I was on the phone with Dad the other night, and our conversation touched the usual bases. I told him the two concrete details of my classes that would quench his thirst -- I said that work was fine; I told him that I'd see a dentist. In exchange, he offered most of his favorite comments -- how his back is feeling, what the bridge has been like after Sept. 11 and an update on the remedial English night class he teaches at the junior college.
Toward the end, he served me up a bonus. In the midst of telling me about the project he has been working on at his main job at the high school, he informed me that he and the other faculty members on his committee would be going to Pittsburgh for a conference -- and that he was booking a flight for them.
I gave him the polite, filial "Oh, really" when he told me, but as soon as I got off the phone, it hit me. He hasn't been on a freaking airplane since 1977.
As soon as I made that realization, I got a grin from ear to ear. Now, I did not smile because I'm some kind of vengeful son perversely pleased that my father gets to board a plane in these tumultuous times.
I smiled because I know that all these years -- all these years of working for and worrying about his family -- he has wanted to travel. And yes, I know a midday flight from Newark to Pittsburgh doesn't exactly qualify as travel in the cosmopolitan minds of most of the folks around Penn, but it's about as far as my old man's gone in almost 25 years.
I remember my grandmother telling me that she took Dad on an airplane once when he was an infant to visit Aunt Dot and Uncle Al when they still lived in Detroit. Other than that, the only other time he's flown was during the summer of '77, and that time he made it all the way to the U.K.
A senior English major in college at the time, Dad claims he'd been planning to see the blessed plot for a long while before he finally made the arrangements. Funded by both my grandparents and some of the money he'd made working for Stanley Kaplan, he spent two weeks in England, mostly near London.
By all accounts, Dad's trip was no bodacious journey. He was never much of a drinker or a gambler or a partyer. All that combined with the fact that he stayed with family friends -- a then-middle-aged couple named Jack and Ethel -- makes it pretty likely that his time spent in England did not involve tossing TVs out of hotel windows or smoking a joint in Buckingham Palace. With that said, it's definitely one of the fonder memories from his life.
He already looks the part of the stereotypical English teacher in his photo album from the trip. Whether at Madame Toussaud's or at Stratford-on-Avon, he's always standing there, looking straight into the camera with his goatee and and a slightly tousled part in his hair. He's always wearing corduroys and a heavy sweater.
He brings up his trip to England from time to time even now. He'll talk about how much he loved seeing the insides of the halls of Parliament. He'll mention how shocked his Roman Catholic eyes were to be witness to topless sunbathing for the first time.
But he only stayed two weeks.
After Dad returned to the States, he finished up his senior year in school. In the fall of 1978, he got his first teaching job, and the next summer he and my mother got married. They decided to stay in the Bronx, and by the spring of 1981, they had two sons -- a pair of Irish twins, nine months apart.
To say it was all over for Dad might be a cruel hyperbole, but his globetrotting days were certainly postponed. With two wise-ass sons to keep him on his toes and their two avaricious mouths to feed, Dad's priorities were pretty much set.
Much to his credit, he's done yeomen's work for over two decades. Between summer school, coaching little league and second jobs he has not had much time to hop on planes and sample the finer things in life.
Keeping the example of Dad in mind, I know that I want to hold off with the heavy stuff for a bunch of years to give me the chance to do the kinds of things that I think he might regret missing.
Of course, I'm concerned about my future. Grad school, jobs, they're all on my list, but I'm not about to start talking as if I want the rest of my life to start happening in a hurry.
There's a window of time in which you can have designs on smoking a joint in Buckingham Palace, a window that I don't want to see close just yet.
Will Ulrich is a senior Philosophy major from the Bronx, N.Y.
