An Old Photo, and Father Comes into Focus

The Boston Herald

I took the coaster home and stuck it in my journal, but I didn't tape it in. I like holding it. I like looking at it.

The image on the coaster could be my father. It's circa 1950, a sepia sketch of a police officer, standing alone, straight, serious, hard-brimmed hat, young face, clean shaven, long wool coat, badge over the heart, polished leather shoes. There's no visible crease in the pants but I know it's there just as I know the wool coat is rough and itchy.

“Hi, Dad.’'

“Hi, Babo,'' my father says as he bends down, picks me up and kisses me.

He used to press a crease into his pants every day. I watched him do it. He wet a clean handkerchief and lay it on top of the heavy blue trousers. The iron made steam and the steam made the small room hot. He pressed a crease into his long-sleeved police shirt, too. He took pride in this. And I took pride in him.

The coaster is from Cuffs, an Irish bar, part of Jury's, an Irish hotel located in the former Boston Police headquarters. There are many framed pictures on the walls of men in uniform, great pictures from long ago. But it's the sepia sketch on the coasters that brings my father back to me, not the man he is today, but the boy he was just a blink ago, younger than my son is now.

The coat sleeves are too short on the paper officer. You can see his hands. My father liked his coat sleeves long. He liked them to fall to the joint where his thumbs began. He stood straighter than the officer in the picture, too, his shoulders square. He was tall and he was fit, but not muscular or toned the way young men are now. He was strong, but in a quieter way. 

An Irish cop is the logo of an Irish bar. And yet I never saw my father drink. Not in all my childhood. My mother would have port wine at Christmas and New Year's. But my father? He drank coffee, winter and summer, and smoked Camels, maybe Chesterfields. Until one Lent when he gave them up - no Nicorette, no hypnosis, no behavior modification. He just crumpled up the package and that was it.

He had green eyes sometimes and brown eyes most times and a broad nose and full lips and a space between his two front teeth that made him look even younger than he was.

He whistled when pressing his pants and he whistled coming home at night, walking up the back steps at the end of his shift. And I would race to him and shadow him as he hung up his uniform and emptied his gun.

This was my father - and the world - 50 years ago. A small drawing on a piece of cardboard, a throwaway coaster that I saved, brings it all back.