I never wanted to be like you. Well, perhaps I ought to rephrase that. It might be quite common for a young boy to wish to be like his father, walking behind him, doing his best effort to walk like him, perhaps eat like him, drink like him, burp like him. I do reckon, each time you burped, your “excuse me” and your corporeal reaction was to me more than clear evidence, firstly, that it was not your intention to celebrate burping (as many real men fathers appear to do), and, secondly that burping was not to happen as a socially accepted action for the sharing. Excusing yourself in such instances told me time after time that a burp was rather to be kept a private occurrence as much as possible. Coincidentally, just weeks ago, I audibly burped while a friendly customer was standing just behind me. “You burp!?” he exclaimed in astonishment. “All the years I have known you, I have never heard you burp.” He reemphasized.
In any case, well within and beyond that likely period of a boy wanting to be like his father, the young adult me, the coming-of-age me, the adult me, the coming-of-awareness me, did not sense any desire to be like you. It feels today as though I almost always felt as being in the midst of a crucial and difficult learning process, one that could lead this lonely hungry creature at any given second in a number of challenging directions but never one capable of approaching being similar to you. Therefore, any effort to emulate you would have had nothing to do with being me but with a useless effort of being a repetition, even worse, an enhancement, an extension, an improvement of you. Preposterous! However, as sad and disturbing as it may sound today, no mirror I knew even managed to show me as an individual, a proper being. Hungry mind, hungry eyes, and hungry ears were looking in quiet desperation to grasp some essence of truth, yet submissively believing.
To emulate you was also an improbable desire. The admiration was so high that emulation seemed to be nearly a blasphemous consideration.
Actions, some actions, however, I do recall being impressed by. One can peel a grapefruit, orange, or apple by holding the knife towards one’s own body, cutting with a type of backstroke, following through until the fruit has been peeled, backwards. As a child, and as an adult, well passed the age you were when you were terminally diagnosed, I have seen most fruits being peeled by driving the knife with the sharp edge away from the body. There is less control in those movements, making it less dangerous to cut oneself, that is what you told me once. And, even today, there is a slight sensation of achievement (some call it pride) when I peel a fruit according to your instruction.
Just days ago, merely walking the streets of this New York which you no longer know, and would in part not recognize, suddenly I thought of the way you bat eggs. You know well that I detested everything in the realm of eggs, and perhaps for that fact never imagined that I was repeatedly observing you whenever you were beating them in a bowl with a fork. Your wrist movements I have been trying to replicate ever since I felt forced to buy them on my own, once I became responsible for my cooking and living, and had no choice but to implement them in my life to some extent.
Even sweeping continues to call my attention to you as father at home, and as the young determined man you were in Cuba, and in New York, where you were praised for the way you cleaned. The broom, actually just opposite to the knife when peeling, is to be moved away from the body. With your logic and humor you loved to explain that the dust is not to cover your shoes.
In memory of my father (March 21 1931 – March 11 2001), today I share another short excerpt from a work in progress:
Sila Blume 
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