That day in July of 1961, the day my sister had to go to the hospital for a tonsillectomy, my mother planned to stay overnight there with her. As I wrote earlier it was the day I woke up with the definite sign that I was indeed on the road to female maturity. I was cared for competently by my grandmother and aunt, but by the end of that long hot day I was very tired and missing my mother. I flopped face down onto my bed. I could hear my father's light footstep and I knew he was standing in the doorway, hesitating. Then he walked up to me and patted my shoulder in a clumsy manner, and this was something quite different from the way my father was. He was never clumsy and he never hesitated. But this physical reassurance spoke. It said everything. I could tell that because he was a man and didn't grow up around girls, he didn't know how to say anything. There was this big breach between him and me. But all was well. He did manage to cross that breach, and his big hand is still on my shoulder.

My father was a chemist and belonged to the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Chemical Society. He went to meetings every other Thursday night. Those nights that he didn't come home for dinner were the times when my grandmother was there and we always had something for dinner that my father didn't like to eat. I always feel guilty saying this because I loved and respected my father, but the four of us had a lot of fun then because my father was very strict about table manners and topics that were appropriate to discuss while eating. So we ate our crab cakes or fried chicken and giggled a lot.

My father was elected president of his chapter of the chemical society and we were all proud of him. It wasn't a surprise to us that our father would be president of anything. He was a true natural leader; he stood straight, spoke little but well, NEVER got confused, had a great deal of dignity. He had a gavel he used to conduct these meetings and it sat on a shelf in our spare room. We would look at this gavel with the gold band around the handle and of course as children we wanted to touch it and play with it. But these desires we never took seriously--just the thought of what could happen if we somehow managed to break it or mar its surface frightened us.

After my father's death the Pittsburgh chapter of the society established a "Sherwin A. Golding Man of the Year Award."