Memories of My Daddy

My dad, whom I called Daddy or Beebee, cherished cars the way he cherished women. He was not a gear-head who cares about the horsepower of the engine or the specialty shocks. He was an admirer of fine art, and treated cars and women in a passionate way, as a lover would treat them. The smell of leather and the smell of Chanel #5, the soft curves of the body, the sleek lines of the face, all these things were to be respected. In his 84 years, my father owned nearly fifty cars. My first memory of a car was our Fiat Bianchina. When everyone else was driving the gargantuan Lincoln Continentals and Oldsmobile Dynamic 88s, they were curious about the little car my daddy drove. Although I was only two or three years old at the time, if someone asked me where my dad bought our car, I told them he got it at the toy store. We had a Corvette or two, at least a dozen different Mercedes, a few MGs, and lots of other little sports cars. My dad never wanted a behemoth car. A camping trip in my teen years, six kids and three adults packed into a Datsun B210, was the life for him. He tinkered a bit, even worked on building an electric car from an old MG Midget, but taking apart a car, was like taking apart a life. In his later years he went for hybrids, and would have bought a Tesla had he lived to see them.

My father was passionate and flamboyant. He was a flirt in every sense of the word, bold and daring, doting on every woman he met. His flirting was not crude but poetic, he treated women like the princesses and queens he believed them to be. Twice married, my mother was his first wife. Although my father was likely born to be a sultan, when he found his second wife, my mother was too American to understand. He thought he could make two women happy, or ten, or hundreds. Just as he had with cars, he couldn’t decide, he wanted them all. Although my mother asked him to leave, he always loved her. But, he had found a special tie with my step-mother, she was his true soul mate, and the woman he spent the last half of his life with.

Daddy could laugh, yell, cry, and laugh again in the course of a few minutes. He was the center of attention, the life of the party, scary and loving, powerful and intense. He burned the candle at both ends, was wild and charming. Everything in his life was all about him and yet I never, even for a moment, doubted his love for me. He seemed bigger than life yet he stood just five foot eight inches tall and weighed only 135 pounds. Built like a jockey, he was fit and strong. He could beat anyone arm wrestling, even men twice his size, and he had been a feather weight boxing champion in his school years. He was athletic and loved to ski, but he wasn’t a sports guy. He never watched sports on TV and he didn’t care about the difference between baseball and football.

Poppy, as the grandkids called him, came from Tehran, Iran although he always called it Persia. His name was Faradg Gilan-Farr. He would always say that Faradg rhymes with garage, he liked the play on words and a garage is where a car resides. My father loved puns. Because he could speak three languages, Farsi, French, and English, he would mix up puns between the languages so that only someone who knew all three languages could understand how clever they were. He liked puns that were just English, or just French, or just Farsi, or any combination. He considered puns the highest form of humor because you had to have command of the language.

Faradg, his first name, means key to heaven. His last name means conqueror of the town of Gilan, a place he had never lived and yet it was a part of his heritage. He came to the United States in 1949 and attended the University of California at Berkeley. My dad received his degree in architecture, a career he knew he wanted to pursue from the time he was twelve, when he designed and built a fireplace for his family home in Tehran. He had no desire to return to Persia and became a citizen of the United States in the mid-1950s. My father would say that he was more American than those of us who were born here because he WANTED to be American. He learned about the constitution, he spoke perfect English, and he was proud of his new found country. His older brother was already here when he arrived. He brought his younger brother to the US, and eventually his mother, whom I was named for. Poppy’s father had passed away before Poppy immigrated to the United States but the stories of him lived on. My father had two sisters who remained in Tehran but they visited and he kept in touch with them, as well as various nieces and cousins. His best friend floated between the continents, staying connected to Persia, Europe, and the United States.

Although my father was proud of his newly acquired country, there were parts of the Persian culture that we kept. Food, of course, was number one. My father was a great cook and we kids called him the Cranky Chef. No one was allowed in the kitchen when he was cooking, except one lucky soul who followed him around cleaning up. Even that person had to make themselves small so as not to be in trouble!

Nowruz was the other piece, Persian New Year, celebrated the first day of spring. For Nowruz we always had the first barbeque of the season, my dad’s special dish, kabab. To describe kabab does not do it justice. It is a thin, square, barbequed meatloaf of beef and lamb with onions and spices, cooked with flat bread that soaked the juice and became a part of the dish. It was divine, good hot or cold. Like most Persians, we set the table with Haft Seen, seven items that started with the letter S, for good luck. Our Haft Seen items were: Sabzeh, we often used wheat grass or lemon grass, anything green and growing. We had a bowl of the spice sumac, seer (garlic), sib (apples), serkeh (vinegar), and then we’d switch it up with something that started with S in English, or with S shaped cookies, or anything else to get in our seven items. Not traditional, but traditional for us. Sometimes my dad would make a special potato and chicken salad, shaped like a bunny with ears of pickles and a nose of an olive. Salad Olivie was almost too cute to eat, but we ate it anyway.

My grandfather was Zoroastrian and my grandmother was Mohammedan. The Zoroastrian religion is ancient, older than Christianity. Mohammedan is a liberal and loving version of Islam, my grandmother bowed to Mecca when her watch alarm went off, five times a day, but she also wore western clothing, drank, smoked, danced, played music, and ate pork. Because my father’s nanny was French, when he came to the United States, he went to catechism and was baptized as a Catholic. He liked the incense and rituals of Catholicism and did not like the way Islam treated women. His true faith was based on three words, “love, truth and beauty.”

