Big Chuck
Picture the train scene from any movie from the war years. Smoke billows around the tracks and Betty Grable waves. You know the scene?
Inside is a collection of stock players. A variety of soldiers (grizzled veteran, smooth-cheeked Midwestern boy, smart-ass Southerner with a deck of cards). A old man. A small boy traveling alone. A young woman with a past. A kindly conductor.
Freeze the frame and close in. Closer. All the way, among the faces, until the screen is filled with only the image of the little boy. Got it?
This was my father.
He turned five the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. He had no memory of that, or much of his childhood. He was the eldest son of a single mother, and spent a fair amount of time shuttled between relatives or in a foster home.
A 16-year-old boy in 1953 poses for the high school yearbook, jeans, white T-shirt, blond hair slicked back with a D.A. No cigarettes rolled in the sleeve because cool guys didn't actually do that, but he has them. He sings in the glee club and dates a girl he's known since junior high, and he likes cars. Not Fonzie, but not Richie either.
This was my father.
Mary has a date. Phyllis' daughter, Beth, is staying with her for the weekend and the babysitter cancels. She calls her boss in desperation, and as it turns out there's a big boxing match on TV and his set is broken, so he comes over to watch the fight and keep an eye on the kid.
The fight ends in a knockout in the first seconds. Beth wants to make cookies. Lou Grant isn't sure about all this. "I don't suppose Mary has anything to drink," he says. Beth pulls out a bottle. "There's...Scotch," she reads. Lou grins.
"Good ol' Mary. OK, kid, let's make some cookies."
Listen: This was my father.
Lou Grant. The father from "Wonder Years." He was a type, a solid man with a gruff exterior who chain smoked Parliaments and liked his Scotch, who worked for 45 years as an orthotist and rarely called in sick, who could build anything and fix anything, who dragged his teenaged sons to barbers against their wishes and coached Little League against his, who married his high school sweetheart and played with his grandchildren.
This was my father.
He liked Petula Clark and the Tiajuana Brass when I was a kid, and cranked the stereo up so it could be heard down the block. He liked musicals, or any play I was in. He loved "Arthur," a movie about a funny drunk, and "Miracle On 34th Street" (the first one).
The only poem I ever heard my father talk about was Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening." I knew this but never thought about it, not until now. A little boy, alone, with responsibilities usually reserved for an adult. Now I think I know why.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Fred Rogers used to tell children, on his TV show, that they were unique. "There's never been anyone quite like you," he'd say, "and there never will be." And this is true. There are no ordinary people.
But there are ordinary lives, lives without fanfare or the spotlight, lives of quiet duty. There will be no streets named after my father, or statues in the park or libraries. He was simply a good and decent man, which is what I would have them say of me.
But for all the joy in his life -- and there was that, his children and grandchildren, his marriage of almost 50 years, his friends -- his road was very often dark and deep. There were always battles to be fought, and demons to be dealt with, and work to be done.
And I want to say that through all this, through a missing childhood and successes and failures and trauma and tragedy and joy, my father always kept his promises.
He has earned his rest, if any of us have. Go to sleep now, Dad. I love you. Go to sleep.  Charles A. Sigars, Sr. Dec. 7 1936 -- Dec. 11, 2003
8:52:20 PM 
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