“Dad’s Few Words”
My dad, George Zarzana, was a man of few words. It was partly his upbringing, partly his way. He spoke when necessary. And when he spoke, he commanded attention.
I’ve been thinking a good deal of him lately for a variety of reasons. I’ve been retired from fulltime teaching for over a year. Within a month of his retirement, dad was diagnosed with an incurable disease, myelofibrosis, a leukemia-like blood and bone marrow disorder that took him three years later. Last November, on the anniversary of his death, I had outlived him. At times, my thoughts settle on that reality.
My dad also comes to mind when I think of Notre Dame and my graduate studies there. Some of the most frank and direct words he spoke to me were about Notre Dame.
A quintessential subway alum although he lived in Sacramento, California, dad never had a chance to sit in the stands and witness a game live. Yet he was a devotee of the Fighting Irish as much as any Domer. His four sons all earned college degrees but none from ND. We attended Catholic colleges in California; he was immensely proud of our achievements.
He had a two-year night degree in accounting earned from a junior college in the 1930s. Even later with the GI Bill, he never had the chance for more education than that. Hard-working, proud, stubborn, he possessed a mind that could mentally calculate numbers faster than any computer. A son of Sicilian immigrants, a young man during the Depression, a member of the Greatest Generation, he never had the opportunity to achieve anything beyond a mid-level, desk-bound state job.
He had a unique parenting style, too, while raising four sons. When my brothers and I were fighting, he’d begin the Fight Song in a low, gravely, ominous voice. As combatants, we had until “Shake down the thunder” to quit or face the consequences.
And when it came to Notre Dame, degree or no, he remained a loyal son. On autumn Saturdays, he’d dig in the garden with a radio tuned to the Fighting Irish. This was long before cable and regular national TV broadcasts. He hardly missed a game back in those radio-only days.
During the 1973 Sugar Bowl against the Tide, my parents were at a formal dance. Dad called me several times for score updates as I watched the game. This was before mobile phones and ubiquitous flat screens. He had to drop dimes into a payphone for those updates, but he hung on that game as much as anyone in the stands.
I taught high school in our hometown during the 1977-78, my last year on the secondary level. Dad was already well into the final years of his life. We didn’t know that at the time, of course, and more to the point, we didn’t speak about it. I lived at home to help Mom with him. My three brothers all had settled lives and careers. I was the one free enough to move back home ostensibly “to save money for graduate school” but really because it was expected. Never discussed, but expected.
A future doctoral program was vaguely out there somewhere. I had sent out ten applications, mostly to schools on the West Coast. At that time, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere east of I-5, at least not after my down-the-way doctorate was completed. In my mind, I would be studying somewhere in California or Oregon or Washington and then be back teaching college somewhere in California. It all made perfect hazy sense. I had applied to a few distant Midwest programs but more as an unnecessary backup plan.
Dad’s illness was such that he would have periods of relative health followed by periods of decline. He never fully made it back to the previous level of health after each medical crisis; some entailed trips to the ER, and some ended with days in the hospital. He once became severely dehydrated and jaundiced; this led to the removal of his spleen and a touch-and-go recovery.
His steady decline was obvious. His ongoing blood disorder gave him a pasty, sickly complexion, took his appetite, and left him in a general malaise. His weight loss was clearly noticeable. After a steep decline in general health and spirits, he’d get a transfusion of several pints of blood that gave him some renewed vigor for a few weeks, but then his decline came on again.
My area of expertise is British literature not medicine, but I knew enough to see the signs. They offered no encouragement. This downward spiral went on for three years.
And yet we did not talk of it.
In January, 1978, he and I often sat in our living room with the TV on. He glanced at the set over the newspaper or a novel. I graded quizzes or worked on lesson plans. We both became transfixed by the pictures of the Great Notre Dame Blizzard of ’78. Who wouldn’t be? The day after the onslaught of snow that left the campus white and featureless, the Dome stood golden in the sun. Having an NBC affiliate right on campus allowed viewers from all over the country to witness these spectacular scenes of the shrouded grounds. (Turns out, unbeknownst to us, Marianne, my future wife, was a senior, snowbound in her dorm after that storm.)
I had applied to the Notre Dame Graduate English Program by that time but never intended to go there. I was sure I’d be at Cal or UCLA or at least UC Davis. (Never USC, trust me.) I had a solid MA from Sacramento State, four years of high school teaching, plus a substantial set of educational experiences that showed how ready I was for those last rungs of academe.
As a boy, the TV show West Point was my favorite. I remember that whenever a cadet was disciplined, he had to march a courtyard, stepping off back and forth, back and forth. Every week it seemed, another cadet was in trouble, and the camera showed the same montage. Starting off on dry pavement, then stepping through blowing dead leaves, then rain, and then snow. Back and forth. I’d say to myself, Who’d want to live where it snows?
