C I P R I A N I

I would call my father on his birthday usually on the way home from work. I think I sent him gifts up to a point – a tie, a book, sometimes a DVD. Later in life, my dad got into Clint Eastwood movies. One year I sent him Space Cowboys which also starred James Garner, another one of my dad’s favorites. My dad didn’t own a gun and wasn’t necessarily notorious for kicking ass, but somehow the characters that Clint played resonated with my father, maybe because those characters had about the same threshold for bullshit that my dad did.

My father was in real estate. I can’t remember if it was for a birthday or no occasion whatsoever, but a few years ago I had sent him the movie Glengarry Glen Ross written by David Mamet. He’d never seen it. I had sent him Mamet’s book The Secret Knowledge which I had read and thought my father would particularly enjoy since Mr. Mamet’s politics seemed to be converging with my father’s.

My politics and dad’s diverged around 2008. Aside from the minor infractions that happen when one is growing up – refusing to take out the trash, staying out late, a fender bender – one of the few times in my life that my father and I got into a heated argument was during that election year. That all blew over and we were on speaking terms again the next day.

By the time 2016 came around, we were on the same page again. The last thing we talked about was the insanity, but he assured me we’d get through it.

My father, a registered Democrat, certainly leaned more conservative than I and many of his friends. During his eulogy for dad, my Uncle Bill remembered the last conversation dad and his liberal friends had and fondly spoke about how they had finally found something they agreed on.

My father was flawed, but he always told the truth. Lies angered him. We didn’t always agree, but he was a better man than me. We never got a chance to talk about Glengarry Glen Ross. I don’t think he ever got around to watching it.

He would have been 73 years old today. He never had a Twitter account.