I would so happily celebrate both Partonnukah and Taco Cabanakkah. (Sorry for orthographic inconsistency, transliteration from Waxahachianer Yiddish and the Pigeon Forge dialect gets so confusing.)
I just bought candles so I can ambivalently light them and mutter phonetic Hebrew and play "Jolene" on the fourth night, as tradition dictates. Bave has a story about how he always thought when he was rich he'd have all the same color socks and not have to bother with sorting and someone finally said "you know, you can do that now." So I took the rich man's sock solution to Taco Partonnukah and bought all white candles.
The advent calendar candy for the next 8 days is ze-ukkah gelt.
Oh, that reminds me, Chalica starts tomorrow. I'll have to remember to not celebrate.
Every year it seems this comes earlier and earlier.
I think there is actually a promises-to-be-terrible TV movie about the early life of Dolly that is on during Partonnukah. Answered prayers. I can't wait to see network tv's parade of actors from Kankakee doing non-rhotic "I declayuh!" accents for rural Tennessee.
We just decided that Friday is Gin and Tonukkah.
Night 1: "You're Jewish?"
Night 2: "We're Jewish?"
Night 3: "How Jewish?"
Night 4: Quotes from that Simpsons episode in which Krusty confronts his heritage.
Night 5: "Wait, I know this one: Titus Caesar?"
Night 6: "Let the gentile draw near and ask his/her questions. Not that one."
Night 7: "You had to marry a Methodist! You couldn't find a nice bearded Unitarian?"
Night 8: [Fielder's choice: Food, wine or traffic. Bonus round: De Blasio! [shakes fist]]
Flippanter Commenting Industries LLC knows you have a choice of jokes about your religious holidays. Thank you for choosing Flippanter! Ask about our "Mahayana? I hardly knew her!" specials!
Oh I sort of wish tonight were Gin & Tonnukah. That sounds kind of good right now. Oh well, must abide by scripture.
Maybe I'll see if Heathers is on any streaming service and if tonight can be Veronnukah.
7: wild, sustained appplause. I am on board with all of this, provisionally as an episcopalian. can there be cocktails, with smoked bluefish and crackers, and vegetables crudités served with jane's krazy mixed-up salt? it'd make me feel more comfortable.
I'm afraid I am violating the 40-comment rule by mentioning that 1) at the start of the weezer video for 'say it ain't so', the sporadically detestable rivers cuomo comes on to the camera in a captivating way. I want to retroactively fuck him now. it is my favorite weezer song obvi.
2) I AM TIRED OF THESE MOTHERFUCKING SICK PEOPLE IN MY MOTHERFUCKING FAMILY. I have to cut short my trip to my dad's so I can go home and participate in the battery of testing needed for girl x's apparently inevitable spine surgery. she is in more and more pain, and can only be comfortable lying flat, in which position a limited number of things can be done to entertain oneself. I need to go home and play talking games with her (live-narrated fan-fiction starring my children in their favorite fictional universes, AIMosDefHMYB.) they want to drain fluid from her spine into her lungs?! they want to connect her precious spinal fluids to a spongy airborne bacteria filter why now? are they aware of other locations for fluid, such as, everything in the universe exterior to my child's body? and poor baby in a fit of depression after struggling to work on math problems on the computer screen took a knife into her room to ostentatiously mope with (NO SHAME), and my husband actually took it rather well considering his aggressive mental health and propensity to worry about his girlies, but she then went to see the school counselor (with whom she had a preëxisting appointment) and told her about this. there was poor husband x, thinking, at last I can get some work done this afternoon instead of taking my child to the doctor, and then the call came for the two-hour long emergency meeting with the principal of the girls' school. girl x is resentful that the counsellor didn't give even one shit about her privacy. I understand this, but feel I could have told her exactly what would happen, if only I had been there. I have to admit she might be slightly pissed that I posted this also, but there's no one else to talk to at the moment, and she's free to tell her internet friends about me also...
