He ruined me for most men in this world.
'Ugh,' I cringed inwardly, rapidly drumming the delete button on the keyboard. That just sounded awkward.
When I wrote a mother's Day message to my Umma last month, I suddenly realized - with no small horror - that I'd likely need to write one for Appa. I was horrified, not because I didn't want to - I love my Appa, fiercely, adoringly. It's precisely because of that ridiculous love that I constantly crumble - as a writer and as a daughter - at the prospect of collecting the right words to capture the man I've been fortunate enough to call my Appa.
He was the sort of Father who made it impossible to buy greeting cards. Every birthday or Father's Day, I'd make my way down the card aisle and sneer at everything I picked up. Even the most clever greetings spun by Hallmark's best sounded too trite to describe a man who made his way from an impoverished sweet potato farm to the Korean Merchant Marines to a supervisory waterworks engineer for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection.
If my dad were reading this, he would command me to rewrite that last sentence. "I didn't make my way, Jane," he'd say in a gravelly tone. "God made my way."
And perhaps that's the best way I could introduce my Appa to you all. The way he tells it, he found God as a young man discovering a bible, and those words came to him at the exact time he'd been searching for hope and life meaning amidst a hard life.
Orphaned in childhood and left in the care of his older siblings (including an older brother who would often beat him ruthlessly), my Appa came across a bible.
"I read it from cover to cover. And then I read it again," as he often retells it. Were anyone else to make such a claim, I'd call Pinocchio. Have you ever seen a bible? I'm sure you have. It still holds the title as most sold books around the world for all time, and even if you haven't read it, I'm sure you've come across a Gideon's edition in a hotel desk drawer. It's a lot of onionskin pages of text, front and back, single space. But Appa found hope in those pages - not only to cover all the heartache he'd already experienced as a parentless, oft hungry child, but enough to fuel a life of faith that burns brightly to this day.
I could talk about so many other things. His heart for people that would leave his wallet, time, and fix-all skills at the mercy of needy friends and strangers. His uncomplaining forbearance with racist coworkers so that his wife and three daughters would never starve as he had as a child. Or the way he'd drop anything and everything at the drop of a dime if ever one of his daughters whimpered "Appa, help" on the other end of the line.
Some heroes wear capes.
Others have Batmobiles.
But my hero often cradles a guitar in his hand, a well-loved Royko drill in the other, and wears humble corduroy pants - or whatever latest finds he's picked up from Goodwill (not out of need, mind you. He's a cunning investor and has a fine government pension to boot). It's that uniform - and not Superman's - that I've come to equate with my ultimate safe space on this entire earth.
Happy Father's Day, Appa. You made it so easy to believe in a heavenly father.