I was 25 before I first saw snow on the ground in my native Sacramento—only a dusting which melted by 10 a.m.
So here Dad and I were, watching the ND campus under that deep, cold blanket, and I made the same plaintive remark: “Who’d ever want to live in that weather? Who’d ever want to live there?”
“You’re going to go to Notre Dame!” my dad announced. It wasn’t an invitation to discuss the matter. It was a statement of purpose. Of irrefutable fact. Gandhi declared, “India shall be free.” Martin Luther King stated, “We shall overcome.” George Zarzana made it clear: “You’re going to go to Notre Dame!”
The Spring came on. The rejections poured in. Cal, UCLA, Washington—the whole West Coast—nixed me. I was destined to leave California. It came down to St. Louis U and Notre Dame, both accepted me. Dad settled that: “You’re going to go to Notre Dame!”
That August, I packed my car and headed east to South Bend.
*
I returned home for the summer after my first year in Indiana and knew my dad couldn’t go on much longer. But still we didn’t speak of it. Once I did mention that he and mom ought to talk to the hospital chaplain about “things,” he snapped, “What’s wrong? What’s going to happen?” My suggestion went nowhere.
Thanksgiving my second year at ND brought on Dad’s final crisis. That gray November day in 1979, when we spoke long distance for the last time, he shared one of the most direct declarations he had ever made to me about his condition. “Look,” he began in a weakened voice over the phone, “if anything happens to me, don’t think you have to come home to take care of your mother. She’ll be fine. You make sure and finish at Notre Dame.”
“What’s going to happen to you?” I asked, pretending not to but knowing the answer to the question neither of us wanted to discuss.
“Nothing is going to happen to me. But your mother will be fine. She’ll take care of herself, don’t worry. You just stay at Notre Dame and finish.”
I never spoke to him again after that Thursday evening. He went into a coma on Saturday. By Tuesday morning when I got back to Sacramento, he had already died.
*
I never had the chance to get Dad out to a game and see the campus. I met my wife, Marianne Murphy, more than a year later. Our daughter, Elaine, was born six years almost to the day after his death.
He’s been gone over 37 years, and yet, hardly a day passes that I don’t think of him.
And of course, any mention of Notre Dame brings him to mind. “You’re going to go to Notre Dame!” Commanding words from the man of few words. In his own way, tender, strong and true.
My dad, George Zarzana, was a man of few words. It was partly his upbringing, partly his way. He spoke when necessary. And when he spoke, he commanded attention.
I’ve been thinking a good deal of him lately for a variety of reasons. I’ve been retired from fulltime teaching for over a year. Within a month of his retirement, dad was diagnosed with an incurable disease, myelofibrosis, a leukemia-like blood and bone marrow disorder that took him three years later. Last November, on the anniversary of his death, I had outlived him. At times, my thoughts settle on that reality.
My dad also comes to mind when I think of Notre Dame and my graduate studies there. Some of the most frank and direct words he spoke to me were about Notre Dame.
A quintessential subway alum although he lived in Sacramento, California, dad never had a chance to sit in the stands and witness a game live. Yet he was a devotee of the Fighting Irish as much as any Domer. His four sons all earned college degrees but none from ND. We attended Catholic colleges in California; he was immensely proud of our achievements.
He had a two-year night degree in accounting earned from a junior college in the 1930s. Even later with the GI Bill, he never had the chance for more education than that. Hard-working, proud, stubborn, he possessed a mind that could mentally calculate numbers faster than any computer. A son of Sicilian immigrants, a young man during the Depression, a member of the Greatest Generation, he never had the opportunity to achieve anything beyond a mid-level, desk-bound state job.
He had a unique parenting style, too, while raising four sons. When my brothers and I were fighting, he’d begin the Fight Song in a low, gravely, ominous voice. As combatants, we had until “Shake down the thunder” to quit or face the consequences.
And when it came to Notre Dame, degree or no, he remained a loyal son. On autumn Saturdays, he’d dig in the garden with a radio tuned to the Fighting Irish. This was long before cable and regular national TV broadcasts. He hardly missed a game back in those radio-only days.
During the 1973 Sugar Bowl against the Tide, my parents were at a formal dance. Dad called me several times for score updates as I watched the game. This was before mobile phones and ubiquitous flat screens. He had to drop dimes into a payphone for those updates, but he hung on that game as much as anyone in the stands.
I taught high school in our hometown during the 1977-78, my last year on the secondary level. Dad was already well into the final years of his life. We didn’t know that at the time, of course, and more to the point, we didn’t speak about it. I lived at home to help Mom with him. My three brothers all had settled lives and careers. I was the one free enough to move back home ostensibly “to save money for graduate school” but really because it was expected. Never discussed, but expected.
