June 2001     PAH! #129

I typed my father’s full name, including middle initial, into the internet search engines and did not get one result.

According to the internet, Raymond J. Morelli doesn’t exist.

Two weeks ago, the line of people who came to pay him their last respects trailed (really, not virtually) all the way out the door of the funeral home.

There were one or two members of his high school class of 1937. One old army crony from a neighboring town who’d served in the 4th Armored Division under General Patton. There were friends from the hometown that was his permanent residence since his birth in 1919.

For three hours I stood in a receiving line with my family, pumping hands and embracing people like a candidate, and hearing sweet and wonderful things about my father.

He died on the day my daughter received her First Holy Communion, an event he had planned on attending. On that one day, my family’s heart ran the gamut from grief to joy, although the joy was quite subdued.

Weighed down by the sad, sudden news of his passing that very morning, I sat in the church waiting for my daughter and all the other well-dressed children to proceed up the middle aisle to receive for the first time the bread that is the centerpiece of the communal meal of each Sunday mass.

Even had I not been overwhelmed with solemnity that day, I’d still have wanted walk up and down the church aisle and bonk on the heads with their own cameras all the dimwits who, instead of drinking in the sweet and sacred air, were trying to get their cameras into focus and frame their children in the viewfinders of their video cameras.

For weeks their children had studied the Bible, completed an entire study book, drawn pictures and composed original prayers, all in preparation to received a church sacrament that is one of a possible seven they can receive in a lifetime.

But for many parents, this was yet another photo opportunity -- like a softball game, a dance recital -- a chance to capture on film for the ages an event they would not eyewitness the first time around.

The processional of children walked up the aisle. Many of the kids looked up to see his their families. They sought affirmation. Instead of eye contact, instead of seeing their parents‘ proud countenances and affirmative winks, kids blinked at flash bulbs.

At my father’s calling hours and funeral and subsequent gatherings, no one took a picture. The ego and self-consciousness of taking pictures for all posterity was replaced by the sincerity of exchanging gestures of support that would do their own part in creating a love that will long outlast any film.

I spoke at his funeral. So did my niece. And the priest gave a warm eulogy. “Not one of you mentioned what he did for a living,” said my wife. No one in the long receiving line mentioned it either.

In 1945, after serving in the war, he returned to his hometown of two thousand people. My father was a family man who worked in factories, who came straight home after work and stayed there (except on Monday nights when he volunteered to monitor bingo games at our church.) We spent our evenings swapping sections of the newspaper, watching “Mannix” and “Hawaii 5-0” and “The Dean Martin Show.” I see him in the part of myself that, when driving home from work, quickens with the anticipation of seeing my family and spending the evening with them reading the newspaper comics.

On a dim, chilly early evening a week after his funeral, I  watched through the window to the back yard where my two daughters played on the swing set. They laughed and sang. On the stereo was a CD by the Holly Cole Trio, a spare and eerie arrangement of “On The Street Where You Live.”

“There is no where else on earth I would be rather be,” sang Holly Cole hauntingly, woozily, beautifully. Those children and that song illuminated not what my father did for a living but what he did for a life.