It has been 17 years as an 86 year old patriarch of my family, Vincent Punaro, continually showed me compassion and frequently guided my pathway in the right direction. He set the parameters: button your coat or you’ll catch cold: be back before dark; here, have some more spaghetti and meatballs; finish your dinner, the children in Europe are starving; do what the teacher says; listen to your father; don’t lie; listen to your mother; if you do that again, you’re gonna get it, and so on. However, even with parameters set, he let me strive to become my own person. As you can imagine being fathered by a man not only from a different decade but from a different century has made my life challenging at times. Not in the sense that he was not a
