My Turn: On Father's Day, remembering a man in motion

It can be the simple acts that measure a man.

Consider the way my father ran up the stairs of our home. He may have been eager to rejoin our family, or he may have been in his usual hurry. Let’s say it was a little of both.

My father’s hand was a blur when driving a screw. He pounded nails with precision and force.

He shared news of Walt Disney’s passing as though a member of our family had passed.

He would give a ride home to a disabled young woman who spent long days seeking company in a laundromat near his television repair shop in Jackson Heights, Queens.

He was the magician who brought relatives’ broken televisions back to life following Sunday dinners at their homes. Other Sundays, he would take us for walks in the woods.

When I use the word busy to describe my father, I don’t mean to suggest he was busy accomplishing great things. He has no Wikipedia page. If you passed him on the street, it is likely you wouldn’t have noticed him.

You could have fooled me, though. When I was a child, my heart would leap when he pulled his car into our driveway.

After going for a walk on early summer evenings, he would return home with a bag filled with Linzer tarts.

At night this quiet man would become a driven artist who painted monumental landscapes. Year after year, and then decade after decade, he worked to see his canvases hung in New York City galleries. That this never happened didn’t deter him. He knew how good he was, and that was good enough for him.

Following his retirement at a young 59 — televisions were no longer repaired but were replaced — he kept busy building furniture and frames for ever more paintings, gardening and helping his children repair whatever needed fixing in their houses.

When he helped to make repairs to my houses, I could be guilty of idly sitting by while he worked. It is just that I loved to watch as he went about his business. There was a thrilling economy of motion and clarity of thought. Watching his hands work together was like watching a ballet. I wanted to stand and applaud.

My father disassembled a hard drive to determine how it worked. He would repair his outdated air conditioner, oven and refrigerator for the sense of accomplishment.

He invented a weed-pulling device and applied for a patent. He built cold frames to be filled with plants grown from seed. He wrote a book about organic gardening.

He would pack a Styrofoam cooler with homegrown lettuce, onions, green beans, broccoli, beets, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, figs, peaches, nectarines and apples before visiting any of his four children.

Even into his 80s he was too busy to slow down. Chronic leukemia became little more than a tiresome inconvenience.

Then one spring, he surprised us all by not planting a garden. It had become too much, he said. While he would continue to occasionally paint, there would be no more monumental landscapes.

I would now find him asleep on the couch after letting myself into his home. His eyes would again close when I was in the middle of telling him a story.

I would ask if he missed his many projects, and would be disappointed when he said no. The busy life of the man I measured myself against had reached its conclusion. This was my father at rest.