A year ago yesterday my father died of prostate cancer. My relationship with my dad was the most complicated and difficult relationship of my life; some of it was my fault and some of it was his, but the reality was that we barely spoke or saw each other for the last fifteen years of his life up until the final weeks when he was dying in hospital. At his wake and funeral it was very clear that he had aspects of his life I knew nothing about; he had been a basketball coach for years, a side of him I never saw or knew much about. In death it became obvious that we were both bigger than the things we always fought about and I was able to put a lot of hurt aside to write a eulogy for him. I am a writer, something he was often ambivalent about, and I have spent years dealing with my own issues of depression and repressed anger that keep me from writing as often as I’d like to or should. But the night before his funeral I found myself able to put any negative feelings and hurts aside to write about him in a way that I hoped would bring people together rather than drive them apart. The following is the eulogy I wrote for him and one of the few things I wrote in the past year that I actually feel good about. It took his death to prove to myself that I really did love him a lot more than I could admit during all those years I was mad at him. Unlike my younger siblings, as the firstborn & oldest, I found I had a lot of really vivid and positive memories from my childhood of him, things that really helped shape me into who I am today. He was a very spiritual guy and he certainly inspired a sense of spirituality and the eternal in me. In many ways I’ve realized that he will never really be gone from me as there is so much of him I still carry with me. I love you, Dad and I still miss you.
Ronald Joseph Pierpaoli
8/10/47-2/20/08
Fathers loom large over the lives of sons and daughters. Whether present or absent, the role and position of father in any family is that of primacy; in numerology the father is represented by 1. Paternal energy is synonymous with maleness and the life-giving radiance and energy of the sun.
Ron Pierpaoli loomed large as a father. He had two families, two sets of children and he straddled the
gap, passing between them, sharing stories and meals, many meals.
Ron loved food. He was quite proud of that. He’d broadcast his thoughts on eating at Bridgeport Air Center beside his soapy-wet airplane, N2571 Quebec.
“We should probably start thinking about lunch.” He’d pat his belly loudly.
There were certain foods that elicited specific stories.
Sometimes the stories were serious stuff.
Polenta? Polenta is not just some porridge made of corn. Polenta helped conquer the world.
When eating polenta my father always told of how the Roman soldiers were able to carry corn meal in their packs. When they camped they would add water and over a fire they could cook and eat polenta right out of their helmets. It was part of how one of the largest most successful armies in history drew their strength for each military campaign and kept on moving across Europe all from the carbohydrate corn.
You could get a connection to the history of the world just by sharing a meal with this guy.
He was a great and expansive man. His mind and stories stretched out across continents and through millennia.
I have vivid memories of places I have never been from the richness of his stories.
I can see all the way to Papua, New Guinea; Daddy swimming in a river, wearing just his skivvies, minus his glasses, splashing and shooing away some large unknown serpent that had swum up to him with malevolent intent.
He told stories of aborigines and saltwater crocodiles. When he returned from The Philippines there were tales of Jeepneys, outrigger canoes and the Metro-Manila Aides.
My Dad wasn’t into a lot of typical hobbies, no NASCAR or fishing for him. Ron Pierpaoli was into ologies. Archaeology, theology, provolone-ology.
Did he ever tell you about Diatryma?
On every trip to the Peabody museum in New Haven my father would marvel at the bones of Diatryma; a giant bipedal bird who ate early dog-sized horses. My Dad loved Diatryma. This creature lived during the Age of Mammals, the Miocene Epoch to be more accurate, about 20 million years ago. Diatryma was this seven-foot heavy bodied flightless bird with a terrible parrot-like beak and powerful clawed legs. I have to think these things would have been pretty scary. But he loved them.
Maybe he imagined eating one.
He encouraged imagination in his children. When I was six, he took us up into the steep woods beside Laurel Ledge School in Beacon Falls, Connecticut in search of Bigfoot.
