I remember when I was young, my Mom worked at First Bank. On Friday's, my brother and I were with Dad. He would pick us up from daycare and we'd go to the liquor store on Foley Blvd and McDonald's. I hate ketchup. He would always request a no ketchup/mustard burger for me and we'd pull forward and wait. Inevitably, it would arrive, with ketchup on it. Needless to say, the introduction of the Chicken McNugget was a godsend.
We'd go home, eat our dinner and Dad would sit in his rocking chair in the upstairs of our 4 level split home and I would play records for him. He always drank brandy, and was always jovial.
He was also a hunter, and a fisherman. When deer were had, they would hang them up in our garage and spend hours in the garage cleaning the meat. When they were done, they would cook the tenderloins in an electric fry pan with onions and mushrooms. I recall that they were delicious and Dad was always happy. The same with fishing. He was always happy.
Fast forward to the 2010's. Dad hasn't been so happy. Sometimes I feel that it's my fault, because I am divorced. Dad loved Andy, like a son and I can't help but feel that I destroyed a dynamic that could've been maintained. But still, even during those happy times when we were together, Dad was always drinking.
The 2010's brought a hip replacement surgery, which resulted in a forced sobriety. Which resulted in a rebellion from forced sobriety, which brought on him falling and breaking the leg his new hip was attached to. This brought on a secondary surgery, along with a stay in a retirement home to recover with another forced sobriety.
It starts to sound like a broken record from here. But to those involved, yes, it is a broken record. Yet, it's an important enough of a beat to keep trying to hear the rest of the song. And so you keep up with the hopeful days of sobriety that follow the remorse of drunken fall outs. And you 'encourage' (nag) with the earnest of an inner city school teacher in a crappy Lifetime movie.
And then the things you remember. Somehow, they nearly all involve a drink in his hand, and yet he was almost always happy, and you look at your own life, and you wonder. And you look at his life, and you wonder ever more, was the happiness because of life or because alcohol made him happy? Did he reach the potential he'd hoped for?
There are so many stories in between that I don't know, and those that I do, yet they do not create a clear picture of this person. This person who was an enormous influence on my life, but was still mostly an absentee mystery.
I remember that Unchained Melody is one of his favorite songs and he wants me to play it on the piano at his funeral. I remember that he LOVED to dance (but he was always drinking when he loved it.) I remember that he was a great cook and he loved to feed people and entertain (but he was always drinking.) And I remember him going to work every day in shirts my Mom would iron while she watched taped episodes of All My Children and how he always sat in a rocking chair. Always. He's broken so many rocking chairs.
I recall my Grandparents, sitting in their rocking chairs too, drunk, smoking cigarettes and doing very little at all. I remember seeing my Grandma in the hospital with liver cancer. She insisted that someone ensure her pounds of makeup were on at all times, but the disgusting brown tubes flowing juices from her organs scared me, as did she, always. She was always late, always bought weird presents, let her dog poop on the floor in the house and had a naked statue garden and peacocks. She was not the cookie making Grandma from the other side of the family. She was the one who showed up unannounced with life-sized gummy rats for Jeff and I, driving a dented old limo and sporting Cruella Deville skunk hair. And she was my Father's Mom. In the objectivity of the recall, I can understand. I can fully get why he dove headlong into denial, all those years, while at the same time claiming he would never become them.
I can recall and understand, but his life doesn't look like theirs. It seems at some point he decided it had to, it must, I have to take that turn and become a puddle of a person who requires assistance to stay alive. The unconscious became a dragon that ate it's own tale to 're' find out what it already knew...
And it's terribly sad.
I hope that he finally wakes up in his 'nth' time in rehab and realizes that he could be truly happy, sober. With adorable Grandchildren who call him PAPA! And a family who admires his ability to be stable and calm. And just an all around great guy, who could help people, just by being him. I guess we'll see...
