Commentary : Well, Pop, We Finally Found the Sun : Love: A father’s lifelong but thwarted wish to live in San Diego is realized by proxy--long after his death.

In 1928, my father made plans to move our family from Detroit to San Diego. Why it never happened was a great sadness that shaped the remaining half of his life, and ultimately helped plot mine.

The thought occurs to me now, as I sit in my San Diego home, because on this Father’s Day I am older than my father was when he died in 1960, at 64.

Max was 32 in 1928, and, considering his beginnings, he was on top of the world. In 1913, he and two sisters arrived at Ellis Island with that wave of Eastern European immigrants who came to live in America, the land of milk and honey where the streets were paved with gold.

They came to Philadelphia from Bessarabia, when that buffeted piece of geography belonged to Romania. An older brother, who set out for Buenos Aires, was never heard from again.

In Philadelphia, Max met Bertha, who had come over with her parents and six sisters from Pikov, a tiny shtetl in the Ukraine. They married, my two older brothers were born, I was conceived, and the family moved to Detroit, where I was born, in 1925.

Max worked long hours in a small grocery store. But it was his store, so what did the hours matter? He was up at 4 in the morning three days a week to buy produce at the open market and worked six nights until eight. Sunday was a piece of cake. He closed the store at noon.

In the 1920s the stock market soared, there were two chickens in every pot and a car in every garage. Max shared in the nation’s prosperity. He owned a Buick, a hard, yellow straw hat with a round brim that was fashionable at the time, and he was able to save money in the bargain. Life was good! From Bessarabia to Philadelphia had been a good move. From Philadelphia to Detroit had been a good move.

Then Max began to hear about a place out in California where there was sunshine every day. He had trouble with the name, San Diego, but not with the concept. He had been taking risks all his life. At 32, the thought of moving from snow and ice to everlasting sunshine wasn’t a risk at all--it was only good sense.

He would open a store in San Diego and continue his success there. Easy.

It wasn’t so simple in Bertha’s mind. She had been married at 17, and was already the mother of two boys at 19. Her girlhood had passed her by and now, at 28, with three sons (and a miscarriage in between) she yearned for stability.

Max could not be blamed for his ambition. Bertha could not be blamed for wanting peace and quiet.

When Max said he was giving money (his life savings, it turned out) to a relative who was going to buy real estate in San Diego, Bertha wasn’t so sure. After all, they were doing so nicely in Detroit, why tempt fate?

Max assured her that the first winter they were in San Diego, in the sunshine, she would bless him for having rescued her from the bitter cold of Detroit.

In quick succession, the relative who was to buy real estate went west and disappeared, the stock market crashed, the Great Depression began, and Max lost his store. Bertha’s reminders that she warned him not to send the money were not gentle.

My father went through five stores during the Depression. Each failed. At one point, he had what they called in those days a “nervous breakdown.” He was reduced, finally, to taking a job in the store of a brother-in-law--the ultimate indignity.

We lived in a series of grubby flats. When I became old enough to understand such things, I learned that the rent was $10 a month, and we were never able to pay on time.

I also remember one noon when I was 9 and was home for lunch from elementary school. My mother had a cup of coffee while I ate. A cockroach fell from the ceiling into her coffee. I will never forget the expressions of horror, disgust, then hot rage that crossed her face. It was my father’s fault, of course. Who else to blame?

The mythology is that adversity brings couples together. I have yet to meet a couple whose love deepened while they were having difficulty paying the rent or clothing their children.

Then the Depression was swallowed up by the war. My father acquired another store and, thanks to the wartime economy, began making money again. The cockroach-infested flats were replaced by a single-family home.

But fate was not yet finished with Max. The war ended and after the short, postwar boom, small stores began experiencing difficult times. The recessions of the Eisenhower years and the emergence of the supermarket presaged the end of the neighborhood grocery store.

There seemed to be no solution to those problems. My father had his first heart attack in 1954, about the time that it was disclosed that an expressway would be built along Russell Street, where the store stood.

The state would buy up the property, the merchants were told. That was the good news. The reality was that the state moved agonizingly slowly. Houses were abandoned; customers disappeared. Having been the cause of emptying the neighborhood, the state then would pay only a pittance for a business, which, after all, wasn’t very productive.

My mother got the pittance. My father was spared the final irony; he died while representatives of the state of Michigan were still “negotiating” the purchase of his shell of a store.

Ten years after my father’s death, I too grew weary of the Detroit winters and succumbed to the lure of San Diego. As I prepared to move my family from Detroit to San Diego in 1970, I was apprehensive about the impending change. Here I was, a college educated, experienced professional, with a good position in county government waiting for me when I arrived, and I was nervous. Then I thought of my father.

My father never spent a day in a U.S. school, his signature was 50% scrawled bluff, and he couldn’t wait to try his luck across the country in that city with the unpronounceable name.

So, Happy Father’s Day, pop. For what it’s worth, you made it to the city of eternal sunshine, after all. I brought your proxy.