My sister forewarned me that becoming a parent would conjure
up many memories of my own childhood and reflections of my parents' parenting
styles.  "Contrast or compare, your
choice," she said.  I imagine that it's
normal for many women glean their parenting styles from their mothers.  And while I'm very much like my mother in
many obvious, observable ways (no dishes in the sink, a propensity to shout),
but in other, more subtle ways, I am very much like my father.  One thing that we have in common is that we
loathe exercise.  Another is a love of
knowledge and writing and a certain uncommon ease with both.  My father is 75 years old and writes a daily
blog; at least he did until his life turned upside down about a month ago with
a diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer and again a week ago with admission to a
hospital for pneumonia (as if lung cancer wasn't enough).  After 50 years of a successful career as a
creative director in advertising (think Mad Men, only slightly less glamorous),
he found a second career teaching fashion advertising at a college.  He was  renewed and reenergized with this second
career.  Indeed, teaching brought out the
best in him.  I believe that teaching is
a calling; a person either has the 'teacher' in them, or they don't.  My father is a born teacher.  His greatest gift to his children has been in
the role as a teacher and indeed, he has taught us so much.  With a voracious appetite for knowledge about
both history and current events, and a brain like a file cabinet of trivial
facts, my father has an equally voracious desire to share his knowledge.  And when he's in a teaching moment, whether
as a father, grandfather, brother, uncle, or as I simply observe him in conversation
with friends, it's a beautiful sight to behold.

My parents divorced in 1971 when I was 6 and my mother,
sister, and I moved from the suburbs of Detroit to my mother's hometown of
Toronto.  I was the only kid that I knew in
Toronto in the early 70s whose parents were divorced.  Without peers, support groups or self-help
books about being a single father, my father's commitment to being there for
me, though separated by an international border, never waned.  I received a postcard from him every  week until I went to university.  He came to Toronto every other weekend to visit
my sister and me.  My friends though I
was so lucky to go to 'the States' to visit my Papa where he took me to
professional baseball and basketball games, University of Michigan football
games, and taught me all the rules.  When
he came to Toronto we explored the city's ethnic neighborhoods and went to
museums and movies.  I have fond memories
of Papa teaching me how to understand the sizing of men's dress shirts (neck
and sleeve) while perusing the men's section at The Bay department store and going
to the McLaughlin Planetarium.  It was
magical at the planetarium, sitting in the dark, leaning back in comfortable
high-backed chairs, and the ominous big machine revolving in the middle of the
room as a very serious narrator told stories about the constellations.   I've
only ever gone to a planetarium with my Papa. 
The McLaughlin Planetarium closed in 1995 and now being used for office
space and storage.  It makes me a little
sad to think that I will never be able to take my daughters there.

Papa was a Daughter of the American Revolution and won the
Illinois state history competition in high school.  He encouraged my interest in the civil war
and my determined need to know all about slavery in 5th and 6th grade, and then
the civil rights movement in junior high. 
This was not all that typical for a young girl growing up in Toronto -  learning about British history at school by
day, reading the writings of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. at
night.  Papa used to take me to a
restaurant on King Street in Toronto called the Underground Railroad.  It was decorated with old wood beams and
railroad ties and photos of runaway slaves and the underground railroad.  We ate okra and black eyed peas and the best
cornbread on earth.  Papa told me about
my Grandpa Joe's growing up in Georgia in the 20s and how he loved black eyed
peas.  When he told me that the Ku Klux Klan
burned a cross on my Grandpa's lawn because his family was Jewish, I knew that
my deep resonance with the civil rights movement  was not a coincidence.

Perhaps most importantly, Papa taught me the meaning of
unconditional love.  I always knew that  he loved me and supported me in everything
that I wanted to do, or be.  For example,
when I ran off to New York for my 3rd year of college with nothing more than
duffle bag of clothes and a vague plan to transfer to a school there for one
year, my father continued to send me my monthly college allowance and was proud
to hear how much I loved my International Law class at Brooklyn College.  My mother didn't talk to me for 16 months.   I'm
sure my father worried about me, just like he did when I went backpacking through
Europe for 3 months when I was 18 (remember, this is 30 years ago), but his
support nonetheless spoke volumes about his confidence in me.  Well before New York and Europe, when I was
about 13 years old, I asked Papa, "why do you allow me to do these
things?"  (at the time, I was
probably referring to eating sugared cereal for breakfast), he told me his
version of the golden rule: " You can do whatever you want, as long as it
doesn't hurt anyone."  Blasphemy, I
thought at the time.

Which brings me to the greatest lesson of all that Papa
taught me.   Of course, it's not one of the many tidbits of
unimportant trivia that is forever ingrained in my brain, like the fact that
Domino's Pizza started as a small local chain in Ypsilanti, Michigan, owned by
the owner of the Detroit Tigers who later came out against abortion rights....  My Papa's greatest lesson, and if I impart only
one to my own children, I hope it is this: 
every child needs to know that someone believes in him or her.  That's it. 
I'm sure.

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