As some readers of this blog will already know, I lost my father, Lawrence “Larry” Kaiser, on February 2nd, just a little over a month ago now. He was 87 and ailing, so his death was not unexpected, but it’s true that nothing can ever truly prepare you for the loss of a parent. Of course, Dad lives on through my memories of him, and as a number of people have pointed out to me, he also lives on through whatever unique qualities he passed along to me, his youngest child.

When I was a child I felt closer to my mother, Shirlee. She was a stay-at-home mom, so we spent more time together than I did with my father, who was busy simply trying to earn a living and support a wife and four children. But as I was growing up, I was often told I was more like my father’s side of the family. Dad was soft-spoken, easygoing, slow to get angry, and unlikely to hold grudges, all qualities that I inherited. He could also be quietly and stubbornly persevering in the pursuit of what he wanted, which is something I’ve also been quite rightly accused of (as character traits go, it’s not a bad one to have). As a young person, he loved to draw, which was an interest I shared with him (though in time we both grew out of this). He was a navigator during WWII on a Lancaster bomber, and I treasure the pencil sketches he did–character studies, really–of his flying crew during this period, as well as some later sketches he did of my mother.

Of course, we also differed in some crucial ways. Unlike me, Dad had a engineer’s mind and had been crazy about airplanes since childhood. He almost certainly would have become an aeronautical engineer if the war hadn’t intervened; when he came back from overseas, he had a young wife and soon a growing family to support, so he carved out a career in industrial sales, which seemed to suit him just fine, making use as it did of his technical knowledge and his relaxed, easy manner with people.

Neither of my parents had much formal education, but both were avid readers who educated themselves on the numerous subjects that interested them. Later in his life, Dad became quite a chatterbox about many topics, and that was when I started to feel I really knew him at last. He would have laughed if I’d ever called him literary, for he had no serious literary aspirations. He did write many letters in his distinctively graceful, artistic script, and he tried his hand at whimsical light verse about family members. He was a very modest man and always called these efforts “doggerel.” No, he was not particularly literary, but he was certainly literate: he had an eloquent and precise way of expressing himself in both speech and writing, and I never knew him to make spelling and grammatical errors. Given his example, it’s probably no great surprise that I’m an editor.

As for where his way with words came from, I have reason to believe that it came from his mother, my grandmother Florence, who I’m told I greatly resemble in both looks and mannerisms. Florence, a native New Yorker, had been a legal secretary, but I learned from a cousin recently that she had literary ambitions and was writing under a nom de plume. What she was writing remains a mystery. My aunt tells me that Florence was delighted by the theatre and could quote extensively from the works she loved, so perhaps she was writing a play. Whether she ever finished what she was working on or pursued publication is also up in the air. My guess is that as a wife and the mother of three young children, she simply put her writing aside, perhaps hoping to get back to it one day. I’ll probably never know. I’m just glad that she and my father were the sort of people they were, and that they passed down something of their wonderful gifts to me.

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