When I was 11 years old, a few months after my parents split, my dad came over to the apartment. He was holding an album. This was not particularly normal, but there was something, he said, he wanted me to hear.
He put on a Frank Sinatra song, "My Way." He stood me in the middle of the room and cued up the song I think eleven times, until I knew all the words. It seemed important to him that I did.
My dad came up from practically nothing. His father killed himself when my dad was three. At age four, he was making paper flowers with his mother to help support the two of them.
They lived on Barrow and Commerce, in the West Village. From the age of nine my dad worked (and smoked). He took the tickets, sold the popcorn, swept the floor at the Cherry Lane Theater.
He put himself through school, basketball scholarship, wound up a partner at Neuberger Berman, I don't think he ever thought he was entitled to any of this, but he wanted me to be, to think, you know what? You get to be here, learn the words.
Richard Rommelmann, 8/6/35 - 2/13/20 xx
