Daddy: A Subject We Agree Upon

SHE SAID, SHE SAID is one year old, and in its short life has taken on everything from the precious to the red hot between my older sister and me. If you’ve been reading along you’ve learned that we don’t see most things the same way, and that on some topics—our mother, for instance—there is no seeing eye-to-eye, but rather a history of fighting tooth and nail. That behavior does not extend to our other parent. Not a bit. And in celebration of this anniversary I offer a token, a gesture, a love letter of sorts.

Families, like nations, have their own languages. We talk, we colloquialize ourselves into clans whose simplest intimacies are nicknames and dog names and things we shout at an ump.

In my family, we even have a motto: “Say it with words.” It’s a family custom. Something we got from our dad.

Our father was a sportswriter. It’s a portmanteau profession, the baggage of which requires an equal love for the hard play of others and for writing. We are sportswriter’s daughters as well as writers, and on the topic of where we got our love of writing there is no heavy baggage; you won’t hear any of it here. This is a love story.

These days we just don’t say enough about how much some of us love our Dads. We don’t get nearly enough ink on how some of us are so proud to be their daughters that we weep at baseball games, still love pink Brooks Brothers shirts like the ones they wore, and read aloud to our children the near-poetry of Red Smith, the great sportswriter, until they can read him themselves. We hear all too little in the language of love about how the qualities of that one man went into the healthy image we have of the men we need to befriend and who, if we listen very closely, will lead us to the man that we should marry.

We are so awash in words and books and talk shows on the abuses of power—and yes, they exist—that we have fallen in love with agony.

We had agony. Our father loved the written language so much that he became a great agonizer. Every single word was weighed against a possible pinch-hitter. Sometimes he agonized at home, once to memorable consequences. On a long afternoon in the early 1970’s, he sat in his study hunched over the typewriter, running his hands through his thin hair. The story was due. For the previous three days painters had been in the house but I guess he hadn’t noticed. On the fourth day, a lone painter wandered up to my father’s study. The encounter went something like this:

“Mr. Roach,” said the painter.

Mr. Roach said, “Who are you?”

“The painter?”

“Yes.”

“That dining room. You want that champagne, too?”

“Champagne?”

“Like the rest of the rooms?”

“The rest of the rooms?”

“Are champagne.”

“In this house? Since when?”

“Tuesday.”

“And the dining room?”

“Not yet.”

The writer cast a look at the clock, then the typewriter, then the painter. “What nationality are you?” he asked.

“Croatian,” said the painter.

“Such lovely national colors,” said the writer. “Use those.”

Back to the silence–which was broken six hours later by the earsplitting scream of a woman viewing her red, white and brown dining room for the first time. It may have been the only time Jim Roach expressed himself in anything other than words in his own home. I know it was the last. But it is worth noting that those walls remained a deep red, the ceiling a pure white and the beams their natural brown for as long as we had the house.

To me, it’s worth noting these impressions on this anniversary of The Sister Project, noting that while this blog is called She Said, She Said, that on this one topic, Margaret and I would say this the very same way: We loved the guy.

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