I can remember a lot of apes in my childhood.
There was a Tarzan cartoon we watched on Saturday mornings and in it Tarzan was friends with several gorillas and they would help him out when he needed some muscle. Mangani. That’s what Tarzan called his ape friends. My father adopted that word and often referred to his offspring as his mangani.
Ungk ungk mangani that’s what Tarzan would say to set his gorilla-buddies into action. My dad used it in basically the same way.
Ungk ungk mangani could mean get up and go to bed, get your toys cleaned up, or get in the car, or let’s get going, whatever.
He was often dramatic and sometimes prone to hyperbole.
Let's face it, the family boat was really a dinghy, just slightly larger than my outstretched arms but it became the HMS Biz; Her Majesty’s Ship Biz. He named the boat in honor of his wife.
His wife, Elizabeth Ann Ajello; in part she ceased being just an aka Betty-Ann when she met my father. She became The Biz. Ron dubbed her Biz and it was so.
He changed things with his words, his proclamations, and his advice.
He dreamed big, he made a lot of announcements; asked grand rhetorical questions.
“This could be it, Biz.”
“You can’t possibly be fighting!”
“I’m gonna need quiet in this car, this is a dangerous merge”
He liked silence for merging onto highways, whether he was driving or not.
“Ok, let’s turn off the radio. You’ve got this merge coming up.”
He could be rough to work for. My dad wanted your full attention even if he was the one working on something. He wanted you to be ready beside him in case he dropped a screw or wobbled on a ladder.
“Stand by one, huh?”
Stand-by-one; the concept was very clear.
Ron was unique and he did things big. Even snacks; maybe especially snacks. Keebler cookies, fig newtons, grapes, chestnuts; a snack was rarely just one item. There was usually a selection; a multitude of options in the cookie, nut or fruit department.
Ron Pierpaoli was a learned man.
He valued good old fashioned book learning from scores and scores of books. He taught me to read bibliographies, to always consider your sources.
He made me value language; to choose words sometimes by their pop and pow, not just their meaning and significance.
“In the beginning was the word…”
He loved the Gospel of John and he impressed upon me the power words have to conjure images and meaning beyond any of the five senses. Ron believed in the mystery of ritual and in the sanctity of words prayed.
The night he died we left Columbia Presbyterian and overhead the full moon had a little bite taken out of it.
A lunar eclipse.
It had just started, couldn’t have been more than 15 minutes into it.
I couldn’t help thinking my father timed that.
There were so many cultures he had studied and admired that were all so big on eclipses. The Toltecs, Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, Phoenicians; they were all into eclipses of the sun and of the moon.
I really think Ron wanted to check out in time to catch the eclipse. He probably wanted to soak it in from the new view; a celestial vantage point.
It’s gotta be something. It’s gotta be some view.
In so many ways I keep telling myself he must be so happy right now because he was looking forward to this, he has all the answers now. He was always aware of and deeply concerned with the eternal and with the spirit-body. He looked to ancient texts for their descriptions of the after-life and the pathways our souls are destined to travel. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Nag Hammadi Gospels, the Codex Mendoza and the Dead Sea Scrolls; my father studied and examined these ancient texts looking for their reflections in our times and their echoes in our modern lives.
He often told me there is a banquet in heaven and I’m sure that’s right up his alley.
I hope that is where he is right now. He is there with Alessandro, his grandfather that he loved so much, for whom I was named. Maybe Dawn and Penny are there too, tails wagging, under the table or sitting near him waiting for table scraps. Maybe they’re serving polenta today and Ron can tell his grandfather about how the Romans used corn to conquer the world and Alessandro will listen smiling, so happy to see him again and share his stories. And Renzo is there too. Father reunited with son. And it is beautiful. I am sure of that.
But there will be sadness here.
This man who was so much larger than life is passing from it.
I cannot Stand-By-One anymore.
This is it, Biz.
Ungk ungk mangani
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