Everybody has a story of family and love or hate. This one is about two magical men who shaped little me into the man I am today. I only wish that my boy had the chance to meet these incredible people and storytellers. My dad gave me the gift of poetry, escape, and football with love.
I did not have the ideal childhood. But I was born with the gift of my dad, the most loving man I ever knew, He left this crummy world far too early in 1978. When I was thirteen, I was already a wise old soul armed to the teeth with knowledge, fascination, imagination, frustration, anger, tenacity, iron will, but most importantly, the tools in my toolbox to be ready to tackle whatever this world had to throw at me. Well into my 30’s, I was still hearing his words of wisdom and learning from them for the first time, and learning to understand them from an adult point of view.
This was originally going to be about the motley crue multitudinal sources of useless information, but as I began this journey, or should I say was just digging into it, I’m now pouring out memories and tears of my father and Papo, a slang name for pop in Italian, at least according to my brother. But he was my grandfather, and a sweet man at that.
As my writing tenure time has grown, I’ve began to open up a little bit more about myself. I was reluctant to do this at first, because there are a lot of weirdoes out there in computer land, but I am following where my path is taking me. I have run into a couple of strange characters, but I’m the only one living my life.
Back to the story; they instilled in me a traditional family value system and many things from “The old country“. Thanks to them, I was given a playful but strong sense of American, Italian and Irish pride. My father was an amazing athlete, and loved sports, especially football and basketball, I reluctantly began watching the game with them, but I got tired of playing outside by myself on Sunday. I had no idea how much I would fall in love with this game.
My dad taught me about Johnny Unitis, Frank Gifford, Notre Dame, Ohio State, USC, UCLA and much more. He loved baseball too, but that was my grandfathers passion. As any true sports fan knows, if you know how to read a box score, and I mean every bit of it and understand it, then you really understand the game. Papo couldn’t care less about the Padres, But was a stern Yankees follower, but my grandmother faithfully listened to her Padres every night.
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