The Tribune

MY father died 55 years ago today. I still remember the phone call delivering the news. I was packing to visit him in Florida, leaving in the morning to catch the first flight from Louisville where my then husband and I were living for six months.

I remember just about every word of that call but the weirdest thing of all is I do not know who called. Even shortly after, I could not remember who told me my father died of what is known as a café coronary. He choked on a piece of steak and was hauled off to the men’s room so as not to embarrass the fine restaurant which, I confess without hesitation, I took delight in hearing failed not too long after that horrific moment.

Losing a loved one is never easy, losing a loved one in what is supposed to be the happiest time of year is even harder. It’s the contrasts that make it so difficult. The singing, decorations, the parties, the food – and the tragedy. It’s hard to describe what tragedy feels like. Empty. A vast hole. Absence. A picture with something missing and no matter what you do, you can’t make the picture whole again.

There are also the memories that seem to be more vivid. Other Christmases or Boxing Day or New Year’s with the one who grinned and chuckled and whose face and voice are missing. Maybe everything gains intensity during these few weeks of the year. The rush to cook, to shop, to wrap, to remember everyone you nearly forgot.

I can’t bring my father back more than half a century after he is gone, but I can think about how he held my hand as a young girl, walking down 41st Street in Miami Beach every night in the winter months when we lived in Florida because he could not stand the cold of Philadelphia.

It was our special time together, our after dinner walk when he would smoke part of his one cigar a day and I would inhale the aroma because it meant time with him. We’d pass by Nathan’s which served hot dogs and beer and he would tell me to turn my head the other way because there were men sitting at the bar who had been drinking and using bad language. Not that my father was any saint, believe me. I sometimes wondered why I even loved him given the way he behaved when he was on one of his binges or the fact that I knew he loved my mother with all his heart but cheated on her anyway.

When she died – and she was the saint in the family, the kindest, most thoughtful, caring woman I have ever known – a part of him died with her, a large part, and he never recovered which is what led to his drunken choking on a piece of steak in a fine restaurant and being left to die like a dog in a men’s room. This big hero of a man who never finished high school but ended up president of the Philadelphia Businessmen’s Society, this man who adored his little girl even though I wore glasses and thought of myself as gawky and ugly and no one much cared that I was smart, except for my teachers and my father who believed in me without reservation and spoke to me like an adult.

Loving a parent is the first lesson in unconditional love. Whatever your situation at home is this holiday season, please, please hold someone close, share a meal with someone you need to forgive, take food to a family in need. Make it count. You never know when the phone might ring and even if you can’t remember who was on the other end, you will never forget the split second when you got the chilling news that there would be a hole in your life that could never be filled, an emptiness without cure.

Make this holiday count, please.

BLAME IT ON THE BANKS

SINCE one thing we don’t love unconditionally - and these days don’t love even with conditions - are banks, we take twisted pleasure in sharing a report by Tim Quinson that appeared in Bloomberg Green’s Good Business column this week.

Quinson cites a study by the Sierra Club and the Centre for American Progress that found eight of the biggest US banks and ten of the country’s largest asset managers finance about two billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions based on their year-end disclosures for 2020. That’s about one percent less than what Russia produced. Those emissions, Quinson said, equal what 432 million passenger vehicles driven for one year would produce. Or as the writer put it: “If the financial services industry was a country, it would rank as the world’s fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases.”

Just one more reason not to love banks along with long lines, poor customer service and the ever-widening gap between interest rates earned and paid. But the real fear among those who study financing trends worldwide and look into what those trends mean for the future is that on the current path, the funding of industries and manufactured goods and supplies dependent upon fossil fuels will fuel such climate disaster that recovery, when possible, will be so costly that at some point it will slow the economy and lead to the worst recession in history.

Meantime, the cost of lithium ion derived from nickel has risen more than 200 percent in a year as the demand for batteries and growth in the electric vehicle industry continues to climb.