At a recent art street fair I was almost overcome by clouds of cigar smoke from an art aficionado strolling past. The smell of cigar smoke is oppressive. Cigarette smoke is sharp and penetrating. Pipe smoke is sweet and aromatic, suggestive of old leather chairs in a book-lined study. Only cigar smoke is heavy, pungent, rank and oppressive.

Perhaps it was Father’s Day on the horizon that reminded me that I hated the odor of cigar smoke when I was growing up. My father smoked cigars and I remember him with a Philly cigar in his mouth or in the pocket of his vest through most of my childhood. And that was when a Philly was a five-cent cigar. It’s not exactly an equation of I hated my father, and my father smoked cigars, therefore I hated cigars; but it’s close.

My father was the disciplinarian in our family and one of my early childhood memories is of him chasing me around our center pedestal oak dining room table with a wooden yardstick in his hand. He wanted to spank me for some now forgotten sin. What made the event memorable was that the yardstick caught in the rose and lavender silk lampshade of the dining room chandelier and ripped the fabric. This gave me a chance to escape, but the torn shade remained for months as a reminder of my transgression. With a lampshade like that in the dining room, is it any wonder that I turned out gay?

My father was the night supervisor of the post office in our small eastern Pennsylvania city. His life, and our family life, was distorted by his “bassackwards” schedule of working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. every weekday night. I would wake him from his few hours of evening sleep around 10 p.m., pour his coffee and put a piece of breakfast cake on a plate at his kitchen chair while my mother packed his brown bag lunch-two sandwiches, a piece of fruit, and a piece of cake-which he’d eat around 2 a.m. While he ate his 10:30 p.m. breakfast, I acted as spotter at the living room window watching in the distance for the approaching streetcar.

With my warning he had time to walk, or run, to the streetcar stop one block away. My mother always waited at the front door to give him a fleeting kiss on the cheek as he flew past. That was about as much affection as I ever saw demonstrated between my parents.

Because he worked nights and slept sporadically throughout the day, sometimes on the living room sofa, sometimes in his bed, I had to be quiet. “Your father’s sleeping” was a daily, sometimes hourly mantra. It meant that playing in the house or around the house always had to be controlled and quiet, and that I could never bring other kids to my house to play. “Your father’s sleeping.”

But when he wasn’t sleeping I still had to be quiet and keep my distance or hear his charge of, “What are you, some kind of Indian?” We never did things together, never played catch, never went to the circus, and he never went to my school for parent’s night or special events. He never voiced approval for my accomplishments, imagined or real.

When I was twelve I landed my first grass-cutting job in the neighborhood. My father insisted on supervising, and later checking, my work. I thought I’d done an excellent job and I was angry when he found areas than needed a closer trim and cuttings on the sidewalk that needed sweeping. I received twenty-five cents for my labor but, with Mrs. Oswald as a satisfied customer, I soon had cutting jobs for other neighbors.

When I was a freshman in college I invited my parents to attend “Parents’ Day” replete with an afternoon football game followed by a reception at the President’s house. Although we lived within walking distance of the campus, my father refused to attend. Only my mother went with me. I was hurt and embarrassed that my father wasn’t there and had given Milton Cross and the Saturday Texaco radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera his top priority.

I vowed never to ask my father for another thing, and I never did. But whatever effect this exclusionary tactic had on me, it had none on him. He continued to live a life that largely excluded me. Only occasionally would I hear at our mutual  barbershop that my father was proud that I’d won a scholarship, that I was on the Dean’s List, or been elected president of the Chapel Choir. I never heard that approval from him.

It wasn’t until I celebrated my fortieth birthday, had a wife, three teen-age children, a hefty mortgage, and a growing professional practice that I realized: “Oh, my God! My father was forty when I was born.” I no more wanted another infant to deal with at age forty than I wanted free passage to Mars.

With the impact of that realization, the smoke that clouded my relationship with my father began to clear. I saw that, as a forty year old civil servant with three children, and now a fourth, at the start of the Great Depression; as a pure bred Pennsylvania German man who saw discipline and authority as paramount, and expressions of emotion as weakness; as an eighth grade educated man who read the New York Times, listened to the Metropolitan Opera and saw all three of his surviving children achieve professional status; he had done well.

From his side of the cigar there never was a problem, or smoke, that obscured anything.

He wasn’t the warm fuzzy teddy bear, “Let’s play ball,” Norman Rockwell Dad that I wanted, and fantasized other children had. What I wanted, he couldn’t give me. He didn’t have it to give. He provided food, clothes, a home and security-which was the expectation in his generation and his culture. I finally saw that the supervision of my first job at age twelve was really an act of love.

My father died of “natural causes” when he was eighty-eight. He was able to live in his own home with the assistance of a housekeeper until he entered the hospital three days before his death. I was working on a new assignment in Saudi Arabia when he died and by the time I’d cleared the bureaucratic hurdles and landed in New York he was already buried. I regretted that I missed his funeral but it wasn’t a great personal upset. I’d had dinner with him in his own home just two weeks before his death, the night before I flew to London and on to Saudi-and I knew in my heart that we shared a mutual love and respect for each other. My funeral attendance was superfluous.

John Siegfried is a retired pediatrician and a retired pharmaceutical executive. He resides in Fort Lauderdale but retains strong ties to Rehoboth Beach.