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Father Figure
By Angela Arlia

aaaamagine a man who stands just touching five feet, perhaps less, depending on the condition of his arthritis on the day in question. A man with very little hair that he keeps shaved close to not look too much like a hippie. Imagine, as well, a pair of glasses that magnify two dark brown eyes, like black marker spots on white paper. Imagine all this and you have my father.
aaaaOf course there's much more to him than this. Yes, my dad is a small man and like most men, he feels he is invincible. And yet, because he's a small man, he feels even more invincible than the average male (a Napoleon Complex, if you will). He has stood out in the rain in many a downpour with an electric chainsaw. Often he's been
a caught, lit cigarette in mouth, walking into an apartment filled with gas, only to turn the gas up higher. On a number of occasions, he's been known to grab a menacing New York City rat in his hand only to kill it moments later with those same bare hands. In some ways, he is a Superman. Very little scares or hurts him, except his Kryptonite: air conditioning.
aaaa In the humid and sweltering heat of a New York City summer, most people cannot live without an air conditioner. It's really very cruel and unusual punishment. But the moment we turn on the a/c in the car, without his knowing we've turned it on, he will start to massage his neck. He suddenly gets a cough that didn't previously exist. His muscles become sore and the fever starts to grow. He will ask, "Angie, did you turn on the air?" I will reply that we have done no such thing. And he will then proceed in with comments like:


aaaa "Mary (turning to my mom), do you think I have a fever?" Or
aaaa "But I don't know why I feel so cold all of a sudden?"

aaaa At these comments, I will glance over and my husband as he tries his hardest to keep a straight face.
aaaa My father lived through a childhood when bombs were dropped from the sky. During this childhood, he would often wake up at 4 in the morning to take care of the family farm, all before going to school 10 miles away (and he actually wasn't exaggerating). As he grew older, he crossed the Atlantic to make a better life for himself in Canada, where he nearly lost his ear to the freezing cold weather. And to top it off, he had me, whom he so fondly called "Tempest" or "Earthquake" in Italian. Life has been tough for him.
aaaa Despite many hardships, he keeps a relatively positive perspective on life. One of his usual philosophical statements (or what we call "Luigi-isms") is, "If you like it, you like it; If you don't like it, you don't like it." This roughly translates to accept things as they are. Or something like that.
aaaa My dad generally accepts people and things for who and what they are (his feelings about air conditioning aside). The only thing he can't seem to accept is that most men are not named Johnny. He insists that every man, whether his name is Abdul, Pablo, Dimitri or Jun Ho, is really named Johnny. And if he somehow begins to believe a man's name isn't Johnny, that name had better at least have a "y" at the end of it somehow. So Nicholas becomes Nicky, Robert always becomes Bobby and my dog Bonnette (a girl) is named Bonny. It's really the only way he knows how to address people.