Here’s my husband Mike with a guest post for Father’s Day.

The original Mike Knezovich, my father, dances with Beth on our wedding day. (Photo: Rick Amodt)

My mom was combative, politically opinionated, a 5′ 1″ ball of fire.

My dad? Polar opposite. He had a quiet power.

As a child, I’d watch the clock. Every single day, he’d pull up the driveway at 5:00 in his ratty car–he always got the old car and my mom the new, because he drove to the steel mills in East Chicago, Ind. The pollution (pre-EPA) and rugged, rutted industrial roads near the mill were hell on cars. He barely was through the door before I was jumping on him, sometimes punching him playfully, draping myself on him, wanting him to play whatever it was I liked playing at the time. Or just rough-housing, all the while my mom telling me to calm down, dad not seeming to mind it.

The only time I remember my dad ever striking me outside of the playful rough-housing was after I made fun of the way a man talked to us while we were fishing once. It was hardly anything, really, just a quick snap that was enough to surprise the hell out of me. Mostly, I think, it was a reflex of disappointment, and the only time anything like that happened.

And because I loved my pop, I really hated disappointing him. When I was in high school back in the early 70s, I — like a lot of kids — discovered marijuana. And we inhaled. And we thought we were pretty clever in hiding it from our folks. One day, when I was in the basement doing my laundry, I was horrified to find my bag of the magic weed sitting neatly on top of the dryer, impossible to miss. I knew it was my dad’s work (my mom would have been screaming at the top of her lungs). I eventually went to my
dad, apologized, told him I wouldn’t do it again. And I didn’t (at least, not under mom and dad’s roof). It all happened without his so much as raising his voice.

I’m lucky to have vivid memories of him. And in my adulthood, I’ve learned others outside my immediate family do, too. Recently my cousin Linda–who lives in Southwestern Pennsylvania where my dad grew up and his siblings still lived–wrote about one of hers.

When I was 12, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had three major surgeries within six weeks. As a child, I had no idea what was happening. Your dad showed up at the hospital and took her hand and kneeled at her bedside. I can still hear her sobs. He came all the way from Illinois just to hold her hand. (She would recover and live to be 90 years old.) In a little girl’s eyes, your dad was my hero. 

My dad was so consistently there that he was easy to take for granted. Which I largely did, I think, until my senior year in college when he suffered a near-fatal heart attack. I saw him diminished. I saw him afraid. And that was one whale of a rite of passage. Months later, after doctors judged him well enough to survive quadruple bypass surgery, I came home from the D.C. area where I’d landed a job. I saw him off to the OR, and was around for the first days of his recovery. It was the first time I felt like I was there for him.

That surgery bought him 10 more good years, and I thank my lucky stars for them. Because I had time to not take him for granted, and make him know how grateful I was (though he always fidgeted and appeared excruciatingly uncomfortable when I would tell him).

And he wasn’t done being there for me and for us. Our son Gus was born amid a good deal of difficulty and spent his first few weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. I had to go back to work, but my dad — by then retired — came down to spend his days with Beth, getting her to the hospital for her own followup visits and to visit Gus together.

My pop with my son.

My father was there when the neonatologist gave Beth the news — the day before Gus was to come home — that Gus had a rare genetic anomaly that would leave him with lifetime disabilities. When I got home from work, my dad was in the kitchen, looking a little bewildered. He was typical for his generation in terms of his stoicism. He didn’t talk about his time in the service during WWII. Or about difficult stuff in general. But  clearly something was up. 

I found Beth in the bedroom, in the fetal position. And she told me the news. 

Whatever my dad lacked in communicativeness was more than balanced by something very very important: He was there. He was powerless to change the reality about Gus. But he was there when we brought Gus home. And his being there made an enormous difference. He loved his grandson from the beginning, holding him, cooing to him. He brought a kind of beauty and normalcy in very difficult and abnormal circumstances. It helped get us through that early period, and he visited several more times to stay with us and help out with Gus.

