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| Dad and my niece, Meghan. Megan is grown now, with a little girl of her own. |
I
don't have nearly enough pics of my dad.
I
still dream about him. Our relationship was complicated. He was my hero the day
he bought me a tape recorder for my 11th birthday, but he outdid himself on my
12th when he got me a ride on small airplane. It was just me and the pilot. I
don't think Wally had the money for both of us to go. We lived in New Jersey,
and the pilot at the small airfield flew us once around the Statue of Liberty.
What I remember most, though, was looking out the window on takeoff and seeing
him standing in the grass next to the runway. He was wearing his favorite
bright red sweater, and he gradually became a small red dot in the distance
below as we flew away. It was the best birthday present I ever got.
From
that point on, like so many dads and teenagers, we were at war. We fought over
haircuts, because I'd discovered The Beatles and wanted my hair longer. We
fought over loud music, or whether I should be watching the Smothers Brothers
at my age. We eventually moved to Pennsylvania after a short stint on the
eastern shore of Maryland. Our low-intensity war continued for years. I was
always on the margin between being a good kid and a bad one. There were skipped
days of school, underage drinking citations and a year of my learner's permit
in his wallet to successfully teach me a lesson.
Still,
I wrote him off as incapable of understanding me. Yet after my fiance died some
years later, he was the first to talk to me man to man about loss. In my 30's
we grew closer again. I'd turned out OK. I think he had a hell of a lot to do
with that.
I
remember near the end of his life, he was in the emergency room. He was zonked
from whatever they had running into him. He complained about the wall clock. It
was running backwards, he said. Then he looked at me and calculated almost
instantaneously the exact number of hours he'd been alive. "I guess that's
enough," he said.
It
wasn't.
He
bounced back from that episode, but I knew we were losing him. He died at home.
He'd been often incoherent over the last few days of his life, but I sat with
him and we spoke a while just a few hours before he passed. He was lucid.
Energetic. What we talked about I cannot recall because the only thought going
through my head was I was losing him.
When
the phone rang a few hours later, I knew before my wife answered.
I
miss him. I'm almost as old as he was when he died, but I miss him now perhaps
more than I ever have in my life. Like all of us, he was flawed. At times he
could also be magnificent. Even when he was a tiny red dot far below as the
plane I was in climbed and banked toward New York City, he was bigger than
life. He is still a giant in my dreams.
He
was my dad.
* * *
I will
take the opportunity to share one other piece I wrote about my father back in
2004. He loved the water but didn’t have much luck with boats. He was never a threat to the legacy of maritime giants like Magellan. He did, perhaps, rival the captain of the Titanic for sheer bad luck.
Here’s a link to
that post:
* * *
Be good
to each other.
* * *
