by Alexander Natiku

Created on: July 24, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

For a son a father is a very important role model. I try and remember this with my son, an only child. I was raised in a family with 3 sisters and was the only boy. It certainly was interesting, but honestly I did feel alone. My father, for all intents and purposes, was a tremendously intelligent, renaissance man. That does not mean he was perfect - far from it, but a great role model nonetheless. What made him so important and significant, apart from being the only male family role model (my parents were WWII immigrants with no family in the US) is that he was riddled with faults, and that is what made him so human.

He was an amazing intellect with unique insights in the world. But he was a product of his own time and upbringing - one of two children brought up by his mother in the twenties in Eastern Europe. A real male chauvanist with traditional male-female roles that made him very strict, conservative and old-fashioned in societal ways. But as a mathematician, engineer, sculptor and artist he was unlimited in his ideas and visions.

He held Sunday dinner lectures on challenging all of us - aged 9 to 18 - on debates about the Roman Catholic church and how God did'nt exist as an entity but as a "higher power" he gave us the first sense of standing up for what we believed in and challenging us on our beliefs from intellect to emotion. He was a man you loved to argue with and dislike for his harshness. We did love him for his unbounding ability to give and to stand for something. He was not an easy man to love, because respect was the only form that he accepted.

I remember as a 12 year old how on Christmas eve my father struggled in a snow storm to walk 3 miles to bring us a Christmas tree as his gift to our family (remember he didnt much care for the concept of God, or the Catholic church). But he wanted to give us some joy and happiness and since we had no car and no taxi would take him, he walked through a park, cemetary and highway to bring us our "christmas present" showing up almost at midnight.

In Catholic school (my mother insisted we all attend in the 60s) I was often in trouble with the nuns who liked to crucify some of the boys for being loud, audacious and a little too independent. I wasnt a ringleader but I always was the poor schmuck who got caught for small, silly things like talking in class, etc. Once I was suspended and my father came to the Pastor's office. I thought he was going to kill me for getting suspended. Instead, my father simply, but

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