GIFTS ON FATHER’S DAY AND EVERY DAY

By: Nancy Davidoff Kelton

June 2026 Issue

My father got pneumonia 28 years ago in Florida. I had just turned 50. My mother had a broken pelvis and was recovering in the rehab unit of a nursing home. She thought Dad had a cold.

My parents’ doctor and their covering doctor were both on vacation. The coverer twice removed admitted Dad to a local hospital near their condominium. Although I had visited three weeks before, my father wanted me there when he got the pneumonia diagnosis. I flew down.

When I got to his room, the hospital rabbi was talking to him. “If there’s anything either of you want, let me know,” he said to Dad and me upon leaving. My father, connected to several tubes, and looking thin and pale, laughed. “You used to call our rabbi, the rabbit,” he said. I did. I used to call people and places names that were funny or off. Wurlitzer was Wurtilizer.  Station identification was station- I-got- a- vacation. Our neighbors, the Nathans, who owned a furniture store, put ads in  The Buffalo News on Sunday that said, “No money down at Nathans.” Upon looking at the ad, I would invariably say, “Poor Mr. Nathan.” My father laughed and then told my mother who was hard of hearing what I said.

He now told me that Aunt Evelyn had just visited him in the hospital and they did The NY Times crossword puzzle together. “Were you surprised she took the time to see you?”  I asked. “Sort of,” he said and reminded me how pretentious she was. “She’s the only person I know who says yes in two syllables. Ye-es.”   

When I left there, I visited Mom in the nursing home, saying Dad was still home with a cold.  And two days later after he died, I went there and told her the same thing. Since I was a little girl, I have spared my mother.

At the funeral in Buffalo, which my mother did not attend, Jack, my father’s closest friend for many, many years, was sitting alone in the first row of the chapel in front of the open coffin. Jack was invariably late for most things: professionally and personally. Dad covered for him. Both men, lawyers, were quirky, witty, and unconventional. Jack and my father got along famously. They revered each other.

Jack stood up when he saw me. We hugged. He was holding a deck of cards that said First Bank of Buffalo. I had a deck in my pocketbook that said M&T Bank of Buffalo which I intended to put into the coffin during my eulogy. When I saw that Jack had a deck, we put both in together and laughed. Dad invariably got cards instead of toasters when he opened bank accounts. When I had asked my father if he ever bought cards, he said, “Buy? Of course not. They come with.”   

For months after the funeral, I pictured him sitting at the foot of my bed offering me his long-term advice. “It only takes one,” he told me when I got rejections on my work or my relationships did not work out. In school and after, when I thought I should conform, he said, “Don’t try to keep up with the Jones. They do not know what they are doing.”

As a little girl, I told him it bothered me that Mommy had less to say during dinner than we d-id and whatever she did when I was at school and he was at work sounded boring. He said, “Find work you love. You do it every day.”

In college after crying to him on the phone when I thought I would flunk chemistry, he wrote me a letter with the title: Don’t Sweat It. It included the following: "Hearing you getting so upset over a course was upsetting to me. No one in our family knows chemistry. Hopefully, the person who teaches you chemistry next semester will ask better questions on the tests. l love you no matter how it comes out. "

“Read. Read. Read.” he said.

 Ever since I can remember, I saw my father with his nose in a book in the evening, on weekends, and in bed before he went to sleep. Piled on his night table were his favorites: books by Voltaire, Twain, Hardy, Dickens, S. J. Perlman, and Alfred Sheinwald’s 5 Weeks to Winning Bridge, among others.  He owned his longtime treasures which he regularly reread.  He got new ones from the library and occasionally from the Book of the Month Club. He returned the later after reading them. Whenever I told him about a book I wanted to read, he would say, “See if the library has it.” 

I miss Dad every day, not just on Father’s Day. This is my 29^th without him.

I carry his advice, heart, love, desire to be myself not the Jones, and, by myself.   I would like to think I carry his sense of humor, too.  And whatever else comes with.

                             The End