Namesake

I looked up the word namesake even though the meaning should be obvious, but questioning everything as I do, I had to be sure.  Indeed, namesake means "to be named after another."  Thank goodness because now I don't have to change the title of today's blog entry.


Daniel was named after my father, Richard Daniel Newberger.  Growing up, I can remember that Dad never liked his middle name and never had a particularly good reason to dislike it.  When it came time to pick baby names, I never had a second choice for a boy's name:  Daniel was it.  Now, it's funny, because after Daniel was born, my dad suddenly loved the name.  You gotta love nepotism.  


My father was born on March 10th, 1925, four years before the Great Depression started.  He was a highly decorated World War II veteran, having served in the D-Day invasion at Normandy.  He served under Patton and was his personal driver on one occasion, in fact, the very day before Patton was killed in a jeep accident.  He saved five of his men from enemy attack and was awarded the Purple Heart for valor.  He stole my heart from the moment I was born.


Dad followed in his father's footsteps as a wholesale garment salesman in New York City and made the unprecedented transatlantic move to California in 1956 because of the weather.  He hated the rain.  He hated the snow.  He really hated the wind.  He hated to get his hair wet.


Daniel also hates to get his hair wet.  Who knows?  Maybe this is a genetic disposition.  Daniel was just two and a half months old when Dad died on December 11th, 2010.  There's a picture of me and Daniel from last year's Ojai 4th of July celebration and when I saw it, it took my breath away.  I saw my father.  Not just my father's eyes, not just his nose, not just his forehead, not just his mouth, not just his eyebrows, but I saw his spirit, his essence in that flickering moment that the camera lens closed.  I can't even begin to explain it. 


I've been thinking about this whole concept of namesake.  There's a sense of a passing of the baton to that namesake.  What has he passed on to Daniel?  Certainly his physical characteristics, but what else?  Dad has passed on his sense of humor.  Daniel loves to laugh.  Music.  My father loved it.  He grew up in the big band era of Tommy Dorsey and Louie Armstrong.  He loved Sinatra and Bennett and Lena Horne and Judy Garland.  After my dad died I would listen to a favorite Tony Bennett CD in the car.  I'd look in the rear-view mirror and find Daniel moving side to side to the beat.  He was only four months old.  It seems to me that Dad has passed on an innate sense of musicality to his grandson and I will be forever grateful because it opens up communication pathways in his brain.  

Of course not all the traits are admirable ones.  As Dad got older and more feeble, he got grumpier.  And who can blame him?  Daniel takes after him and yet he's only 3.  Sometimes I think I'm seeing my father reincarnated wearing a Curious George t-shirt.  "Excuse me, but did you just squawk at me?"  My father used to do that, but in our family we called it kvetching.  Truth be told, I've been doing a lot of that lately myself.  I am my father's daughter and realizing it more and more each day.


There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about my dad.  I see him in my son.  I wonder what he would be feeling about all of this and what advice or thoughts he would have had.  How I wish he were here to see his namesake, to hear him laugh, to watch him run, and for me to hear him say, "He reminds me of you when you were that age."


Happy birthday, Daddy.


Love never dies.  

Me and Daniel,  4th of July, 2011

Dad, 1943, World War II