while I was typing that she called my husband at work to say the wire of her braces snapped while she was lying down and now they need to go in an emergency fashion to the orthodontist so the inside of her lip doesn't get cut worse. HNDE4GF89IVFDEUYFUCKIGT4NOUGBCFUCKWTRWTFEVEN
this one of the few times in my life I think that washing down some of the morphine, speed and valium on my bedside table with 2 c bourbon (conveniently located on the outside porch!) would do me up nice. I am upset but no one is here to rely on me. I'm not tempted to get hammered before going to the spine surgeon, for example. no one is counting on me now except the dog, and he's asleep. well, and my chemo-woozy mom would be pretty upset if I was too drunk to hold her hair back when she puked. right. my mom! I'm fine now. I'll maybe stop listening to that song though. 'somebody's cold one is giving me chills.' maybe I'll put in my bite guard so I can stop. grinding. my teeth.
on the plus side, I guess they'll be getting her those paper math print-outs like they supposed to for her dyslexia for real now. they're going to be ON that shit.
Post title (maybe intentionally) reminds me of this song.
I could pack for the plane tomorrow, or order a car to the airport. I woke up at 12:45 this afternoon; I should be tanned, rested and ready. no? no, I'll just read bullshit on the internet then. cool.
I was in a shitty mood but helping my friend's delightful teenaged daughter with her Latin homework was very soothing. Also I got to tell her she would miss the macrons when the go away.
Don't know if it's still there, but Heathers was on Hulu earlier this year.
Holy cow, al. What a parade of horribles. Hang tight. Do self-care. Call your sponsor if need be. (I hope I'm not overstepping.)
Want a distracting movie? Christmas Wedding Baby is on Netflix. Delightful romantic comedy with plenty of sisterly angst love.
14: so true. especially if she ever tries latin poetic composition. like everything wasn't already long by position! I honestly have zero clue how anyone ever successfully applied greek prosody to a language so ill-suited for it. every fucking syllable is long. not that I'm bitter about my failures or anything.
PS I am sure she knows this but back in the day I found wax to be a very helpful jury-rigged solution to broken brace wire stabbing me in the lip.
17: I still hyperventilate when thinking about a class where I had to identify the meter of previously unread Latin poetry that had been written out all run together with no spaces/word breaks.
thanks witt! I'll be ok, I'm just annoyed and helpless-feeling. rather than pack I'll just work on planning my trip with my childhood best friend to india! we went together in 1992 for a few months and it ruled. no one else wants to go to india with me. we're going in march, for holi in maybe agra and then go to rajasthan. lake palace hotel in udaipur, here we come! I want to go to kashmir but um...
I dated a man from Kashmir briefly. Gorgeous skiiing pictures. I badly wanted to visit, and I don't even ski.
when my friend was 16 she went to india, and to kashmir, with her mom and dad and at my sleepover birthday party in the then-unfinished attic of this very house she made me blood-oath-promise I would go with her. we have yet to make entirely good on the deal.
nosflow: miley cyrus does a great jolene.
thanks for the responses, my peeps. I promise I am cheered by venting here, and I am less crazy than I seem. no, really, that was what neil the ethical werewolf said after I first met him and asked did I seem like he expected: "you're less crazy in real life" was his verdict. we can quiz torrey pine at al. from last night about it. "al, more, less, or equi-crazy in real life?" not that I haven't had a total nervous breakdown on our blog in the last three years but who's counting? I was fine. god, are my fucking brother and sister ever going to get here from west virginia or what? I guess I better book a car and pack if I'm going to lord anything over them. I don't have a ton of stuff here so I'll just push everything clean into my one suitcase, de-tune the ukulele for the plane, and count out the medicine I took too much of and now have to ration out at the end of the month like always. très boring.
where is the west coast contingent to entertain me? are you drunk on protein, tiger-bro? I demand the teo and gswift show. someday swifty and I can have a podcast together and it will be awesome.
