Father's Day: Problematic Day

My father is now dead. He died exactly how he didn't want to die, by inches, bits, and pieces, as his body kept telling him that he was done. Yet modern medicine ignores the body's telltales signs and keeps coming up with medications and treatments that prolong our lives beyond their "sell" date. When he lost his capacity to swallow, I thought to myself, christ on a bicycle, if that doesn't signal that the body is done, then what does? And yet, doctors also take oaths that demand they do everything to preserve the sanctity of life. I'll let the ethicists debate this one, because, really, at this point I don't have a frigging clue what that means.

Anyway, that's not the point of this piece, which is, the problematic father. My dad was a man of unbelievable strengths and profound weaknesses, and it's hard to think of him without acknowledging the whole: the brilliance tempered with the massive self doubt and hatred; the wit juxtaposed to the caustic jibe; the gentle man whose politics were so right that they made my teeth ache.

But on this day I think I should concentrate on the good. The trips to Tilden with my sister for pony and carousel rides. The Sunday afternoons spent at Oakland's Fairyland. Endless games of pee wee golf at that place on Telegraph Ave. I'm sure all this was unspeakably boring, and yet he weathered through it and I don't remember any complaints. The carousel at Tilden still survives, as does Fairyland. The pee wee golf place got swallowed up years ago by an office building. Some landmarks of my childhood still survive--not many--but enough that I've taken my children to these places and in the process walked in my father's shoes for a bit.

So, yes, I chose to remember those Sundays at Fairyland and Tilden, and hot dogs at Oscars. Good times, Dad. Thanks..

September 10

No, that's not a typo. I know you were thinking, ugh, another 9/11 comment. Nope, this is just a personal acknowledgment that it is my father's birthday tomorrow. He's been dead a few years now. Being the victim of some horrible disease that robbed him of his brains, bit by bit, you could say that he's been a dead for a number of years.

He was a difficult man to put it mildlly. To say that our political beliefs were at polar opposites doesn't quite do justice to how differently we viewed the world. I could never understand how someone so intelligent (and his I.Q. was phenomenal) could be so stupid. I imagine he thought the same about me. One of those people of whom people say, "He could whistle birds off a tree," he was also legendary for alienating people with equal ease. You either loved him or you hated him. Whenever I'd go down to the hospital where he worked I was never sure of the reception I was going to get. Either people would glare at me or give me a broad smile when I asked for him. It was never indifference!

I put my daughter on a plane to go back to college yesterday. She barely knew him. By the time she was really aware of people around her, he was little more than a shell, barely talking, barely registering anything. Of course, we didn't know that this was only the beginning of the slide, and that it was going to get a whole hell of a lot worse. But the reality is that had he not gotten ill, it is very unlikely that I'd call him up to tell him that she'd arrived safely (like I'm going to do with my mother this morning). We didn't have that kind of relationship.

That's the thing about death. It ends all the fantasies that you may have. That one day my father and I could discuss politics without getting into a screaming match. That he'd actually call to see if his grandaughter gotten to her destination safely. That, well, you get the picture.

Anyway, Dad, I hope that where ever you are Leonard Bernstein is conducting Beethoven's 9th and there's a prime rib dinner with all the trimmings in front of you. Happy Birthday.

Love Claire

Oh, Father, I Hardly Knew Thee and CAKE!

Father's day is coming up (reminder to self, buy gnome for husband) this Sunday, and since my father is now dead, it has turned into the day for championing my husband, which is cool because he works his butt off and deserves some praise and acknowledgment. Plus, um, he IS a dad. There's a meta post in this, on how we are truly adults when the holidays traditionally meant for our parents become holidays for us, but I really don't want to go there tonight.

In my Internet travels I have run across something that might be extremely appropriate (as we are food obsessed here) and father-ish. Matt has a very interesting site here: http://www.tiepedia.com/tie-blog/49-crafts/155-tie-cake. Please click because even my extensive powers of description are somewhat at a loss to describe how freaking accurate these cakes look. I see that there is one for doctors, which, hey, dad.

This was always a somewhat problematic holiday for me. My sister and I used commiserate on how many HOURS we spent looking for the appropriate card, but, sadly, there really wasn't a card that quite fit. Usually, I ended up getting a blank card with a flower on the front, which, of course, said volumes in and of itself. Anyway, my father did have a sweet tooth and being Scottish loved marzipan, so my dilemma has been solved; a bit late but solved. I could have just baked him a cake and forgotten the dumb card.

So, please, check out Matt's site. It's cool!

The Up Side

My childhood was a series of moves. This was not the fault of my mother, bless her heart, but extenuating circumstances and my father and life. Except for that brief period when my father decided to start anew and moved my mother down to L.A. (and then two weeks later decided that family life was not his baliwick and fled to Alaska; I wish I was making this up, but I'm not), I've spent all my life in the Bay Area.

After my father returned from Alaska (okay, kicked out for practicing medicine without a license, so family legend goes), my parents decide to make one more try. You can imagine how that went. Anyway, my father wasn't a bad man, just a very confused and sad one, and over the years he really tried. That his efforts always failed is immaterial in a way. Until he remarried, my parents occasionally played "married" in that they would take us out for dinner and we would pretend to be a real family. This wasn't as pathetic as it sounds.

My father was born into the wrong class and the wrong time. I can actually see him as the younger, impoverished son of the some earl who went off to the colonies to make his fortune. I have something of a fixation on the British colonial settlement of Kenya and, boy, he'd have fit right in. In reality, he was the son of a clerk and had a fairly impoverished upbringing in Glasgow. I guess you'd call his family the gentile poor. But he was definitely out of place, because he had a tremendous sense of adventure. When I was a kid, we never went out to dinner. We journeyed to dinner, to strange out of the way diners and restaurants in what then was the hinterlands. He loved to drive and a night out with Dad was never less than a thirty-mile jaunt somewhere.

The point of all this is that there is a restaurant near my current house. It's been in business since I've been ten and I'm now fifty-three. And one of the first things we did when we moved out here was to go to this restaurant. And the same woman who was hosting when I was a kid was STILL there. And so was most of the staff. We went there for dinner last night. The old hostess has now retired, but many of the same staff are still there. There's a busboy that has been there since I was a kid.

It's cool to take your kids to a place where you can say, hey, I came here with your grandparents when I was ten. And it's the same. It's like a time warp but not. Like I said. Cool.