Thursday, January 31, 2013

Life's Not Fair. So What?


Below is a copy of the eulogy I delivered on January 20th, 2013 at the funeral of my father John R. Powers.  What I said was a little different, as I discovered at the pulpit that I was missing the last page, so I had to wing it... but I came pretty close.  

I think the ceremony itself was really lovely.  It was held at Chapel on the Hill in Lake Geneva with Pastor Bob Bardin overseeing everything.  Our pastor, Keith Aurand spoke as did several of my father's friends: Michael Brandwein, Jim Quinn, Chuck Thomason, Marie Martin (on behalf of Libby Mages), Matt Kramer (on behalf of Tom Dreesen), as well as his sister Margo, my sister Joy and I.  We had lots of nice music, some hymns led by Denise Olson, Gordon Wisniewski singing my parents' song "I Could Write A Book," I sang my dad's favorite song "Once Upon a Time" from The All-American, and a trio of trumpets (Ray Ames, Amanda Krause, and Greg Bunge) played "Danny Boy."  

At the end we all released balloons outside of the church, attached to letters we had written to my dad.  There were maybe a hundred white balloons with red strings, and even though it was freezing cold, they all floated, together in one group so high until it looked like they turned into stars.  

It made me think of one of my favorite quotes from "The Little Prince," 

"In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night..You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me."

My eulogy, as you will read, is full of quotes.  All of them my dad’s.  His words are italicized.  I hope they bring you the same comfort they bring me.

For Those Who Loved My Dad

“Life’s not fair.  So What?”  It was the title of one of my dad’s one man shows and a personal mantra, “Life’s not fair.  So what?”  So many things seem so very unfair to me just now, but I can’t help but hearing my father’s voice, “So. What?”  There are a lot of reasons for me to feel angry and slighted but there are so many more reasons to feel proud and grateful that John R. Powers, playwright, novelist, speaker, Emmy Award winner and man about town was my dad.

My dad was a public speaker, but in many ways, a very private man and last year I told him that if he died tomorrow there would be a million things I wouldn’t know about him.  My father wrote, “every moment on this planet is a privilege” and that’s how he lived.  So, he didn’t waste a moment writing me an e-mail telling me a little bit about himself.

First of all, I was a very unhappy child as best I can remember.  No one's fault.  I was a rotten athlete and sports, especially baseball, were big in my neighborhood.  I was a terrible student.  Also,l had very few friends.  I was an even bigger pain then than I am now.  So, in the major three areas of my life, sports, school and social life, I was a loser.

In high school, an all-boy high school I was very unpopular and missed a lot of days of high school.  I just did not fit in and I was never that crazy about male company.  However, I took an interest in the opposite sex the moment I discovered which one was opposite.

In freshman year, I failed music appreciation  (the only student in the history of the school to do that) and Latin.  In sophomore year, I failed Geometry.  The last quarter of senior year, I had done a complete turn-around and managed to end up on the Honor Roll - that was the only quarter you got to keep your honor pin - some jerk must have been on the honor roll for 15 quarters and, the last one, missed it and didn't get to keep the pin.

In four years of high school, I took gym class twice.  The rest of the time I dodged it. I needed exercise like I needed another hole in the head.  In fact, the original title of my first book was inspired by a remark the school coach made to me.  "Memoirs of a Smart Ass." 

My mother was the big one on education.  My father drove a bread truck for many years, then sold used cars.  He was a very ambitious, hard working guy.

Both of my parents always told me I was going to college even though my grades indicated otherwise.  I guess when you tell a big enough lie long enough, someone will believe it.  As I said before, I wasn't too bright.

Enough for now. 
LOVE
         Dad

In a brief biography that I found among my father’s things, he wrote the following.
        
I grew up, went to school and worked on Chicago’s South Side.  I have also worked various jobs throughout the Chicago area.  Having graduated in the bottom three percent of my high school class, I was rejected by over thirty-five colleges and universities.  I was eventually accepted by Loyola University and attended their Rush Street campus.  I also worked four hours a day (and full time during the summers) paying for my college tuition.  Since I spent approximately three hours a day commuting from Chicago’s South Side, most of my studying was done on Chicago’s public transit system.