Poppy went back to Iran once, in 1971. His best friend, whom we called Uncle Farokh, had a project on the Caspian Sea. My dad never worked on the project because he felt the seeds of revolution were planted. He knew it was only a matter of time before it was unsafe to be there. During the Iranian revolution he was so upset by the photos of the dead Iranian generals in Time magazine that he burned the magazine, cancelled his subscription, and cried for days. He knew many of the people who were killed, they were family friends. For the first time in his life in the United States he encountered prejudice. Since his English was so perfect, which just a hint of an accent, he began telling people he was French. He was also fluent in French so it was an easy ploy to pull off. Once the revolution cooled down, he went back to being Persian.

As an architect, my father was first and foremost, an artist. If a linen closet ruined the lines of a wall, it was not included. If a circular staircase, or even a round house, was in his imagination, cost was not considered. He planned a dining room addition for me that would have been more expensive than the purchase price of my home, had I moved forward with his ideas. Interior fountains and gardens, cantilevers that appeared totally unsupported, and indirect lighting were part of his signature style. The mid-century modern style, so famously done by Frank Lloyd Wright, was more creatively done by my father. He added his passion for environmental preservation and his eye for clean, clear simplicity. He created homes that flowed from space to space without the need for hallways, bringing the outside in, enveloping you in nature. He created spaces that allowed for families to gather, children to play at the feet of their parents, and a sense of community to arise within the home. Because he also understood construction and labored many hours on the jobsites, he created homes that lasted and did not leak (as many Frank Lloyd Wright houses did). He was the creator of BioSun Environmental Energy Systems. These homes were heated by the energy of special atriums that were incorporated into the houses. Photosynthesis, combined with the sun, made a heat source, as well as a source for year round organic gardening, and a place of beauty to reside in. An advocate for sustainable building practices and alternative transportation long before it was popular, he championed both personal property rights as well as the environment in a mutually positive partnership.

Architecture and construction were so much a part of our family, that I knew no other way of life. I lived in dozens of homes before I was 18 years old. We’d live in one house and then sell it and move into an apartment, find another house, move in, fix it up, sell it, move into a rental condo, buy a lot, build another house, and so on. I lived in homes with fountains and interior gardens, homes with views of the San Francisco Bay, and homes on the water at Lake Tahoe. I also lived in tiny condos and apartments, half built houses or houses that were gutted. As an adult I have stayed put for years at a time, but my dad continued to move, each time saying he would go out in a box, and then laugh as he went out in a hundred boxes to the next place and the next and the next.

I could never imagine a child Daddy, I always thought he was a grown-up, that he had never been a boy. One day, as I was once again shocked by the fact that he had ever been a child, he explained in his passionate, loud, and almost scary, yet also loving voice, that he was born full grown, wearing a white shirt that he kept unbuttoned, and eating marmalade. This is how I picture him still.

He had two stories we asked for nearly every night. One was about a spaceship. We called it the varumph. He would put his hands together like a space ship and make them fly around, making space noises. Then the ship would open and he would use his two fingers, like legs, coming out of the ship, which was his other hand. The legs would get bigger and bigger with each step and he would say varumph, varumph, varumph until the space man was so big he would chase us around the house and tickle us and we would laugh and wrestle on the floor until we couldn’t laugh any more. The other one was the do-do. He would take his index finger and his thumb and make a claw that said do-do-do-do and if we hit the do-do it became the va-va and would say va-va-va-va and then he would chase us around the house and tickle us and we would laugh and wrestle on the floor until we couldn’t laugh any more.

I still heard my daddy’s voice when I read Green Eggs and Ham to my daughter. He did not like ham, it was the days of sweet glazed pineapple over ham, and he said it like haaaaaaaaam. He said the Sam-I-am part very fast and made a silly face. A face sillier than Sam-I-am. He was great at faces and one of his famous faces, for us kids, was the cat face. He promised us a dollar if any of us could make a cat face. We would practice and practice in the mirror but he alone had mastered that art.

My daddy was also a hypochondriac. He said hypochondriacs live longer because they are aware of their bodies. He was always going to doctors for some ailment or another, most imaginary but a few real. He had real ulcers, real hemorrhoids, a real carotid artery, and several real strokes. But he did not die from any of these, he died because he was ready. Yes, he had several strokes and was weak, but he was well into his 8th decade when we sat down to talk. He told me that he had come to America, married the two most wonderful women in the country, had wonderful children and grandchildren, worked his dream job, and lived a good life. He was ready to die. When my step-mother came out of the kitchen to say she was not ready for him to die, he fussed and said “I’ll die when you are ready.” It took several years as he slowly faded away and, the day she told him she was ready, he finally let go. It is a beautiful love story, the story of a man who waited to die so that his soul mate could have time to say good-bye.

The song that makes me cry, knowing it is the story of my daddy, is My Way by Frank Sinatra.

And now, the end is near;
And so I face the final curtain.
My friend, I’ll say it clear,
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain.

I’ve lived a life that’s full.
I’ve traveled each and ev’ry highway;
But more, much more than this,
I did it my way.

Regrets, I’ve had a few;
But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption.

I planned each charted course;
Each careful step along the byway,
But more, much more than this,
I did it my way.

Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew.
But through it all, when there was doubt,
I ate it up and spit it out.
I faced it all and I stood tall;
And did it my way.

I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried.
I’ve had my fill; my share of losing.
And now, as tears subside,
I find it all so amusing.

To think I did all that;
And may I say – not in a shy way,
“No, oh no not me,
I did it my way”.

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.
To say the things he truly feels;
And not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows I took the blows –
And did it my way!