Source of My Writing Gene

 Annamaria on Monday

By rights (writes?) I should wait until Father's Day for this post.  But which Monday?  The one six days before?  Or the one after?  Neither seems appropriate.  Besides, I can't wait another six weeks.

When going through one of the many boxes of memorabilia I have stowed away around my apartment, I found a treasure trove labeled "Sam." Though my dad was American-born Salvatore Francesco, his first grade teacher, out near a coal mine in Western Pennsylvania, told him that he had to have an "American" name, so she renamed him Samuel Frank.  That moniker went into his first-ever government record.  And so he remained, even as a U.S. Marine, fighting for his country in the WWII Pacific.

Everyone called him Sam, even his children.  (His nieces and nephews, of course, called him Uncle Sam!)

Sam was a natural-born writer.  I know this because he told me that, once he learned to write words, he wrote on any scrap of paper he could find.  He was also, throughout his life, a wonderful teller of tales.  Since - thanks to his father's death when he was only nine - he only got as far as the fourth grade, he considered his writing inferior.  He was ashamed of his inability to spell well.  But he wrote stories.  I have a number of them, but today I am going to share a thank you letter he wrote to me and David sometime in the late 1990s or early twenty-aughts.  David had picked out a "golfers watch" for him as a birthday gift.  Here is what Sam wrote in response:

My Dearest Dave and Pat,

    How can I thank you enough for your birthday gift.  I am sure you both must have given up a great deal of your valuable time in selecting it.  I cannot think of anything more appropriate for a retired active man to have. In fact I don't know how I have ever lived without this wonderful gift.  A watch that gives you Hours, Minutes, Seconds, Date and Day of the Week, 12 or 24 hour format, 24 hour alarm with twenty seconds step tone feature, Hourly chime, Thermometer that measures temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit, Monitors tide changes, has a water-proof compass, a backlight for nighttime viewing.  However I do have a bit of a problem, after reading the instruction manual a half a dozen times.  I go by the Florida Institute of Technology when I go to play golf. I stopped in to see the registrar about enrolling in the spring semester.  He told me I was a month late.  I told him I was smart enough to catch up.  He wanted to know why it was so urgent that I enroll in the spring semester.  I gave him the instruction manual for the watch. After reading it, he said nobody is smart enough to understand this with only one semester.  My only regret is that I am going to give up one of my golf days.  But just think how much smarter I'll be after two semesters of engineering school.

The truth is how can I be more happy having the two of you as part of my wonderful family.  God Bless.

                                                        I love you,

                                                            Sam

P.S.  It doesn't make good coffee yet.  I am sure with more experience it will be acceptable.

He gave me - among many other gifts - my storytelling compulsion.  I wish I had his deft touch for being funny on the page!

THANKS, SAM.  I miss you every day.