Any day now...

A little over a month ago I was considering my options for health insurance for my family.  I won't bore you with all the dreadful details, but everyone knows insurance is expensive and I wanted to see if I could get a better deal with an individual plan for my family than I get through the group plan from my job.  I called a broker, got facts, got prices, called human resources got more facts, more prices, etc  It was overwhelming to say the least.  In the midst of looking at all of this information and feeling too paralyzed to make a decision before the enrollment period at my job ended, I had a wonderful, unburdening thought.  I will ask Dad.  Dad knows about all this stuff and while he won't tell me what to do, he'll lay it out in a way that will make the decision easier for me.  A few minutes after comforting myself with this thought came the crashing, heart wrenching realization that I couldn't ask Dad.  He died almost nine years ago.  Then, I had myself a good cry.  I don't know why the realization hit me so hard at that moment, and when I asked my mother later when this sort of heartbreak would stop, she simply replied that it wouldn't and that she was sorry.

This week was the ninth anniversary of my dad's passing.  It is, as it has become, a sad and contemplative  week for me.  I had some Budweiser and listened to The Doors and Otis Redding (favorites of my dad) and thought about writing something worthwhile about my father.  I thought long and hard but everything I came up with seemed trite and did nothing to say anything real about my father.  I made a list of some of the sayings he used : she looks like 10lbs of shit in a 5lb bag, it's colder than a well diggers asshole out there, they can burn you but they cannot eat you, etc.  Thinking of my dad's witty one liners did a lot to improve my mood, but did so very little to accomplish actually saying anything about him (the fact that he was funny was sort of implied).  This went on for most of the week until I decided to scrap the compulsion to write anything about him at all. 

Then, a miraculous thing happened.  I spoke to my brother.  My baby brother, who is currently in the midst of putting together a benefit for a friend of his who has recently and suddenly gone blind due to diabetes.  On Facebook my cousin Tara made this comment about my brother in regards to the benefit:  "Funny on the outside, but completely filled with a huge heart on the inside. Sounds comfortably familiar to me. I know he's smiling down on you ;). "  And there, my dear cousin hit the nail on the head.  She managed in a brief comment to say about my father what had been alluding me all week. 

My dad was funny and brusque on the outside.  Downright intimidating sometimes.  He had a way with language that sometimes had you wondering whether you should be laughing or heading for the door.  There was no one he didn't make fun of, no one was safe and he certainly wouldn't have been considered politically correct (not that he cared to be either).  Ballbusting was a specialty of his, nay an artform.  Thing is, while he made fun of you, he made fun of himself too so that you never walked away feeling bad about yourself; you walked away laughing and feeling good about the world.  He was terrible with names and called everyone, friends and strangers alike, some endearment or another.  Chief, big guy, sweetheart, doll.  He did it in such a way as to never make these endearments seem cheesy or diminutive, rather they seemed genuine and they were. 

He had a HUGE heart.  He did things for people that we didn't even know about until after he died.  Loaning people money, time, his home, his clothes, his love.  One of my cousins told us that my father gave him his first baseball glove after realizing that my cousin's father never did.  It meant a lot to my cousin and a lot to those of us who never knew.  He went out on a limb to get people whatever they needed, even if they hadn't yet realized they needed anything.

I am saddened, all the time, that my own children will never get to know my father.  He would've eaten them up, of that I am sure.  I like to think that he might have had a hand in choosing the precious souls that have been placed in my care.  Every once in a while I see something, a rascally look, a chuckle, or a quiet act of kindness in one of my kids, and I know my father is around, always. 

I'm not sure I accomplished what it was I set out to do when I set out to write about my father.  I know that I'm a hell of a lot closer than I was at the start of the week.  I know that I could think for years and write for decades and never get down in words what it meant to have such a man in my life to shape the person that I am, the person I watch my brother being. Any day now I will stop feeling weepy when I think of the loss of my father.  Any day now it will be only laughter (which it often is) when I think about him.

This weeks tip: Chris Rock once said that real dad's deserve the big piece of chicken (paraphrasing here) - if you need to sew two chicken wings to a pork chop to get that big piece of chicken for the man you will celebrate this father's day, then goddammit go out and do it (or you know, buy him a tie).  Either way: Celebrate we will, for life is short but sweet for certain (D. Matthews)