I packed my suitcase like a motherfucking adult! I put my small things of liquids/gels in an appropriately sized ziploc bag like a boss. I am not out of all my medicine. nah. I'm ready to hand my bro party favor valium to help him come down off a shitty, tiring dubious energy-fueled drive. fuck it, clonopin! it's going to be so way legitimate like how normal people would do something.
I'm going to call maryland's finest, barwood taxi, which used to blow goat balls but now, in competition with uber, will generally come when you call them (knock on wood) and book a car and then...then I'll wait for my bro and sis to come back from never-never land west vriginia. god knows going to sleep is a ridiculous plan. who sleeps anymore? it's passé. yep. any minute now I'll use the phone. after I die five times in candy crush, maybe. don't want to rush things. I'll live-blog the call.
I'm sorry you're going through this push-and-pull of competing obligations, Alameida.
How well I remember the logistical nightmare, the guilt-inducing and crazy-making, combination of child-who-needs-me, and parent-who-needs-me, as well. And, of course, the child and the parent did not live in the same place, lived very far apart indeed, and therefore (speaking purely from a pragmatic point of view, which had to do with airfares and schedules and so on) which one needed me more at what particular point in time, and how was I to decide? It seemed impossible to adjudicate such complex, particularist, and locally-determined claims from any position of abstract ethical obligation, and mostly it was an ad hoc affair that left me feeling anxious and guilty and short of sleep.
There is a sociological literature on the so-called 'sandwich generation,' but it always struck me as so bland and bloodless, it didn't even begin to capture the true craziness, I guess.
I'm here, hoping that whatever stomach thing I developed yesterday is on its way out and I won't re-taste my deliberately bland dinner in the middle of the night.
Anyway, I don't have much to say except that I volunteered today at an event at the synagogue at which one of my friends set me up with another friend of his who I've never met but who seems to be quite attractive based on the picture I've seen, so I now have a date at least in principle (although the specifics have yet to be arranged).
We had gin and tonnukah after all. And frittatukah. Ok just frittata. It doesn't get its own holiday day.
Why not? You've got eight days to work with.
No Hanukkah can be complete without Tom Lehrer.
Sarah Vaugh'nakkah.
Coq au vinakkah.
Mow the lawnnakah.
Jumbo prawnakkah.
I'm sorry, just plain jane, that is really hard to deal with. it sounds like you are through the worst of it, I hope. with my dad and step-mom sick (the latter with hep C), and my in-laws in oregon also unwell--so much so that they didn't want us to come for christmas (!) feeling they'd be too tired after five days in phoenix with their other grandchild--it's just crazy up in this bitch. I agree that "sandwich" doesn't seem to cover it.
for financial reasons it's barely conceivable I will have to spend six months and one day in the states in 2016 (US trust is fucking me sideways and I may need to be a non-expat for one tax year to get them to roll over a five-year loan due in oct. 2016, backed by my investments, into a normal credit line which I can then move to a bank that doesn't suck.) I had been thinking, oh well it wouldn't be the worst thing, it may be the last year of my mom's life, and this is too hard on my seriously ill sister how it is, with her providing care she should be getting. but now with girl x so ill I can't think how I could manage it. it's very frustrating. if everyone just lived in one place life would be so much easier.
but I live in narnia so my kids can have the best life, everything clean and orderly and calm, and my illness doesn't hold them back because I have our wonderful helper to rely on for ordinary things, and I can get ten hours of sleep and then do the fun stuff with them. I know they wouldn't be able to handle the shock of suddenly coming to the US and going to public school here (probably--I don't know if I could get them into NCS or sidwell--I feel like it's way tougher now, particularly to get into 10th grade). america isn't home to them, and I know girl x particularly would find it really tough. narnia does have the advantage of letting kids be kids longer--the schoolgirls are just dorky schoolgirls in school uniforms who still play hand-clapping games in 7th grade. my dad's little ala-teens in SC are starting to have sex issues in 5th and 6th grade. granted he's got the troubled kids, but then again the really truly troubled won't go to lame meetings, so he's probably got the medium-troubled kids. 6th grade? that ain't right. I know teen pregnancy and all has gone down in the US but compared to narnia shit is still way too real.
