I posted this on another site and I just thought I would share it here with you all. For those of you who don't know, my Dad is very ill with Pancreatic Cancer. He is now coming to his final stages with the disease. I will be flying up to Michigan next Sunday, Mother's Day to help him and my Mom...the enevitable has been hitting me like a sledge hammer the past few days... anyway, I just sat at my keyboard yesterday and let my fingers go where they would and this is the result:
After a lot of searching, worrying, praying, more searching and worrying and praying some more... I was finally able to book a flight to Michigan to be with my Dad and help my Mom as he nears the time. I have been feeling all sorts of emotions from anger and depression to believe it or not... extreme happiness.. where wisecracks seem to flow out of my mouth from nowhere. I've had dreams of driving down a mountain highway, my car out of fuel and snakes, deadly poisonous ones crawling onto my car to get at me, while I crawl out onto the hood of the car speeding down the dark road beating off these vipers with nothing more than a wire coat hanger. "No wire hangars... ever!" may have been Joan Crawford's battle cry, but to me in this dream they are a life saver... they neatly decapitate the reptiles heads and they fall by the wayside...
I have these dreams and then I sit and stare thinking about all the times I had with my Dad... my sister and I watching while he practices chip shots in the back yard, an errant one smacking into the basement window causing her and I to run with glee to our mother to tell on him... for once someone older would get the blame. He talks about this still.
Other tales of how he stopped drinking when I was just a few months old. There are two versions of this.. his and the truth. His: "I was having stomach problems so I went to see the doc. He advised me that maybe I should cut back on the beer drinking, so I just decided to quit altogether." Nice story.. but that is all it is, a story. My mother tells a different one. "When Dad would drink he was never mean, he just got real happy and stupid. One Sunday after Mass he had a couple of bottles and decided to take your sisters across the street to the school to roll down the grassy banks. They were still in their Sunday dresses. When they came home, I was so mad, I said 'you get a couple of beers in you and you don't even think!' Well that did it for him, he was so afraid I was going to leave him, he quit there and never took another drop."
There are more memories or piggy back rides, horsie rides on his back, wrestling, getting stuck in the nelson holds: full and half. Baseball games at Tiger Stadium, camping trips to Traverse City and two trips out west in 1965 and 1972. I remember the former trip. We were at Yellowstone National Park, watching the geyesers. We walked along the hot springs ( there was a trail of some sort) Dad was testing the water with is finger and pronouncing each as "luke warm". Another time a couple days later, we were at our camp site getting ready to have lunch with sandwhiches and cherry pie for desert. Mom looks over at the tent not 80 feet away from us and sees a bear rip into the tent. She gets my sisters and I to the safety of the car. My Dad? He rescues the pie! We still roar with laughter over that one. In New Mexico several days later: we stop for gas at a Sinclair station ( do they still have those?) We had been on a very long stretch so we were all glad to stretch our legs and get some cold bottles of pop. My Dad pays for the gas, gets in the car and drives off; trouble was he left the rest of us behind. He talks about it later saying that he could see the "Mexicans with their big white teeth just laughing and having a good time." I often wonder if leaving us behind was a Freudian Slip... not that he didn't love us but because he just wanted some peace... of course my Dad like most of the family is ADD so he just probably wasn't thinking.
There were times that were trying too. Sometimes I would push his buttons a little too much and even though he would be reclined in his Lazy Boy.. he must have had telescopic arms because I swear I would be out the door and I could feel his hand grab me by the collar and yank me back, still reclining in that chair! As we grew older, we agreed less and less on things. I could never satisfy him and he couldn't make me happy. We never stopped loving each other however. The past five years or so we started to understand each other a little bit better. Me in knowing that I would never be able to talk with him about the deeper things in life. He loves short answers.. yes or no. He rattles them off and before I can answer one, he was on to the next. Dad can even get females to tell him things they wouldn't to any other man.. "How much do you weigh?" He says it so pleasantly, that their guard is let down for a nano second and they reveal thier weight.
The admininstrative assistants where he worked had these hanging plants sitting beautifully in ceramic pots nestled in macramed webbings. He would take the plants hanging side by side and swing them trying to see how close they would come to smacking into the other. They never did, but the secretaries would want to smack him!
My Dad loves golf, it is his Zen if he wasn't playing it, he was watching on TV or reading or going to watch the pros. For many years in a row he was number one in his company's summer league. it got to the point where we ran out of space for his trophies. On the weekends he would always come home with at least fifty dollars and more often than not 300 dollars. He always amazed me with his concentration skills around the green.
There is so much more I could be writing about my Dad.. I just wanted to share a little bit about him with you all because I love him so much!
Love, Frank
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