Thank you all so much for being here today to remember and celebrate my dad David. I think most people who knew him would remember my dad as a storyteller, I know that’s how I think of him. I hope I can channel a little of that spirit now in telling his story. I’m going to start by sharing a little bit about his life and how I remember him telling it to me in different ways. Then I’m going to let the man speak for himself again and read a biographical poem he wrote sometime in the 80s which I found while going through his things. 

My dad was born in Peterborough, England on March 15th 1946. His mother Sheila met his father Torrido during World War II. Torrido was from Puerto Rico and part of the 351st Bomb Group which flew strategic missions out of Polebrook, a small village near Peterborough, where my grandma Sheila lived. As a tail gunner he was shot down during the bombing of an aircraft factory in 1943 and spent the rest of the war in a Nazi POW camp. My grandparents’ marriage was short-lived after the war and my dad didn’t actually come to know Torrido until later in life when he looked him up and found him living alone at the VA hospital in New York. The one time I met him he showed me the faded tattooed numbers on the inside of his left arm. He told me I should call him Dorito and he would call me Taco. He drank beer in my dad’s cab at 10 in the morning, he was funny and kind but he made me nervous. I was nine then and my dad explained to me how war leaves all kinds of scars. I know one of my dad’s lifelong regrets was not being able to give his father a life away from that hospital. 

Back when my grandma Sheila brought David and his older brother, my uncle Jack to the US on a steamship in 1948 he was not even a year old but he loved to imagine it. His own little English mother, coming to the United States, a blacksmith’s daughter from a small village in England. Arriving in New York, still a teenager with two young children. “Can you imagine it?” he would ask me, “your grandmother, 19 in Spanish Harlem in the 1940s”. He wanted to know that young woman, he was proud of her. But her life in Harlem, like her marriage to Torrido was too difficult for her. Eventually they moved to rural upstate New York where my grandma remarried and my dad’s younger sister Jayme was born. 

I remember how my dad and aunt and uncle would gang up and poke fun at my grandma at family gatherings and how she pretended to be upset but you could tell she actually loved their teasing. When my grandma got sick with the same type of brain tumor that my dad eventually passed away from he was living in New York. He packed up and moved to Florida to help care for her. I know he was grateful for the time he got to spend with her during her difficult last months of life, just like I am that I was with him during his. 

Sheila, Torrido, my uncle Jack and my aunt Jayme all went on before my dad. Jack’s wife, my aunt Doreen wrote to me after he passed and said that they’ve all joined a band somewhere, Jack on vocals, Jayme on her ukelele, my dad on his drums and Sheila dancing around them all. My dad would have loved this story. 

Now he can tell a little bit of his own story through this poem. I think he had titled it, “Tell me that I don’t love my country” but that could have also just been the first line. Here goes,

Tell me that I don’t love my country

I was born to an English woman and my father was Puerto Rican

And we crossed the mighty Atlantic when I was only ten weeks old

And we came to New York City and we lived in Spanish Harlem

And my family was torn apart…

I lived and played in the streets of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Philadelphia until I was eight. 

They are dreams now of green beetles and chalk in the streets, roller skate scooters and open fire hydrants, and stepping stones in Cobbs Creek Park

I grew up upstate…. My heart still aches sometimes for those slow, deep moving rivers that welcomed my young body time and time again in thrilling plunges from bridges, rocks and tree limbs.

I grew up there, amidst the history, the Iroquois, the lakes and the winters, and the fireflies, and the black flies, and the mayflies, and the eel flies, and the mosquitos. 

I learned how to dance there, from the tough white kids in the city, who learned it from the black kids, who learned it from the kids in Detroit and Philadelphia who learned it by heart. 

I learned how to work on a farm there, from the tough farm kids who learned it from their stubborn parents who learned it from their own cantankerous parents who learned it by heart. 

I went through some compulsories about girls and boys and school and football and cars and alcohol.

I had a friend who I loved and we ranged together for over twenty years. 

Later I drove a cab there in a mistaken attempt to hide in memories from what I was just beginning to see was coming to my country. 

Tell me again…

I have seen the works of a gulf wind on the trees inland in Mississippi and Alabama and on the people and houses of Louisiana. I’ve worked amidst the stunning wreckage of whole towns, with good old young boys who played with guns. It was an adventure then. I worked on an oil rig, just one night, went shrimping in the bays and bayous, climbed an eagles nest, watched silhouetted egrets gliding silently in the twilight amidst moss laden cyprus, and grew up a little more in New Orleans. 

I have seen the works of a different wind, the white wind. I have seen the marks left by alternating floods of hope and despair. I have worked amidst the stunning wreckage of whole peoples with good old young boys who played with laws. 

I drove a cab in Boston. My first real fear. I will never forget driving, the trash blown, blighted streets at 3am. As the skeletal remains of buildings stared blankly, blotting out the moon. 

I lived in the hills of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont in all of the beautiful seasons.

I have run through pine foggy mornings on Cape Cod and wondered at the size of such a sandbar.

And I have stood, enraptured at its tip during the aftermath of a hurricane, I forget its name, as cumulous, flying, just out of reach, raced overhead and the sea heaved greens and blues to the horizon. The sands came alive to me and I saw their movement and I understood how that bar was built.

Tell me

I drove all sorts of things in Colorado, school buses, cadillacs, jeeps, mercedes benzs, and broken down VW vans. I learned to drive a semi there, how proud I was.

I rode a bicycle over the high passes, two days up and twenty minutes down. I chased antelope across high plateaus, and elk up steep walled spring green canyons. I drove a jeep along something called the old shelf road and my partner got a little stiff. I fought fires in the wilderness riding in helicopters and got a little stiff myself. And of course I hiked, hiked with primroses in my boot laces and hummingbirds and butterflies urgently inquiring as to the botanical makeup of my headband. 

My brother is there and my sister, and the woman I used to be married to, and a dream of love. 

I worked in growing shame and isolation from New Mexico to Montana looking for uranium. I played a fantasy that I was sabotaging the project. It was me being sabotaged. 

So

After picking apples in Yakima long enough to know I’d starve I was driving a cab in Seattle.

I am growing up again here. 

With my child,

my partner,

my friends,

my organization,

my dreams

I found my grandmother on the ninth floor in one of six twenty story apartment buildings in the South Bronx. I found her after more than thirty years. In a dream of Spanish lace and incredible courage.

I found her in a 1949 picture of a convention of the American Labor Party. 

I found her in time to find a part of myself.

Now there are dreams of the future. We have all grown, souls rooted in and out of our earth. We have grown around a fence, a hurdle, as a tree envelopes what it cannot move. 

So this barrier, the hurdle runs through us, and we are presented with the quite perplexing task of leaping that which is within us and without us at the same time.

We, all of us, share this journey

And though there is ever present foreboding 

We are determined, we will proceed

We all have at some time in our own way climbed high enough to see some vision, some version of the prodigious struggle that lies before us.

Waves in the distance

Past and future come together

Bursting forever into the memory of all humanity

I hope this brief trip strengthens me on this journey and I hope

that I might in turn share some of that with you.