my mom is coming to narnia right after xmas actually so that's cool, and my sister will come a bit later, with partial overlap. I'm planning a just sisters trip like I did with my bro a few years back. she and I were in lombok together a couple years ago briefly but I want to go to the metropole in hanoi with her, then maybe just hoi an (not also cambodia like with my bro because it'd be tough for my sister to walk so far around the monuments.) as I was talking about at the meetup last night, all three of us want to go the the chernobyl exclusion zone together on an all-sibs tip, because no one else will go with us but we all want to SO BAD.
I should focus on being grateful that I have the money to fly when I want, and change dates without sweating it, and pay for my children's care, and go spend two weeks in india with my best friend to get pelted with colored powder and eat bhang sweetmeats in uttar pradesh somewhere. I have an awesome life and every moment there are people in situations like mine without money to ease the way and have to make terrible, painful choices. our helper's son re-injured his brain after severely damaging it several years back (you guys may remember we've been footing his medical bills because we suck at charity generally and find it easier to give where we can see the results). he is sobbing to his mother because he can't play sports ever again and that's his whole life. he's an 11-year-old boy in a poor town to whom playing pickup games with his friends in the nabe is all he cares about. and she is only there one month of the year to comfort him. when I think of what she's facing I have to be thankful for the problems I have.
Usually around this time of year I listen to Dr. Dre's The Chronukkah.
36: How does your bank know where you are or aren't? It's it something that could be solved by flying in and out of Vancouver and popping up in SC every once in a while?
it sounds like you are through the worst of it,
Yes, but only because my parents are now both dead, sadly. Which simplifies matters vastly, I have to say, except that your heart might just break over and over again, as mine has, and still does.
My mother died on 22 December 2012 (three days before Christmas). My dad died three months later, on 14 March 2013 (3 days before Paddy's Day). As my youngest sister put it about our parents' times of death: 'Well, thanks for ruining two holidays for us!'
Listening to Bing Crosby, 'Do You Hear What I Hear,' I'm apt to start hyperventilating, or something. My mum's favourite Christmas song, and never mind your critique (yes, it's my critique too) of sentimental, bourgeois, white North American whateverness.
My parents were just barely middle-class, I guess. Maybe upper-echelon working-class? At a certain point in my adolesence, I learned to feel ashamed of them, of their 'common' and unschooled tastes, of their love of, say, Bing Crosby.
At a certain point, say six months or so, after they had died, I learned to feel ashamed of that shame. I would now give an arm or a leg, or whatever was asked of me, to have my dear little mum still here with me again. Her name was Catherine, and we called her Catty, and then Chatty; and she was the funniest woman I will ever know (of my dad calling her cosmetics bag a 'beauty kit,' which was already to sort of not get it, my mum joked: 'Oh John, you're putting a lot of faith in that bag.' But my mother was so pretty! all fresh-faced and freckled and just truly gorgeous in a low key sort of way).
Er. sorry for that digression. This parental-care stuff is truly crazy-making.
I could say today was shitty because I was up till four stressed about girl x and didn't clean the house like how I planned, and feel sick and scared and got bad health news about my baby. or I could say today was amazing because I got to snuggle in bed with my mom and our cat and watch a BBC crime show together, holding hands under the covers, and my bff since 7th grade came over to hang with me and I beaded a cool lapis lazuli necklace for her, and now I'm going to see my two favorite people in the world and probably hang late just being together and eating christmas cookies a neighbor brought over. AA is lame and preachy in some ways but it really does help you see that taking each day as it comes is the way to go. I really appreciate all of y'all too and it means a lot to know that people care and can relate.
seannukah--watch eight movies in which sean bean dies.
