chrysesofia
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6/4/2006 12:04:06 AM
who are you and what have you done with my father?
popeye: me father was tall and kind and he looked like Abraham Lincoln.
poopdeck pappy: yaaah, don’t tell me what i yam!
~ “Popeye,” 1980 (Robin Williams’s least favorite of his films)
this one is personal, yes. i know. who cares. but this is my spew for today.
my dad was already 47 when i was born.
before he married my mom he had been a widower with a son in high school.
right after he remarried, my half-brother went into the navy.
but i guess my dad wanted more kids, because they had not just me but another one after me, who was born with neurological problems.
i don’t remember my dad ever =not= having a slight hearing problem and a slight memory problem.
the smell of his aftershave from several rooms away was often what woke me up in the morning, as a little kid. royal copenhagen. he worked in the city. we would take him to the train in the morning, in my pj’s, so i thought he worked on the train.
when he came home from work he would walk around the yard and check everything out. he’d change his clothes and make a drink. my mom was way ahead of him. after dinner he’d work in the yard until it was too dark.
in the winter instead of working outside he would watch tv. it was my dad who most heavily influenced my intellectual personality by getting me hooked on public tv … not the sesame street/electric company part, already under my belt, but the NOVA/nature/cosmos part.
the ascent of man, with jacob bronowski. pivotal.
and mutual of omaha’s wild kingdom. jacques cousteau. national geographic.
we watched together every major science and nature series there was to be had.
i would follow him around the yard and bug him with questions. bugs. birds. plants. dirt. trees. water. we had one small bright blue hydrangea, the most dramatic thing, and he would care for it very carefully, wrap it up in burlap every fall so it wouldn’t get damaged over winter, until one year he never got around to it and it died. i’ve always had trouble remembering the name of that plant. now my son calls them “derangeas.”
i watched him mow, fertilize, weed, prune, trim, edge, dig, and reconfigure the landscape. he was allowed to tear up huge areas of the yard and move them around, dirt and stones and sod, in the hot sun, in a white v-neck t-shirt (or not), and the only jeans he owned, and the most gorgeously beat-up brown leather work boots, and it would take days, and then it would look so cool. he had all the creative freedom. and you gotta realize, he’s approaching 60 at this point.
he never related really well, except to crack puns, but he was my creative hero.
i had to assume he was really smart. i didn’t know he hadn’t been to college. to me, being around him was like pre-college.
even though i always had to ask him every question twice.
he was 73 when i got married the first time. at the end of the following year, he sold the house.
but he could never get around to cleaning it out. it just seemed to be too much for him to wrap his brain around. i remember him telling me “at the end, i just had to shut my eyes and throw stuff out, because i couldn’t go through it.” i have to wonder what cool stuff was lost.
at some point in there, i signed up to be his “power of attorney” agent, and executrix, and medical proxy or whatever it is called. and i have to say that i didn’t know at the time what all that could mean.
he bought a condo where he could live with my younger brother to take care of him.
the two of them were like “abbott & costello visit the insane asylum.” it was impossible to be around them. during one college summer at home i nearly had a nervous breakdown, and was so stressed that my entire neck seized up like whiplash and i couldn’t move it all summer. one day after work, i just sat in the car in the garage for hours, crying. i couldn’t go in.
dad couldn’t hear or remember anything, and my brother had some hearing impairment and no concept of time or the reality of anyone outside himself … simi
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