We live in exaggerated, hyped up, polarized times. It’s easy to mistake flamboyance for substance, flash for character, noise for meaning. It’s tempting sometimes to try to do too much, when, really, the very best thing we can do for one another is just be there. Like my dad.

Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” won three Tony Awards last Sunday, including
Best Actor for ensemble member Tracy Letts. This good news gives me an opportunity to excerpt a post I published here two years ago after seeing the play here in Chicago. Better put, when I felt and heard the play: Steppenwolf provided special programming for the blind, and that was the first time I ever participated in a  special touch tour. Here, from that 2011 post:

Touching Virginia Woolf

Two things convinced me to give this touch tour thing a try:

• We’d get to meet the actors and actresses before the play. I love meeting actors and actresses.
• Tickets for touch tour participants were half price.

Flo Finke didn’t raise no fool. I ordered two half-price tickets for the play, convinced my friend Brad to come along with me to the touch tour, and we settled into our seats two hours before the matinee started so we could hear the staff explain the set.

All of the action takes place in Martha and George’s living room, in a small college town somewhere in New England. The staff was familiar with the play, of course. They knew exactly which props were most vital to help us understand the action on stage. Doorbell chimes hanging by the entrance. A small photo of Martha’s father on the mantel. A toy gun with an umbrella that shoots out of the barrel. These explanations really helped. Example: Before the play, they pointed out an abstract 60s painting on the wall, towards the right, in George’s study. “It’s modern art,” they said. “Muddy blue swirls and brown tones. Not very interesting.” Later on in the play, when the actors are on the right side of the stage and someone asks about a painting, George says, “What it is, actually, is it’s a pictorial representation of the order of Martha’s mind.” Thanks to the presentation ahead of time, I understood how biting – and witty – George’s comment was. Which, in turn, helped me better understand the play.

The actors introduced themselves to us ahead of time, too.

Tracy Letts and Amy Morton as George and Martha in a scene from the play.

“My name is Tracy Letts, I’m 45 years old. That’s the same age as George, who I’ll be playing today.” Each actor described their physical characteristics — “I’m…well, a big guy. I’m six foot three inches tall, about 210 pounds. Stocky, I guess” – and what they’d be wearing on stage. When Amy Morton, who plays George’s wife Martha, told us she was five foot ten, I could picture her pairing up well with Tracy Letts’ George.

The actors were happy to answer any questions we had. We discovered this is the seventh time Tracy Letts and Amy Morton have played husband and wife on stage. They’ve known each other thirty years. Both won Tony awards for August: Osage County, and Tracy Letts won a Pulitzer Prize for writing that play. It was a thrill to have this private audience with them.

The Steppenwolf folks were happy to share fun facts from behind the scenes, too:

• They weren’t drinking liquor on stage. It was water. Or colored water. The ice was real, though!
• They had to learn to pace the way they sipped. That way their glass would be empty at the precise moment George asks if they want a refill.
• The glasses and bottles flung across the stage during arguments look real, but they’re special-ordered acrylic resin bottles designed to shatter realistically and safely – wouldn’t be cool to act on broken glass, or have shattered glass spray into the audience.
• Martha’s boobs weren’t entirely real, either. “Lots of cleavage,” Amy Morton said after being asked to describe her costuming. “Helped by padding.”
• The couch and comfy chair on stage were bought new, then sent to an upholsterer to cover them so they’d match, both in color and in the way they looked worn out.

These theatre–types had described the set so well that I really didn’t need to go up there and feel how books and journals had been strewn about on tables and bookshelves or fondle the glasses and bottles on the bar stand. But who could refuse a chance to stand on stage at the Steppenwolf? Harper and I stepped right up.

This was Harper’s first time attending a play, and Evan the front house manager thought my new dog would be most comfortable in the front row – plenty of room for him to stretch out. How. Cool. Steppenwolf offered headphones to wear — a narrator describes visual effects — but I don’t like those. I get a kick out of figuring it out for myself, and sitting so close made that easy to do. I felt like Harper and I were right there with George and Martha in their living room.

Congratulations on the Tony Awards, Steppenwolf. Lately you (and the Blackhawks!) are making us especially proud to live in Chicago.