pawnnukah--the one chess piece that seemed fated for death survives the next eight moves and becomes a queen.
wafer, vonnukah--each person takes it in turn to walk around the room with a pronounced limp while telling stories about cholera.
yuannukah: you celebrate based on a basket of currencies that is kept miraculously low, but interrogate yourself about how it disadvantages ordinary chinese would-be consumers.
the wrath of khannukah--self-eplanatory
don juannakau: seduce 8 women, and watch as a small squeeze of lube goes a miraculously long way.
just plain jane: I'm so sorry both your parents died; I can only imagine how sad that would be. your feelings about judging their tastes--and then un-judging them--is lovely.
Sympathies Al, and JPJ.
I've always wanted to go to India. I've been planning to go while I'm so close and flights are quick and cheap. Maybe in the spring.
Love for 41.2
Way past time for me to step out now.
Also love for all of Smearcase's comments on this post.
For the Stasi fans among us: Erich Chanukah?
JPJ, I'm so sorry for your loss. Your mother sounds sweet and charming, and grief is such a strange thing.
Almeida, I'm sorry you've got all this stuff happening, it sounds completely overwhelming and you seem to be handling it really well.
Seconding the sympathy for JPJ and al. And can I just say that I am eagerly waiting for the liveblogging of "Al and Best Friend Go Round India" and might have to put in an offer for the movie rights. This has feel-good Christmas hit of 2017 written all over it. "Thelma & Louise meets The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel meets Sideways."
Can we cast Emily Blunt as the best friend? Because, you know, Emily Blunt.
Hoisannukah (renaming of the traditional Jewish custom of going out for Chinese food on Christmas day)
Szechuannukah (Orthodox version of above)
And of course:
"Why is this night different from AND MORE AWESOME THAN all other nights?"
"Because tonight is EKRANOPLANNUKAH!"
Alameida, I hope you mother continues to improve and that your daughter feels better just having you there to entertain and comfort her. I'm so jealous of your India trip. I'd love to be able to do that.
It's not comforting, but my commiserating parent thing this weekend was visiting my mother in her memory care unit. Dad placed her a few weeks ago. She is the youngest person there (so pretty physically active, as one might expect for a 65 year old), but also seems to be one of the most mentally impaired. At least she doesn't seem unhappy to be there, and the staff seems pretty engaged and nice. I brought trays of cookies for them (which hadn't occurred to my father somehow?), which they appreciated. Dad made the comment that she's in such physically good shape she could go on like this for years. I was torn between telling him how Alzheimers ends and the horror of its not ending.
I'm at the mid point of my 10 day shift looking after the folks in Florida. Situation does not at all seem as dire as represented by sisters-in-law, yet still quite serious. Dad doesn't particularly want to eat, but does so as an act of will, only to lose the nutritional value through diarrhea. My little brother came down for the weekend (undoubtedly because the one sister-in-law was sure I was falling down on the job) and this perked him up enough to make a couple of road trips (picking up duck breasts at the one place, sea bass at the Italian market way across town). Now he's gone, so I have to make Dad eat my cooking without pestering.
Mom's a lot more functional than represented, and can even drive up or down the island. Not really able to bring off a meal in less than 3 hours cooking time, but that's only a smallish change from 50 years ago, and no change at all from 20 years ago.
Why is the produce section of the grocery stores here like less than a third in size and far inferior in quality to what we have at home?
No Hanukkah here, obvsly, but I gotta go get the flags up . . .
Cheese selection at the Italian market here, though, compares favorably to any place in DC.
sorry cc and ydnew! those are both really tough situations. best wishes from me!
I worry about what happens if my memory goes when I get older. So much of my internal monologue is me reminding myself of reasons why I shouldn't be an asshole in a given situation. I suppose it's possible it would be O.K. if I also forgot all the reasons I had for being pissed off, but somehow I doubt it works that way.
