15 Years Since Yesterday

April 23, 2000 -- It is the last night of my dad’s life, only I don’t know this yet.

It’s early in the morning of April 23, 2015 right now, 15 years since that night. I know where I was, where I was sitting, what I was saying, because it’s like it happened yesterday. In the last week of my dad’s life, he was at home with hospice care, and I sat up with him on the night shift while everyone else slept. It was lonely and scary, and I’m so grateful for that time.

I had a spiral notebook, and during that last week, I wrote pages and pages of things that had happened or things that were going on with his health or what it felt like to walk this awful journey. Part of me didn’t want to remember, yet part of me didn’t want to forget. So I did what I always do—I wrote.

After he died, I tore out the pages, folded them in quarters and put them in the envelope with all the condolence cards my friends sent. A few years ago, I was going through the cards and found the folded-up pages. I brought them down to my kitchen and set them on fire with the flame from my gas stove and tossed them in the sink to burn.

I never read them after I first wrote them, and I never read them again. Ever. Someone told me that my mind would edit memories for me so that the sad and awful things would gradually subside and I’d be left with the memories I wanted to keep. I was afraid that reading those pages would interrupt that process.

It seems to be truer by the year, I suppose. While I remember a good deal of things I sometimes want to forget, I’ve no doubt forgotten other things. I guess I’m happy about that. I’m at the point where I no longer care whether the memories actually happened. They live in my memory, and I’m good with that—right or wrong.

I remember that my dad fried the bacon in our house. I never remember my mom frying bacon--only my dad and only on Sunday mornings. He was very patient with it, and the wait was torture. I fry bacon now using his “low and slow” method, and when I’m tempted to toss it all in the skillet to save time, I hold back.

My dad taught me how to tie a tie. A tie was part of the Brownie uniform in the ‘60s, and I would stand at the full-length mirror with my dad behind me, tying my little orange tie around my neck. At some point, I probably could have done it myself, but it was more fun this way with my dad.

I never saw my dad wear shorts or go barefoot, which is really odd when you consider that’s practically my family’s uniform. He wore a long-sleeved shirt to my wedding, but I think that’s probably the only time I saw him in long sleeves.

When we moved to our new house, he built me really long shelves for all my stuffed animals and painted my room Crocus. I got to pick the paint color, and I didn’t even know what a crocus was. It was purple and that was good enough for me. He forbade me to stick thumbtacks in the newly-painted wall though, and this was a problem because I had roughly 739 pictures of David Cassidy cut out of my Tiger Beat magazines that needed to be put back in their proper place. He didn’t back down, but he did make me giant bulletin board that was probably seven feet long.

He drank Pearl beer and liked sardines. Do you know anyone who eats sardines out of a little tin container? My dad did.

My dad was the office manager of a contracting company, and sometimes he brought “homework” home to do at the kitchen table. He would sign checks and collate and staple things, and when he let me help him, it was the greatest job in the world. Little did I know that was going to be real-world experience.

Once, my dad took me out to dinner, just the two of us. I was maybe 12 or so, and I had to get dressed up. We went to this Italian restaurant on the Gulf Freeway, which was probably not particularly good or even all that fancy. But it wasn’t Luby’s or Bonanza, so it felt grown-up. I ate lasagna, and it came in one of those crockery dishes where you know they just put the whole thing in the oven. I had never seen that before.  Like I said, fancy.

I like this photo because if you know
to look, you can see my dad's blue
eyes.

My dad and I were the late church-goers in our family (probably because the bacon took so long to cook). We went to 11:30 Mass, and at that hour on Sundays, there was a radio show on his usual AM country station in his trusty red Ford pick-up truck. I think they just played the same set list every week, because it seemed like every Sunday on the way to church, we heard Don Williams and Emmylou Harris singing “If I Needed You.” We loved that song. It was our father-daughter dance at my wedding. I whispered it in his ear on that last night of his life:

If I needed you, would you come to me?

Would you come to me for to ease my pain?

If you needed me, I would come to you.

I would swim the seas for to ease your pain.

My dad used Aqua Velva Ice Blue aftershave and Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco, so he always smelled like a combination of these two things. Although on the weekends, he smelled like our garage—part lawnmower gas, part grass clippings, part sawdust or paint.

My dad tried to fix me up with one of his friend’s sons (aka “one of Buddy's boys”), who I later discovered was Randy Quaid. I guess I’m pretty happy that didn’t materialize. He did fix me up once with another guy’s son when I was in college. It was the worst blind date of all time. And I’m pretty sure my boyfriend wasn’t too happy about it, either.

When I had my first root canal, I was away at college. My dad sent me a World’s Finest Chocolate bar in an envelope with a note written on the label: “Maybe this will help your aching tooth.” The chocolate is long gone, but I still have the wrapper.

Tripoley was a big deal in our house, and my dad was the guy who slyly slipped a few blue chips in his shirt pocket when he won a hand, so that at the end of the night, he unearthed a couple extra dollars to add to his winnings. Later, when we had our own Tripoley parties at the kitchen table, someone would run into the living room to ask his advice on a poker hand. Inevitably, everyone folded.

Once, when I lived in Missouri, I called my dad in Houston because I heard a noise outside my house. It never occurred to me to call 911.

When I moved to DC, he bought me my very own tool box and stocked it with things I’d need, including a note on his Frank Horrigan memo pad that says, “Never mess with anything electric. Love, Dad.”

Frank Horrigan. That’s my dad’s name. It’s also Clint Eastwood’s character in “In the Line of Fire.” I love that movie because I get to hear my dad’s name all the time, despite the fact that my dad could not be less like Clint Eastwood if he’d tried.

On the anniversary of my dad’s death, I always go to Mass and then do something that reminds me of him. The first year, I went to a hardware store and wandered the aisles. I needed that smell again. This year, I’m going to a baseball game. My dad took me to Astros games and tried not to roll his eyes when I put up a Greg Gross poster in my closet. (Where it still hangs, I might add.)

It feels like 2000 all over again except that I don’t have a spiral notebook and the good memories are coming back to the front of my brain. I guess that’s progress.