Lolo

My father died April 7, 2005. He and my mom spent the previous Christmas with us in our new house. He helped us move. He always liked to feel useful and never said no when I asked for help. He was a good father.

It was not always this way. When I was a child, I hated him. It pains me to admit this now, but it is true. He was mean and he believed in the belt as discipline. After he died, my mom talked about him a lot and I finally understood why he was the way he was. English was his second language. In the Philippines, English is taught as a subject in school; however, you never lose your accent or truly understand the lingo. This was the challenge my father met when he moved to the United States. He was educated and was a talented electrical engineer. Despite his color-blindness, he excelled in his line of work, often promoted to supervisor. He worked hard and gained admiration from some of his co-workers. Unfortunately, his talent made him the target of envy from his superiors, who I must add were not superior at all. In fact, they were small men and I base this criticism on my mother's account of how they treated my father. It's ironic that the man who scared me as a child was the same humble man who didn't speak up for himself at work. My father was often humiliated and laughed at because of his accent and the fact that the loud machinery took away a lot of his hearing. They would mock him when he asked them to repeat whatever they said to him. When I found these things out, I felt sorry for my father and angry that this was being done to him. I still feel sad because I did not get to see a gentler and vulnerable side of him.

He was just getting into the role of grandfather when he died. My daughter was 3 and he adored her. He gave her the love and attention that I never felt when I was young. Whenever we would visit them, he would suggest going to Toys R Us. When she couldn't choose what toy she wanted, he would buy her everything she pointed to. Everything. Crazy! He was not the same man from when I was a child. He bought and built her first bicycle that last Christmas; the last picture I have of him is when he watched her ride her bike in the back yard of our house. He didn't go outside but he did watch from the porch door. I caught him as I took pictures of my daughter riding around on her new Little Pony bicycle, happy as can be.

He would have loved my son. I am sad that my father did not live long enough to meet him. I feel sad that my children will be deprived of the joy of having a grandfather that dotes on them as my father would have. Mostly, I feel sad that I will never meet the man that my father really was: a giving, hardworking, and intelligent man wanting to share his knowledge of the world with a younger generation.