41.last is especially great.
if I also forgot all the reasons I had for being pissed off, but somehow I doubt it works that way.
Based on most of the news reports since November 2008, it doesn't seem like it.
Obviously I will be heartbroken and all that when my dad dies, but mostly I can't even imagine what will be involved in dealing with his finances. I had long counted on my super business-minded SIL (who is more like my dad than me or my sister) to handle all that, but they're divorced now.
I should check on his will status.
52 It's probably no longer appropriate to call it Irish Alzheimers. Which is where you forget everything but your enemies and their many faults.
My dad is clearing the decks a bit. Sold, suddenly, the house in BC. I'll go out in a couple of weeks to pick up the artwork, and return before closing to pick up a selection of furniture. (I'm planning to impose an 80 year cut-off: anything in the family less than that goes to charity.) Canadian capital gains tax is quite a difficult project: finding receipts for work done over the 35 years they've owned and gradually built up the place is not going to be easy. He wants to get it done, which he can still do.
Wills, advance directives, etc all done.
I mostly just worry about getting rid of all the expired food in the refrigerator.
55: Any stereotype about the Irish that doesn't involve drunkenness has to be considered a net win.
43. A friend has just got back from India with this, if it helps to mitigate the longing.
59 Yikes! And I see my typhus vaccination is no good against that lousy scrub.
My greatest sympathy for JPJ and AL.
At a certain point, say six months or so, after they had died, I learned to feel ashamed of that shame. I would now give an arm or a leg, or whatever was asked of me, to have my dear little mum still here with me again.
Two songs about missing parents which that line reminded me of.
1) "I Brought My Father With Me -- Michael Peter Smith
"Car trips to Pennsylvania
When all of us would sing
He sang Bells Of Saint Mary's
And he sounded just like Bing
Summer days down at the shore
Remembering how he
Would bless himself with foam before
He'd dive into the sea "
2) "My Old Man -- Steve Goodman
"And oh the fights we had
When my brother and I got him mad;
He'd get all boiled up and he'd start to shout
And I knew what was coming so I tuned him out.
And now the old man's gone, and I'd give all I own
To hear what he said when I wasn't listening
To my old man'"
[Incidentally, I've thought of that as the weakest verse of a remarkable song, but the linked performance makes me reconsider that judgement.]
And now the old man's gone, and I'd give all I own
To hear what he said when I wasn't listening
To my old man
Yes, this. Thanks, NickS, for these verses.
Well, it's all so predictable and even formulaic, isn't it? But so too are loss and regret somewhat predictable, if not inevitable (that part of the story where your parents die really is inevitable, though). And people (like me) who are neither poets nor philosophers inevitably rely upon the formulations of the more gifted and the more literary, in an attempt to make some sort of sense out of the sorrow and the loss and the chaos.
Remembering how he
Would bless himself with foam before
He'd dive into the sea
Love this.
Yes, this. Thanks, NickS, for these verses.
I'm glad you appreciated, and I feel like I should say a little bit more.
First, worth mentioning, I know both of those songs because they're ones that my father sings. I heard "My Old Man" growing up, and he learned "I brought My Father With Me" when I was in High School. My paternal grandfather died before I was born, and my father doesn't reminisce about him much -- he was reserved and introverted and my grandmother was very extroverted and so there are more stories about her.
I've never asked specifically what those songs mean to him, but I know that he cares about both of them.
The thing that I find striking about, "I Brought My Father With Me" is the way it uses that very literal image in a figurative way. The chorus starts, "I brought my father with me /
I hope that you don't mind / I couldn't find it in me / To make him stay behind" and it's clear that the father isn't there physically, but in his heart and mind. In addition to the verse I quoted the final verse is also quite lovely.
"There are some ways I'm just like him
Some ways he was just like me
And sometimes when the mirror's dim
His face is clear to see
Tonight the winds of heaven
Blow the stars across the sky
I brought my father with me
I couldn't say goodbye "
As far as "My Old Man" I should clarify that, when I said the quoted verse was the weakest that's in contrast to the previous verse which is, I say without hyperbole, one of the finest verses that I know of. Full lyrics for the song at the end of this comment but I will highlight a couple of things.
