What's below is a piece I’d written all week. It was our family's plan for Father's Day. We never made it.
My Dad, Bob Zgonc, died this morning at 9:30 a.m. It's 10:04 a.m. now.
The piece below was for him to see and read. I'm going to leave it here for a little while.
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My Dad’s the best. Present tense.
He’s not doing so well right now. Hasn’t been for a while. He’s been in and out of hospitals and radiation centers and MRI chambers and care homes and pills, pills and more pills for months now. It’s been a day-after-day-after-day struggle.
But not today. Today is Father’s Day. And my Dad, Bob Zgonc, who’s the best, is going to have one wonderful day today.
We’re taking my Dad back to his Monroeville home, just for this day, to make steak. We’ll make it very poorly per the standard he’s set, but we’ll try. We’re going to buy him chocolate ice cream. We might even toss in a Vinnie’s pie if they’re open.
We’ll also play the music of his life. My Dad's a world-class musician, enshrined in the Polka Hall of Fame as one of our country’s premier accordionists, and that doesn’t begin to tell the story. I had the honor of writing the bio for his induction, and it included how he was self-taught beginning at age 11. He learned the piano the same way, and he can still pound the keys for a savage Fats Domino tune. But the accordion, his model known as the button box — always came first. People who have heard him play, whether it’s in the upbeat variety commonly called the Cleveland-style or the classic Slovenian waltz, will attest they’ve never heard the art form expressed from the heart the way my Dad brings it. Nor have they seen it expressed as he would, with that beautiful smile you can see in that photo above. And yet, the accordion always represented hard work. I’d watch him practice, when I was a child, at all hours of the day and night, challenging himself with new songs, new progressions all the time. It was my own motivation to teach myself the guitar. Because if he could get that good at his instruments without being taught, if he could enjoy and embrace music of all kinds, maybe I could, too.
Here's my Dad performing with my daughter Dara a few years ago at a Slovenian festival in Herminie:
My Baby isn't a baby anymore. She's 17 now. A year away from high school graduation.
And here's my Dad playing alongside the legendary Valencic Brothers of Canonsburg. This was in Cleveland in 2008:
My Dad's the one off to the right. Always sticks his tongue out like that when he plays. No idea why.
We’ll talk about sports today, too.
My Dad’s actually my stepfather, you should know. I was born in Pittsburgh and, six years later, my parents split. My birth father, an ambassador here for the former Yugoslavia, returned to the old country. I did, too, for a full year, but then I was sent back here to stay with my mother. She remarried to this man, and he became, in every way, my Dad. I can’t stress this enough: He didn’t have to be that. I was 7 years old. He already had two birth sons. I was someone else’s son. Heck, I barely knew English because no one thought I’d ever need to learn it since I wasn’t supposed to be here long. This man could have seen me as a nuisance, as baggage. Instead, he taught me how to play ball, how to ride a bike, how to do everything I know in my life. He took me to Pirates games at Three Rivers Stadium. We didn’t have much money, so we’d drive into town well after the first pitch and he’d take me to the back security gate after the sixth inning, back when they used to let you in for half-price. So this awkward, semi-antisocial kid — still learning English, still trying to figure out which side of the planet was supposed to be home — was educated very early in life that a pitching duel between John Candelaria and Nolan Ryan was worth the extra effort. Following the Pirates, Chuck Noll's Super Steelers and, eventually, Mario Lemieux’s Penguins, that became my life.
We’ll talk about the world. Even now, from his bed, this man who’s traveled the world, who’s studied people and culture and art forms, and he co-hosted my mom’s radio show all about Serbian and Slavic peoples and immersed himself into discussions that rise so far above his own humble upbringings — son of a railroad worker in Westmoreland City — he still wants to know what’s going on everywhere, from North Korea’s nukes to Hawaii’s volcanoes to Alexander Ovechkin’s beer of choice.
We'll talk about my brothers. How much he loves Rob and Zoran. How much they love him back.
We’ll talk about everything but him. He wants to hear how we’re doing, how the business is doing and, above all, how our two children are doing. He wants to see them, to hold their hands, to hug them. He’s a hugger, you should know. He hugged me for two hours straight on the street outside the vet’s hospital when our dog died. He hugged me when the Post-Gazette gave my first job, then asked to meet my editor and hugged him, too. He hugged me when he was the first person I told about starting this venture. He hugged me when my Baby was born in 2001. And when my son popped out a month early in 2004, while I was stuck in Raleigh covering the NHL Draft, my Dad was the one who rushed my wife to the hospital and sat by her side. He hugged my son before I could. We’re all huggers in this family. Show me a family that hugs, and I’ll show you a happy, healthy family.
I don’t mean to unload, and I’ll apologize in advance if this comes across as too personal. But one thing I’ve never understood is our society’s tendency to save all our warmest remembrances and recollections for when it’s too late, and I don’t want any part of that. I don't want to wait.
Today is Father’s Day. It’s my Dad’s day. So this is his gift. He’s going to read this. He’s going to see it atop our site all day long. He’s going to smile. He’s going to give me a hug. Because he’s the best.