A future doctoral program was vaguely out there somewhere. I had sent out ten applications, mostly to schools on the West Coast. At that time, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere east of I-5, at least not after my down-the-way doctorate was completed. In my mind, I would be studying somewhere in California or Oregon or Washington and then be back teaching college somewhere in California. It all made perfect hazy sense. I had applied to a few distant Midwest programs but more as an unnecessary backup plan.
Dad’s illness was such that he would have periods of relative health followed by periods of decline. He never fully made it back to the previous level of health after each medical crisis; some entailed trips to the ER, and some ended with days in the hospital. He once became severely dehydrated and jaundiced; this led to the removal of his spleen and a touch-and-go recovery.
His steady decline was obvious. His ongoing blood disorder gave him a pasty, sickly complexion, took his appetite, and left him in a general malaise. His weight loss was clearly noticeable. After a steep decline in general health and spirits, he’d get a transfusion of several pints of blood that gave him some renewed vigor for a few weeks, but then his decline came on again.
My area of expertise is British literature not medicine, but I knew enough to see the signs. They offered no encouragement. This downward spiral went on for three years.
And yet we did not talk of it.
In January, 1978, he and I often sat in our living room with the TV on. He glanced at the set over the newspaper or a novel. I graded quizzes or worked on lesson plans. We both became transfixed by the pictures of the Great Notre Dame Blizzard of ’78. Who wouldn’t be? The day after the onslaught of snow that left the campus white and featureless, the Dome stood golden in the sun. Having an NBC affiliate right on campus allowed viewers from all over the country to witness these spectacular scenes of the shrouded grounds. (Turns out, unbeknownst to us, Marianne, my future wife, was a senior, snowbound in her dorm after that storm.)
I had applied to the Notre Dame Graduate English Program by that time but never intended to go there. I was sure I’d be at Cal or UCLA or at least UC Davis. (Never USC, trust me.) I had a solid MA from Sacramento State, four years of high school teaching, plus a substantial set of educational experiences that showed how ready I was for those last rungs of academe.
As a boy, the TV show West Point was my favorite. I remember that whenever a cadet was disciplined, he had to march a courtyard, stepping off back and forth, back and forth. Every week it seemed, another cadet was in trouble, and the camera showed the same montage. Starting off on dry pavement, then stepping through blowing dead leaves, then rain, and then snow. Back and forth. I’d say to myself, Who’d want to live where it snows?
I was 25 before I first saw snow on the ground in my native Sacramento—only a dusting which melted by 10 a.m.
So here Dad and I were, watching the ND campus under that deep, cold blanket, and I made the same plaintive remark: “Who’d ever want to live in that weather? Who’d ever want to live there?”
“You’re going to go to Notre Dame!” my dad announced. It wasn’t an invitation to discuss the matter. It was a statement of purpose. Of irrefutable fact. Gandhi declared, “India shall be free.” Martin Luther King stated, “We shall overcome.” George Zarzana made it clear: “You’re going to go to Notre Dame!”
The Spring came on. The rejections poured in. Cal, UCLA, Washington—the whole West Coast—nixed me. I was destined to leave California. It came down to St. Louis U and Notre Dame, both accepted me. Dad settled that: “You’re going to go to Notre Dame!”
That August, I packed my car and headed east to South Bend.
*
I returned home for the summer after my first year in Indiana and knew my dad couldn’t go on much longer. But still we didn’t speak of it. Once I did mention that he and mom ought to talk to the hospital chaplain about “things,” he snapped, “What’s wrong? What’s going to happen?” My suggestion went nowhere.
Thanksgiving my second year at ND brought on Dad’s final crisis. That gray November day in 1979, when we spoke long distance for the last time, he shared one of the most direct declarations he had ever made to me about his condition. “Look,” he began in a weakened voice over the phone, “if anything happens to me, don’t think you have to come home to take care of your mother. She’ll be fine. You make sure and finish at Notre Dame.”
“What’s going to happen to you?” I asked, pretending not to but knowing the answer to the question neither of us wanted to discuss.
“Nothing is going to happen to me. But your mother will be fine. She’ll take care of herself, don’t worry. You just stay at Notre Dame and finish.”
I never spoke to him again after that Thursday evening. He went into a coma on Saturday. By Tuesday morning when I got back to Sacramento, he had already died.
*
I never had the chance to get Dad out to a game and see the campus. I met my wife, Marianne Murphy, more than a year later. Our daughter, Elaine, was born six years almost to the day after his death.
He’s been gone over 37 years, and yet, hardly a day passes that I don’t think of him.
And of course, any mention of Notre Dame brings him to mind. “You’re going to go to Notre Dame!” Commanding words from the man of few words. In his own way, tender, strong and true.
Top photo: Mom and dad when they announced their engagement, 1941, Sacramento, California.
Bottom photo: Dad near the end of his life, about 1973 or 1974.
Bottom photo: Dad near the end of his life, about 1973 or 1974.
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