1) There is no chorus. It isn't something you miss, but it's part of what makes the song feel so intimate; it doesn't circle back, it just keeps expanding in a way which feels like a train of thought.
2) The first and last verses don't have a single wasted word. The opening lines, "I miss my old man tonight / and I wish he was here with me" have a simplicity that's much harder to write than it looks.
3) There's a video of John Prine performing the song in which he talks a little bit about how it was written. "This was a song Steve wrote about his father Bud Goodman after Bud died of a sudden heart attack. It took Steve about six months for everything to soak in. He kept telling me he was wondering when it would soak in but he didn't know it was going to turn into a song."
4) That second verse is amazing. First thing to note is that the song doesn't consistently rhyme. In the first verse there's only the couplet of "cigars/car". So when the Second verse starts with the emphasized rhymes of "War/Corps", "load/road" and "bomb/mom" it creates a feeling of strict structure. But the rhymes aren't evenly spaced. The second two are longer lines than the first two, and are farther apart. The third rhyme is shorter in terms of syllables, but the melody shifts at that point and by the times it arrives at "mom" there's such a feeling of freedom. You can hear the entire baby boom in those five lines -- all of a sudden the constraints of the war are over and "not long after that" Steve was born.
On top of all that the Rhyme of "bomb" and "mom" is haunting on it's own right. That sense of freedom comes directly out of (and rhymes with) the dropping of the atomic bomb. The song doesn't emphasize the point, but it's part of what makes the verse unforgettable -- the listener is compelled to consider that history.
MY OLD MAN
Steve Goodman
I miss my old man tonight
and I wish he was here with me
With his corny jokes and his cheap cigars
He could look you in the eye and sell you a car.
That's not an easy thing to do,
but no one ever knew a more charming creature
on this earth than my old man.
He was a pilot in the big war in the U.S. Army Air Corps
in a C-47 with a heavy load
full of combat cargo for the Burma Road.
And after they dropped the bomb
he came home and married Mom and
not long after that
he was my old man.
And oh the fights we had
when my brother and I got him mad;
He'd get all boiled up and he'd start to shout
and I knew what was coming so I tuned him out.
And now the old man's gone, and I'd give all I own
to hear what he said when I wasn't listening
to my old man.
I miss my old man tonite
and I can almost see his face
He was always trying to watch his weight
and his heart only made to fifty-eight.
For the first time since he died
late last night I cried.
I wondered when I was gonna do that
for my old man.
Ah geez. Well 64 just pushed all of my buttons. Damn you, NickS! Also: thank you for this.
My parents on their wedding day:
I think I am not just being biased and partial when I suggest that my old man was rather good-looking as a young man? With his 'Black Irish' looks, he had that 'tall, dark, and handsome' thing going on. He was a devout Roman Catholic with a sincere devotion to Our Lady, but he also had an anti-clerical bent, and was deeply suspicious of our local parish priest.
His sense of humour could be biting and sarcastic, but mostly it was self-deprecating. He didn't think much of self-aggrandizing claims: he thought that people should be more modest, and 'decent' (bragging, and self-display, were 'indecent' by definition, according to the mental-moral universe that my father inhabited).
He grew up in a working-class (predominantly French-Canadian and Irish) neighourhood in Ottawa, but won a scholarship to attend the local university. This achievement he credited entirely to the priests (about whom he was suspicious, as a class, but give credit where credit is due). 'We were but savages,' he sometimes said, but the priests at his middle and high schools were apparently determined to whip those boys into shape.
He also loved hockey, and Thai cookery.
He was devoted to Saint Therese, 'The Little Flower.'
I think I am not just being biased and partial when I suggest that my old man was rather good-looking as a young man?
Indeed. Very rakish.