The man on the moon

 

Yesterday was Father's Day. 

Who am I kidding? I'm writing this on Saturday morning but you won't be reading this until Monday morning. Unless you have some of that special plutonium metal from the movie Tenet that inverts time and have come back here from the future. Why would you want to do that? 

I'm still trying to wrap my pea-brain around the plot of that Christopher Nolan spectacle. And I've watched that damn movie three times. But to its credit does have a 747 ripping through a warehouse.

I don't know what's in store for my Father's Day, nor does it really matter to me. The attention and the gifts will be nice, but the truth is I'm not wanting for anything. And things I do want, can't be ordered online for one day delivery -- health and time.

It's not until you reach the ripe old age of 44 that you begin to develop an astounding appreciation for each.

In year's past, I used to joke that the only thing I wanted for Father's Day was to be left alone. Away from diapers, crying, fighting, screaming, and the endless demands of children used to having their endless demands met by a dad who swore he would never spoil his kids and then did. 

But like the protagonist in Harry Chapin's Cats in the Cradle, that is no longer the case. And now with my oldest daughter itching to get out of the house and move into her Santa Monica apartment with furniture she built by herself, she is the one that yearns to be left alone.

It's a vicious push and pull, repeated in my family and, I suspect, in millions of others. 

I cannot do the phenomena justice, but Dr. Sherwin Nuland, a gifted writer did. This book comes with my highest recommendation. You will laugh, you will cry, you will wonder if there's any whitefish salad left in the fridge.

The fluid relationship I had with my father can best be demonstrated with two anecdotes. 

While in college, I had to wear a dental plate to fill in the gap of my missing two front teeth. It was a temporary thing, called a flipper, that stuck to the roof of my mouth, like dentures. On one rambunctious evening, my college buddies and I found ourselves hurling snowballs from the open windows on the 6th floor of Sadler dormitory. We'd pelt pizza delivery guys from 75 feet above and laugh uncontrollably from the excessive alcohol and other forbidden substances.

That's when my flipper popped out of my mouth and landed in three feet of snowdrift at the base of the building. "Oh shit", I thought, and ran to the payphone in our lobby to call my father. Did I mention it was at 2AM?

"My flipper came out and fell out the window", I panicked.

DRAMATIC PAUSE

"What am I, a fucking dentist?"

CLICK

That was when he and I were at each other's throats and would go months without speaking.

Later, much later in life, when his health was failing and he was wilting away in a San Diego hospital, I would drive down to see him on weekends. 

The cancer had mellowed him out. Almost to the point of being unrecognizable. You have to understand that he was a hard-charging NYC bull that never backed down from adversity. And took great pride in his Bronx-bred pugnaciousness. But in this battle with cancer, he found himself a worthy opponent.

As I spent time with him in his propped up hospital bed, nurses and doctors would come streaming in to check his vitals. And on each visit, he'd introduce me...

"This is my son. He's a writer. He makes a living from the luft (yiddish for air). Last month he ran the LA Marathon. He has a resting heart rate in the high forties..."

It only took him a lifetime to get there, but it was, sadly, the happiest I had ever seen the old man. 

Happy posthumous Father's Day, dad.