Melinda Remembers Dad
Our brother, a few years later, would go on lookout, staking out the corner of Rochdale Terrace and Pauline. He’d scan for the first sighting of the Ford Country Squire to come in to view. As the line goes in one of his favorite songs, Dad always “looked happy to greet us.”
Dad was a gentle guy, a gentle man. When people learn that he’d spent two years in the US Marines, it comes as a big surprise. But it’s true. Honest. The day he died, we asked what his Marine number was, and without hesitation Dad said, 614972.
He was not the drill sergeant type.
He rarely raised his voice, rarely cursed — (though he did have a ready supply of phrases to express exasperation.) He raised us, I think, by somehow making us not want to disappoint him.
He was quick to try to make light of a situation. He taught us, by example, in campgrounds from Connecticut to South Carolina to Canada, to say hi to strangers. His simple advice to me on taking off for college: meet new people.
On summer trips, Dad veered away from bright lights and theme parks. The engineer in him took us to see how Corn Flakes were made at the Kellogg’s factory in Battle Creek, Michigan one July. We visited the locks of canals in upstate NY on another. But mostly, it was the outdoors he took us to, perhaps because he himself had spent long summers with his sister Anna at the state park campground at Hammonnasset.
Every Thanksgiving morning, he took us on the hike to the tower at Sleeping Giant. He told us that as a kid, he climbed the Giant’s chest with his father — after having already walked several miles from their home at Clintonville and Pool Roads.
That’s where Dad grew up in North Haven — two blocks away from here. There were asparagus fields across the street where houses now stand.
His parents, Anna and Bill, had emigrated from small villages near Prague. There were not a lot of other Czech families in North Haven, and they adapted, but still held tight as a family, and to ties to what would be jokingly called, The Old Country.
As the baby in the family, Dad didn’t speak as much Czech as his brothers Joe and Bill and sister, Anna. But decades later, he visited the “old country” and family who lived in the town his father had left.
After he retired, he made a second career – unpaid – of researching his Czech genealogy and how we might be related to the other Penkavas in other parts of the US.
This meant that in the 80’s and 90’s, when Dad heard any of us were going on a trip, he’d say, “When you’re in San Antonio, why don’t you look up Geri Penkava? She’s a doctor there.” Or, “In Ft Lauderdale, Bill, there’s another Wm Penkava. Look him up.”
It was a twist on the idea of saying hi to strangers. These strangers just happened to share our last name.
The last name pronounced in Czech is Pe-YEN-kava — and it means a bird like a goldfinch, native to the Czech Republic. Don’t know if that’s why Dad took to the song, “Feed the Birds” so much, but that Mary Poppins soundtrack, like that of the Sound of Music, were a constant presence in the house when we were growing up.
We played them a lot in the last week.
Back then and more recently, the song, Edelweiss, hit home for Dad in particular. But there were much, much bigger flowers — sunflowers — that he loved to grow in his gardens. So, as you leave today, please take some sunflower seeds. Either plant them — Dad might warn that you may have to protect those plants from the evil squirrels. Or use the sunflowers to feed the birds.
Either way, Dad would like that. As he would say, Carry on.