You can't have everything you want!

I often write about my mother, that irritating grain of sand in the oyster that produces a Baroque pearl despite itself. I have painted a verbal portrait of my father as an heroic figure in my eyes. Despite his warmer nature, he was somewhat righteous.

We never said grace or anything like that at the dinner table, but he was fond of the fellowship of church and men's clubs, doing good for others. You've probably seen those movies where a character looks back to a scene in the past with tunnel vision and accompanying music.

If I think back, I see him in the kitchen at one end of our long house. I visualize him on a snowy New Year's Eve long ago. Standing in his old suede jacket and flannel shirt at the little Formica table where he took his morning coffee at 5 a.m.

This wintry evening, however, he was packing a box of groceries to take to a needy family he had found shivering in a house on one of the farms he tended. He even paid their electric bill all winter long! I marveled at this generosity, but I soon was to be taught a lesson, or so he endeavored.

When I was 14, I found a $10 bill on the floor of the Milton Theatre. Naively, I ran home brandishing my windfall. Profiting only from the tariffs from my grandmother's Bingo winnings, this was a lot of money to me then.
"A poor person might have lost that and be in need of it," he said. "We'll take it back and leave it at the concession counter for two weeks to see if anyone claims it."

Crestfallen, I was forced to follow his altruistic principles, which proved to be spartan. Impatiently I waited, calling the theater every day. Finally, the two weeks were up, and no one had shown up to collect the money! I could now spend it! "I'll take you shopping this time," he said.

I had already had enough lessons! "Help the needy!" "Delayed gratification!" and now, "You can't have everything you want," and I didn't need a crystal ball to know what the outcome of that would be. As much as I chafed at my mother's bossing, she usually bought me a lot of what she wanted me to wear, and a little of what I liked.

She wanted me to dress in a ladylike beige manner like Jane Pauley on the CBS "Sunday Morning" show. I was more of a Cyndi Lauper type. True, our conflicting tastes usually caused a tug of war. We went on Saturday shopping trips, the female form of hunting. I usually came back with a lot of booty, but Braunstein's dressing room usually resounded with arguments and recriminations. To this day, I won't wear plaid or beige.

Because of all of this, I guess my father had surmised that I was becoming a spoiled brat. The outfit I wanted was $11, and he wouldn't give me the extra dollar to add to the $10 bill that I found. This after all my waiting, to teach me one of his parables. "You can't have everything you want." I was furious! He was the affectionate one! True, he yelled at me to stop as I practiced the piano when his Sunday football game was on, but this was mutiny from my Lord Protector! I fumed all the way home down Cave Neck Road.

When we finally arrived home, I jumped out of his dusty company car and told my mother of the outrage. Seeing her chance to be "the softer side of Sears" for once, she said, "He was too harsh. We'll go back to the store right now!" Back to Braunstein's on Rehoboth Avenue we went, and she bought me 10 times the $10 in question, and gave me my $10 bill back to spend as I pleased. Lesson unlearned!

A schism had occurred – a different kind of lesson was learned, and I vowed never to feel like that again if I could. I would work hard, like my mother did, to have independence to earn what I wanted! It would be something that I loved to do, because as the old homily goes, "If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life."

One night soon after my mother died, I was driving along Cave Neck Road at night. The same road my father took home after the $10 bill fiasco. A huge deer jumped high in front of my headlights. He had giant antlers, and white around his eyes and hooves. He paused and looked at me with twinkly eyes like my father's. "There's bad and good in you," the gaze said. My father knew this once. "Try to be good, and work hard."