If your father had been dead for 20 years and if you had few childhood photos of him (or none), how important would it be to you to see a lost picture of him at 13 years old?
My dad died of cancer in 1994, exactly 20 years ago. To my knowledge, there was only one photo taken of him as a child, a stiff family portrait of the whole family. Dad always wondered where the suits came from that the five boys wore. He never remembered any of them owning one.
If that photo were all you had of your father’s youth and if another image suddenly came to light, it would be a treasure beyond value, wouldn’t it?
And that is why this story is so wonderful to me.
A few weeks ago I wrote a simple column about a childhood remembrance, about the April breeze blowing through the windows at John Mills elementary school in Elmwood Park, Illinois, with the wind whispering, “What next? What next?” It was a bittersweet story, because it spoke of how much has changed since those golden days, with the wind wondering what changes were yet to come.
And after that story was published, what happened next was wonderful.
A lady wrote me an email saying she had enjoyed my story. Her children, she said, had also attended John Mills school in the 1990’s—four decades after I had—and they too had enjoyed the breezes of April blowing through those selfsame windows.
She signed her letter Laura Ashby Marzullo.
I thanked her for her note and closed by asking if she was related to Paul Marzullo, a childhood friend of mine.
The next day I got a message from a different email account saying simply, “Please call Paul Marzullo.” A phone number followed. It was sent at 6:01 a.m., which made me worry that it might be some sort of scam. After all, who sends emails at 6:01 a.m.?
I waited until a reasonable hour in the morning—9 or so—and I dialed the number. When a man answered I asked for Paul, and he said, “This is Paul.”
I told him my name, and an awkward moment followed until he finally understood that I was the guy who wrote the column that his wife had read and passed on to him.
“I’m Paul Marzullo,” he said, “but not the Paul Marzullo you asked about. I’m his son. My Dad died in 1994 of cancer.”
I felt something twist in my gut. Paul had been a childhood chum I hadn’t seen in almost 50 years, and I had hoped we might get together for a beer to catch up. But now he was twenty years gone.
Another twist—both young Paul Marzullo and I had lost our fathers to cancer the same year.
And suddenly it felt as if I were talking to a brother, not the son of an old friend.
We chatted for a while, and he told me how much he missed his dad. I did the math as he talked, and I realized that my friend Paul had died while still in his 40’s. Young Paul couldn’t have been much older than a teen at the time. As he spoke, I remembered how much I missed my dad, who at least had lived long enough to see his grandchildren.
As our conversation wound down, Paul’s voice took on a hopeful tone.
“You know,” he said, “over the years we have lost most of the pictures of Dad when he was young. I was wondering if you might have some photos or maybe a yearbook, if you might send them to me.”
It was a desperate plea because we grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood in the 1950’s—well before children became the center of the universe whose lives must be chronicled several times daily. To my knowledge, there are no more than perhaps a dozen photographs of me taken before I was married. It may have been the same with my buddy Paul.
And yet…and…yet….
I seemed to remember one photo that might have Paul Marzullo in it.
“I don’t know, Paul,” I said to his hopeful son. “I don’t have much. But I’ll look. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.” I didn’t say anything about the photo, because I wasn’t sure if his father was in it, or even if I could find it after all the moves I had made in my life. No point in feeding his loss with false hope.
It took two weeks before I could locate it, but at last I held the photo in my hand—the 1962 basketball team at John Mills elementary school, where I was a guard and Paul was a forward.
I copied the photo and emailed it to young Paul. He wrote back minutes later.
You can probably describe his letter without any further help from me. Imagine seeing your own father, 20 years gone, suddenly glowing in full youthful vigor on your computer screen.
I won’t share his full response except to say that he thanked me for “giving a son a missing piece of his father.”
And I guess I have the same thanks to offer Paul, because ever since he launched me upon my quest to find his dad two weeks ago, I have spent quiet moments remembering my own dad and realizing yet again how much I miss him. If he were here, and if I told him about young Paul’s request, I know what Dad would ask me to do.
I didn’t end up with a lost photo of my dad to gaze at on my computer screen, just these words you are reading now.
But when I close my eyes, he is there.