Me, Harper and our gracious Steppenwolf hosts Hilary and Malcolm, on stage during the touch tour. Malcolm is holding one of the breakable prop bottles and a bouquet of the plastic snapdragons which figure prominently in the play.

I’ve met with my Monday and Thursday classes already, and will return to these Wednesday writers this week.

I assign a topic to the seniors in the three memoir-writing classes I lead each week, the writers go home to write about that topic, and when they return the next week, they read their essays out loud. Written copies don’t get passed around to fellow writers, which means that during class everyone has to, get this: listen. My teaching methods are so simple the classes could lead themselves. As if to prove that point, two of them did just that while I’ve been away the past couple of months: they met without me. I’m proud to have created a system that can work on it’s own, but when cardiologists finally gave me the okay to return to my writing classes this week, I had to wonder: do my classes really need me back?

The answer is no. My absence proved it. Classes don’t need me. The absolutely sensational (and very flattering) fabulous news, though? They seem to want me back. All week long I’ve been welcomed with open arms, big hugs, and some very well-written essays. One example: the homage to memoir-writing that Monna S. Ray read in Monday’s class. She credited Roger Ebert for inspiring her to write through her own challenges. “He said that when he was in the midst of typing a piece on his computer he became whole,” she wrote. “From one who had lost so much, this was a powerful statement about writing.” Monna said putting words on paper helps her reflect on her “life of eight decades,” and brings something new to her life now, too. From her essay:

I just learned that I can “reblog” any posts I read that I think you Safe & Sound blog readers might appreciate as much as I do. What better way to try this out than to reblog this post by my writer friend Jeffabout his randy Seeing Eye dog..

I started modeling nude for art students the year I turned 40. The unemployment rate of people who are blind was – and still is – around 70%, and back then the University of Illinois art department was the only place willing to hire me.

My Seeing Eye dog Dora posed with me, and, in the end, most of the drawings were just of her.

Taking my clothes off for college students wasn’t exactly a dream job, but it did have some benefits: standing still for 50-minute poses gave me lots of time to think about my writing, how to reformulate a lead, how to get across a certain idea. I composed my very first published essay in my head while standing naked on a tabletop, and once I got dressed again I rushed home to type the story into my talking computer. Nude Modeling: Goin’ In Blind was picked up by Alternet and published in alternative newspapers all over the country. The success of that essay led to my work on National Public Radio, my one-minute stint on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and, in many ways, the publication of my memoir Long Time, No See.

Last Saturday the New York Times published an essay by another writer who took a job modeling nude for art students. I found Rachel Howard’s essay difficult to read. Not that it was poorly written — I was just jealous I hadn’t thought of writing it myself. In the essay, Ms. Howard describes the short one or two-minute “gesture poses” art instructors ask models to use at the beginning of each class. Quick poses provide students some time to warm-up, and back when I was modeling that idea inspired me to make a habit of writing short email messages before getting into longer pieces of writing. I still do this today — checking the grammar and spelling on the short messages I send out early in the day warms me up for the book writing I do later.

Reading Rachel Howard’s New York Times essay showed me that gesture drawing affected her writing life a little differently:

I was, during those early days of art modeling, struggling to find the life in my stylistically choppy novel. At home alone, I heard the drawing instructors’ voices.
Find the gesture. Don’t worry about the details. What is the essence of that pose? I left my laptop at my desk and moved to the other side of the room to sit on the floor with my notebook.

Funny. The same short poses that inspired me to start my morning working out details (checking for spelling mistakes, watching my grammar) compelled Rachel Howard to do the opposite — to sit on the floor with a notebook and quit worrying about words and sentences. She concludes, “Because really, before we put a word or a mark on the page, both writers and artists must first step back and see. And seeing is not simple.”

Can’t say I agree with that step-back-before-you-write-a-word-on-the-page notion –I tend to write first, step back and listen to what I’ve written, and then work it out from there. As for her last line, “seeing is not simple,” though? I couldn’t agree more.