12-July-12

My birthday present from Big Guy

So much has happened.

The last six weeks have left me breathless - sometimes gasping with boundless joy, other times suffocating under the weight of unimaginable pressure and horrifying loss – and I’m just now starting to get air back into my lungs.

As I often find myself saying after a long absence here, I don’t know how much catching up I’m going to do, when it’s so much more like me to keep looking and moving forward. We’ll see what happens. For now, I simply need to get back to writing.

Brothers

The first thing Big Guy said when I told him that Peter was moving out? "You can come live with me."

I might have a lot of uncertainty in my life, but I never have to worry about whether or not the boys have got my back.

Standing Up

It's been a little more than four years since my dad died.

A few weeks ago, on what would have been his 94th birthday, I found myself alone on my couch. Peter had said that he would go out with me for red meat and vodka, two of my dad's favorite things, but he'd canceled a couple of hours earlier. "The cold is still kicking my ass. I can try to rally later and maybe come by."

"No, don't do that," I wrote back. "I'm having a rough time, but it's just a day."

"You're stronger than me in that way. Well, thanks for understanding."

I'd wanted to text back that I wasn't strong, that I was tired of hearing how understanding I was being, that I didn't understand any of what he was doing. I wanted to break down and have him rush over to try to make me feel better. I wanted none of this to be happening. In lieu of any of that, I wanted someone to go out and talk about my dad with me, share funny memories of him. I was tempted to blurt all of that out and see if guilt would get me, at least temporarily, the tiniest bit of what I felt I needed.

I didn't do it, though. I told him to take care of himself and get some sleep. It was the right thing to do, even though it hurt. I guess that was what he meant about me being strong and understanding, even though I didn't feel it. All I felt was alone.

I wandered into the other room, turned on the television, and curled up on the couch. I laid there motionless for hours, so still that my ear went numb from being pressed into the cushion, watching second-rate episodes of Law and Order. It grew dark outside, and the house got cold. I pulled a dog blanket over myself and sighed.

Finally, I shook myself upright. "What are you doing sitting here in the dark? This isn't what Dad would do. Dad would have picked himself up and moved forward, not curled up in a ball feeling sorry for himself. Get up! You're being ridiculous." Right about that time, Ween invited me across the street for wine and popcorn. I got up, brushed my hair, tugged my dad's knit cap over my ears, and headed over to her house. I felt good about honoring his memory by pulling up hard on my own bootstraps.

Funny thing, though. That's not what my dad would have done. My dad would have stayed on the couch under the dog blanket, moping to the point of making himself physically ill. I'd seen him do it, wander around the house for days in a thin, cotton v-neck and sagging sweatpants because one of my brothers didn't call him on Father's Day, or because the Giants had just ended a losing season. He did not handle disappointment or sadness well. I can't remember ever hearing him tell anyone, including himself, to buck up and move forward.

I'd made up this story about how I got that strength from him, the perseverance and the drive. "You keep going, and you don't quit. That's how Dad would have done it. That's who he was and I'm just like him." I'd idealized him, and then congratulated myself on striving to achieve that ideal for myself.

The truth is simpler and more profound. I keep going and I don't quit because that's who I am. That's what I do.



The 'whether" in this story is a choice I am constantly making and reevaluating - whether to stand up or fall down. Whether to draw into the easy cocoon of my sofa, encasing myself in a velour blanket under a hundred pounds of dog, or to reach out and grab the hands that are being extended toward me, to go out into the world and live. The cocoon is easy. Pulling away from it is more challenging. Every couple of weeks, I fall down. The trick is to figure out how to stand back up again. I'm learning.

Sunshine

The Answers to Questions Nobody Asked

So what were the answers to last week's Tease post? What in the blue blazes was I talking about?

1. Long drive - the arduous journey to Tulare to work the bar at the Historical Museum's 25th Anniversary celebration. Accountant Boy hurt his back bowling with me last weekend, which made three hours each way in the car especially unpleasant. The theme of the event was 'Night at the Museum' which meant that...


2. We had to dress like people from Days of Yore, come to life just for the party. We went with 1920s, since we couldn't get a clear timeframe for when Tulare's infamous Front Street district was at its peak. While Accountant Boy already had a vest and a snap-brim cap from a themed party several years ago, I had nothing in my closet that fit. (I buy dresses for weddings, and usually exercise like crazy leading up to the events, so I'm normally about a dress size larger than anything on the fancy side of my closet.)

When my mom informed me that my hips were too big for anything in their collection, I started worrying about what I was going to wear. It consumed my thoughts for several days. Then I remembered one of the tenets of my new creed - "I'm done with all that."

What does that mean to me? It means that I can keep worrying about something and make myself sick over it, or I can just get rid of the thing I'm worrying about. A few weeks ago, I had this great revelation about my fishtank. I haven't enjoyed fishkeeping in years, but we still had a tank, and I still worried about the fish in it, fretted because I didn't make time to change the water, cringed every time I walked past it. I came in from the yard one day, looked at the tank and said, "I'm done with all that. Why am I stressed about three fish and a bunch of plants?" I called the girl across the street over. "Ash, you have fish, right? Take my fish and put them in your tank. There's nothing wrong with them, but I'm tired of owning them." We scooped up the fish, pulled up all of the plants, carried all of them across the street and put them into their new home. I came back, tore down the tank and the stand and hauled it out to the garage, steam-cleaned the carpet where it had stood so that there wouldn't be dents, and was done with it. It felt so good to not worry about that one thing anymore. A.B. didn't even notice it was gone for three days.

