine.”

“Put this on and the itch will go away.”

“Don’t worry, but you need to have that looked at.”

When I was born, my dad, still newly wed and 26 years old, owned a store in Whitestone, Queens. He and my mom lived across the street. I was told that customers would knock on their door late at night seeking medicine.

It was a lot for a young man. A lot for a new dad and a new husband. But my mother used to tell me that my father was kind to everyone.

That’s my father.

What I remember growing up was the steadiness. He went in every day and did his job well. He worked long hours under fluorescent lights, trapped behind a counter filling prescriptions the old-fashioned way, with a mortar and pestle. The mortar is the heavy bowl and the pestle is the blunt club shaped tool that he used to grind and mix the concoction. It was pretty cool. This is before medicines arrived pre-packaged.

While the store was busy—people coming in for greeting cards, magazines, toiletries and assorted stuff– my dad was usually alone behind the counter. He told us that he longed to be out front where you could kibitz with the customers rather than in back filling prescriptions and typing out labels (the hunt and peck method). This was before computers and mail order pharmacies, before chains ruled the landscape and back when doctors would call in prescriptions.

I don’t know how he kept it all straight. But he did.

He didn’t do it for applause — there wasn’t any. There’s no parade for the man who fills the prescription correctly, who locks up every night, who comes home and is fully present for his wife and his kids.

Although I will say that when my dad came home, my mother made sure his newspaper was near his chair and that my sister and I weren’t doing anything loud or wild. We had a dog named Tina, a Beagle dachshund, who behaved like a person. She would keep his chair warm until he arrived. When he walked in, she greeted him and followed him back into the den to stand guard.

Tina got hit by a car one day. Happened right in front of me. I was playing football on the lawn when a kid opened the fence and Tina took off chasing a cat. A lawn truck coming down the street swerved to avoid the cat and hit our dog. I can still see the scene in my mind.

We put Tina in a cardboard box and my mother called my dad at the pharmacy. He came home and I went with him to the vet, all the while praying she would be ok. She looked peaceful, as if she was sleeping. I will never forget when the vet said she was gone. That night was the first time I ever saw my father cry. I will never forget that either. I was 9 years old.

My dad is a strong person. I’ve seen him overcome obstacles that would have crushed another person. Along the way, I watched, I’m not sure he knew that, probably not. But I watched and I absorbed daily lessons.

How he treated my mom. How he was supportive of my sister. How he visited neighbors suffering from cancer. How he honored and taught us to love and adore our grandparents who came here fleeing tyrants, sacrificing everything so we could have a better life.

I watched him tackle handyman projects, build a business, join a pool club so we could run around and play during endless summers. I watched him come home every night directly after work, never stopping for a drink with the guys like many other fathers did.

He took us on modest but super fun vacations, made sure I could take tennis lessons during the winter months because I had shown some promise and didn’t say a word when I lost interest in high school and moved on to other things namely girls, friends and old Mustangs.

I saw him get up every day, work hard, treat everyone well and repeat for a lifetime.

We don’t hand out medals for that. Maybe we should. Because that quiet, unglamorous reliability is the actual load-bearing wall of a family and a community. Everything else — the institutions, the civic life, the trust we keep complaining we’ve lost — it all rests on people like my dad, doing the right thing when no one’s keeping score.

That’s the kind of hero I want to write about this Father’s Day.

Not the loud kind. The everyday kind. The men who built a good life one ordinary, faithful day at a time, and never thought to call it heroism because to them it was just what you did. It was what his father did after coming to this country in 1920 with no money, no knowledge of English and no one to help him. His son, my dad, went to an Ivy League school and built a successful business and a happy family. That’s the American Dream. Work hard, do the right thing and you shall be rewarded. We ought to ask ourselves if that’s still the case. And if not, why not? What can we do to restore that beautiful promise?

As mentioned I studied my father when I was a kid.

I watch how he carried himself. How he handled life. What he did with his savings. How he derived pleasure from family, a fish tank and a set of tennis (now golf and bocce).

And I’m still studying him now, in my sixties, except now I understand the assignment. The Springsteen song gets at it exactly: you watch your father walk, and you measure your own steps against his, and the great hope of your life is that if your dad is a good man, you turn out to walk a little like he does.

Don’t get me wrong, my dad isn’t perfect (but he was darn close). No good father in any honest story is. But he was constant, and I’ve come to believe constancy is the rarest thing we’ve got. Anyone can be good on the big days. He was good every day.

So, here’s to my father and to all the quiet men like him — the ones who showed up, did the right thing, loved their people, and asked for nothing back. The everyday heroes. The ones who taught us how to walk like man.

I can still picture the store, my dad behind the counter, people lined up for a word of advice. I can still see us as the pool club, me small, trailing him toward the tennis courts, taking two steps for every one of his, trying to keep up. I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep up.