In addition, I have worked in Chicago area television, have been eligible for two Emmy Awards, and won both times.  I hold a PhD from Northwestern University.  My dissertation topic was the media career of Studs Terkel.  I have taught on the elementary, junior high and university levels.  For many years, I was a professor of Speech & Performing Arts at Northeastern Illinois University.  For the past twenty years, I have been a professional speaker, and have, with my wife raised two daughters.

And I know the story from there—although for the record, he ended his biography by outlining mine and my sister’s achievements.  Like anyone considering publishing his work cared where his daughters went to college—but that kind of thing mattered to my dad.  That kind of thing made my dad proud.

My parents met when my mother was in the cast of “Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?”  They loved each other so much that they argued about trivial things all the time.  Someone as passionate as my father, that’s how you know they love you.  He cared enough to fight, about who needed to drive the car, and which day they should fly out for this trip or another, and a million other things. 

My father wrote about the four reading groups in his school, from top to bottom: The cardinals, blue jays, robins, and lastly my father’s reading group: the sparrows.  He often said, that while he was a sparrow, he married a swan.

My dad said that we are all teachers all the time and my father taught me a million lessons.

“Life is a gift; this is supposed to be fun”

And who had more fun than my dad? Taking out our boat, playing tennis, perfecting his basketball shot from the sidewalk, eating $2 burgers at Champs, taking my sister and I to the park, playing board games after dinner, making shadow puppets in his office. Who told more jokes?  Who laughed louder?  And as my father often said, “Laughter is the perfect prayer.”

“The World is a sea of chaos, each day bringing a new wave of opportunities”

My father was ambitious and driven and always looking for the next way to be better.  He believed that life was learning and learning and learning was life and you should always be getting better at something. He worked so hard at everything he did—not only as a writer and speaker, but as a husband and a father and a friend.  My father would have said, he was not a workaholic, he was a love-aholic, because he loved what he did, and that made him a truly lucky man.   He firmly believed that you should never walk a road that doesn’t lead to your heart, and he lived by that advice.

“You are not truly an adult until you consider all the children of the world yours.”

My sister and I are certainly reflections of my father.  He recently wrote to me, “Dear Jacey, you are not the apple of my eye.  You are the orchard.”  But, my father felt a responsibility to be a teacher not just to Joy and I, but to every child he met.  He co-signed loans for two young men at the local high school to guarantee that they could attend college.  He would read The Polar Express every Christmas at Caribou Coffee on Main Street.  He enjoyed volunteering his time.  This year he rang the bell for the salvation army, he served meals at The Methodist Dining Hall at the Walworth County Fair, and he played the banjo while my mother sang Christmas Carols for the elderly in nursing homes. That’s the kind of guy my father was.

“The world would be a better place if there were fewer air conditioners and more front porches.”

My dad loved our front porch.  He loved a good view.  My mother always felt the view was skewed by the street and the cars, but to my dad that was part of the charm.  He loved that there was life around him while he worked in his rocking chair and that he could wave to everyone who passed him by. 

I was recently asked why I love being an actor, and I answered that it’s because I really love people, and that is something I got from my dad.  My father was a people person.  I cannot tell you how many people I called to tell of my father’s passing who said, “I can’t believe John is gone.  He was my best friend.”  He touched the lives of so many people but more than that, he became involved in the lives of so many people.  He has many acquaintances, but nearly as many best friends.

“Labels are for bottles, cartons, and cans, not people.”

My father had what the Sun Times referred to as “a blue collar aversion to pomposity.”  My dad didn’t care if you were the president or the postman, he treated you as an equal.  He would say, “I can either learn from someone or judge them, but I can’t do both. One eliminates the possibility of the other.”

“Hope is the joy of planning for, but not knowing the future.”