So, worrying about my costume to the point that I was having a hard time working, I finally snapped and said, "I'm done worrying about all of this. I'll go buy a dress right now and then I can stop thinking about it." I bought this one. Not cheap, but at least it was authentic, not that cheesy all-fringe look you get from Halloween costume flapper dresses. I researched finger waves, then went for the easier solution of buying a waving iron. I felt really good about my decisive, successful moves toward a solution.


And then my mom said that it'd be better if I dressed like Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke.

3. Gland expressing - oh, don't make me tell you about this. I don't know what I was thinking even bringing it up.

4. A trip to the butter factory - this one, the most straightforward of my tease topics because it's exactly what it seems to be, did not happen. My oldest brother, Big Guy, works for a dairy processing plant. He's the mechanic in the butter room, keeping all of the packaging machines running. For years now, he's been trying to take me on a tour of Butter, but we never manage to make it work. This was the weeks' greatest disappointment for me. I love factory tours, and I know he's proud of his work and wants to show me around. Next time, I hope.

Birthday

Flamingos

How to Live Forever

Most kids have a long list of things their fathers taught them. “My dad taught me to play ball”, or “my dad taught me to ride a bike”, or “my dad taught me to drive”, things like that.


My dad didn’t teach me to play ball. He probably taught me to ride a bike, although I can’t remember him doing so. I didn't even remember that he could ride until a few months ago, when he asked me to print out a picture of him with his first bicycle. He certainly didn’t teach me to drive. One hour of careening down the country road beyond the golf course ended those lessons. I almost drove us into a ditch, and he said, “I think that’s about enough for today, honey. I’ll drive us home.” My mom subsequently taught me to drive.


My dad taught me different things. When I was very young, maybe seven years old, he taught me to play gin. We’d sit at the kitchen table and play for hours. He didn’t teach me how to win. He let me learn that on my own. It takes a special kind of man to look fondly across the table at his youngest child, staring back at him over a fan of cards barely contained in her tiny hands, trying so hard not to give away that she's one card away from ginning. A special kind of man to then put his discard face down on the pile and say, “Sorry, honey, but I’m going to have to go with three.”

Everything I learned from him was by example, by watching him and emulating him. I make sure that I put stamps on envelopes just so, perfectly lined up at both corner edges, because that’s how he did it. He taught me to whistle, which I can do beautifully, although I never could get the trill down right. I learned to love the Giants, through the few good years and the innumerable bad. I watched him and I learned what it meant to be loyal.


I’m trying, although I suspect that I’ll never be as good, to be the kind of listener, the kind of conversationalist that he was. My dad could listen to an argument for an hour, listen and think about what everyone had said, and then ease his way in and say the perfect thing to end it. He had a calm thoughtfulness about him. I didn't always agree with him, but I always respected his opinions because I knew he'd deliberated over them so thoroughly.


I remember sitting at the kitchen table many years ago, crying. I was in a real funk, and he was trying to figure out how to help me. I finally got up the strength to tell him what was wrong – that I didn’t understand how everyone in the world didn’t spend all of their time thinking about how someday they were going to die, how unfair it was that the crushing burden of this knowledge was reserved for the deep thinkers, like twenty-year-old me. I ended my lament with, “But you know, right? You’re OLD! How do you keep going, knowing that someday you’ll just be GONE?”

My dad folded his hands on the table and stared at them for a minute, deep in thought. He took a measured breath and said, “Well, I think that if I affect other people, that I do good things and make them think that they’re happy to know me, then that’s my legacy. That’s the part of me that’s still here. If I can do that, I’m not gone.”

It’s the most important thing I learned from him.

My dad died a little after noon on January 24th, 2008. He was ninety years and sixteen days old.

Lineage

My parents were married last weekend in a lovely little ceremony in one of Tulare, California's two Catholic churches. Yes, they were married already, but not in the eyes of the Church, a point that has lately become vitally important to my dad. He wanted this so badly, so earnestly, that The Engineer and I even refrained from making cracks about the burden of growing up in a small town as bastards. This was no small feat, holding back the quips. The Engineer and I are legendary smartasses.

It was a lovely, ceremony, custom-made for my mom, who is still not Catholic, and my dad, who can no longer kneel on command. Father Rick did a wonderful job of accommodating them and making all of us - Catholics, Methodists and atheists, gay and not gay, young and old - feel welcome and included. Our family beamed proudly from the pews as The Engineer, Big Guy and I stood up for our parents and saw them married.

And then this happened.


Here's the thing. If you put me a room with a bunch of loonies, I'll naturally become the straight woman. Nothing I like better than standing back and making wry observations about people as they make asses of themselves. I like it when events have something that makes them memorable. When it seems like there's no chance of that happening, when everything seems like it's going to be staid and, well, ordinary, it triggers something in me.

When yet another group was gathering behind my flash-addled parents, that something fired. "Oh for God's sake! Why don't we ALL get in the picture at the same time? You don't like how you look in pictures? I'll fix it so that nobody's looking at you, then. Problem solved!"

I come by this trait honestly, and through a woman who had been dead some fifty years when I was born. Guess which one of these women is my grandmother? Yes, that would be her on the right, Miss Grace Loinaz. For the longest time, this was the only picture of her that we had.


A couple of years ago, we found my grandfather's photo album and came across this picture. My dad's sister Madeleine is pretty sure that this is also Grace. Wearing a man's clothes. Backwards.


My father and Aunt Matt weren't old enough when she died to remember anything about her. Anyone else who might have known her has long since passed beyond the vale. These pictures of Grace are all that we have of her.

I think I would have liked her. I hope she would have liked me.