By Letty Bassart

I envision my father, a slim man with coarse salt and pepper hair, neatly groomed, with a slightly receding hairline.  This man, who is not my blood relative, shines his soft, sheep skin boots every other Sunday, still uses his father’s carpentry tools, and drinks the most exquisite single malt scotches whenever possible. 

As we were growing up, he never once sat at the dinner table without a collared shirt; and always made sure we kept our feet on the ground and our knives in our right hand.  While we did not have lavish, loud Latin parties, speaking in English at home was a crime punishable with 1,000 lines.  Hand prints on walls had to be removed immediately.  My twin and I spent many Saturdays scrubbing white egg shell back to its natural state.  Weekends in the Gomez household were always spent working and work became our family’s most seamless form of communication.  Each of us falling in to wash the cars, set recycled bricks in the patio, remove wild rose bushes from our Virginia cabin.  As children we were fascinated by ant lakes formed as water collected in mounds of unmixed cement precursors to our next project. 

Pride is a funny thing and can be described any number of ways.  It is our Achilles heel, our survival tool, our integrity and, at its best, reflects the depth of our love and belief in another human being. 

My father is a painter.  Not a fine artist, but a craftsman.  While many would consider this to be the most banal of trades, my father brings to his craft an elegance that is only barely matched by Frank Lloyd Wright’s signature red tiles.  These red tiles were reserved for his self-selected best buildings.   Last weekend my father, younger brother and I spent several hours constructing a wall unit for my studio apartment.  Each layer of compound carefully spread across, perfectly level 2 x 4s and each shelf carefully placed along its corresponding pencil mark.  My father tells my brother, “I have been a painter my entire life, but I have never come home dirty.”  Both these men complete their work, with carefully pared fingernails and spotless hands, forearms, and clothing. 

In Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen writes:  “I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover…  As the good citizen finds happiness in the fulfillment of his duty to the community, so does the proud man find his happiness in the fulfillment of his fate…  People who have no pride….  they have got to accept as success what other warrant to be so, and take their happiness, and even their own selves, at the quotation of the day.  They tremble, with reason, before their fate.”