Just a few weeks ago, my father and I were discussing religion and he said, “I don’t get atheism.  Where’s the fun in that?”  He couldn’t understand a commitment to the idea that there was nothing bigger than us.  He drew the following comparison: if you put a watch in front of a dog, he won’t be able to read it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t 2:30.  It made sense to me—time is all around, and the dog is living in it and experiencing it, even if he doesn’t understand it.  And, I think my dad believed or maybe hoped that God was like that—all around us, something we’re experiencing every day that’s just a little beyond our grasp.  He always said that he hoped there was something more, someplace where he would see his parents and his brother again.

“Each of us is a rock that sends ripples through generations.”

Every day I see my dad in the things that my sister and I do: for better or for worse.  His strength, his ambition, his cynicism, his sensitivity, his ability to capture the essence of a moment on a page—I think Joy and I both do that in our own ways.

“Today is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”

My dad lived every day like it was his last.  From the time he was a child, he had a keen sense that we were not going to be here forever.  At the age of five he decided he wasn’t going to use salt, because he already used ketchup, and he didn’t want to waste days of his lives asking for people to pass condiments.

He wrote about how his grandfather would tell him, that when he sat down for dinner he should look around at those faces and cherish them, because there was a first time, and there will surely be a last.

He would go on to say, “There is a first time and a last time for everything, but sometimes you don’t even get that.”  I think of all of the things and moments that my father is going to miss, and of course I think… life’s not fair, but I’m lucky, because my dad’s voice echoes in my ear: so what?

I feel so lucky to have his voice with me, and I know the advice he would give to me and Joy and my mom:

“Sometimes to get where I want to go, I have to start where I don’t want to be.”

“I am strong enough to lean on others.”

“Nothing is wrong with having to start over, but everything is wrong with not starting at all.”

My father worried all of his years growing up that he was a loser, but looking around here at a room full of his family and friends, people who loved him who were changed by him, I know he would be as content as my constantly in motion always improving father could be.  I also know what he said about winning and losing,

Winning isn't anything. You can live an entire lifetime and never win, so it can't be that important. But losing is as much a part of life as breathing...Live long enough, you're going to lose jobs...and friends...and family. And dreams. Losing, and learning to go on and live again, is the only kind of winning that truly matters.”


Friday, January 18, 2013

I Believe

I have not blogged in a while.  I was starting to write a piece a few months ago during the hurricane, when my friend Bridget McCarthy lost her daughter Avery in a car accident.  It was all I could think about for a while and I wanted to write about it, but I wasn't sure how.  

The thing that struck me was Bridget's strength after the loss of her daughter, and I was amazed at how her faith in God actually grew after her daughter was gone.  My father lost his brother in  a tragic accident when his brother was 16, and he was 22.  He always said that there is nothing worse than losing a child--and I am positive that is true, but I can tell you that this is pretty bad.  

"My father is dead."  It is a sentence that I have already uttered hundreds of times in the last 24 hours--sometimes to myself and many times to his shocked friends, and even family. After uttering the sentence many people have actually responded "Your father?  John?"  Well. Yes.  That is the only father I have.  Had.  And as my father, who always had a keen sense of mortality and the preciousness of life would remark, "the only one I am ever going to have."

It's the kind of thing he would say to me when I fought with my sister, "she's the only sister you'll ever have."  Obviously, something that echoed what felt when he thought about his brother.  After his brother's death, what faith he had in Catholic church was very much shaken.  But, my father could not shake the belief of a higher power, and the hope that there is another life after this one: one where he would see his brothers and parents again. He never understood how a person could be an atheist and recently said to me, "where's the fun in that?"

I am not an atheist, but I am not an... anything.  I genuinely don't know what I believe, and as I was getting on the plane bound for home I was struck by this emptiness--missing my father, and missing, unlike my friend Bridget, the sense that anyone was with me.  She talks about feeling her daughter's presence and the signs that she is getting from her.  And I thought to myself, "I don't feel him with me at all.  I don't feel anything except heartbroken, and very much alone." and I swear, as I thought it, on the runway in New York, where I was reading aloud to my boyfriend from my dad's book (the only one he every signed to me), the sun broke through what had been six days of overcast weather in New York and the light flooded across the pages. 

My dad always did hate cloudy days.