Father's Day, 2018

It may be a station wagon, but it was fast.

All you really have left when somebody leaves this Earth are memories. You can have things and photos left by that person, but what those really are, are triggers for your memories of them. My dad died eighteen years ago and on this Father's Day all I have left are bits and pieces of my time with him. Probably the furthest back I can remember is Dad smashing down the wall in our bedroom to create a dining room. He had finally finished the two attic bedrooms, one for the boys and one for his only daughter, and now he would turn our old bedroom into the dining room. It was exciting to see him smash that wall down with a sledgehammer. Lots of dust. I also remember riding in Dad's Packard. A large pre-war car with running boards that we would sit on outside the Dairy Palace, while slurping down our ice cream cones. A semi-truck ran over that car. It was parked, nobody hurt. There was the time that dad sat on a bag of nails. I vividly remember him bent over in the bathroom while Mom extracted each nail from his butt cheeks, and dabbed a dot of mercurochrome and each wound. Almost every summer Dad would take us on vacation in a car loaded with kids, suitcases, and vacation crap. One year he took us to Saint Louis, where he was born, to see his aunt and some other family members. I remember clearly that they were the last white people in a neighborhood that had turned all black. Mostly I remember that our relatives all lived in old houses and that it was hotter than Satan's spit.

Baseball figures large in my memories of Dad. He listened to the White Sox on the radio and watched them when they were on television while enjoying a glass of Blatz Beer. He also took us to see White Sox games, once parking about a mile away in the Bridgeport neighborhood. I watched him give a couple of hard looking city kids, fifty cents each to watch the car. I did not like that because all I got for my allowance was a nickel per week. Of course I now realize he paid them not to trash his car. On a hot Father's Day in the 1980s I turned the tables on Dad and took him to see a Chicago Cubs game. It turned out to be too hot for him, so we walked back to my apartment and sat in the air conditioning, drinking beer, and eating hot dogs while watching the last four innings on television. Much better than the nose bleed seats I had bought at Wrigley Field. All good memories. I do have one bad baseball memory with Dad. That's when he "talked" me into joining Little League. I was horrible at it and did not want to play in Little League. The last time Dad saw me play baseball, after striking out three times, he told me that if I didn't do better they would put me in the instructional league. He was correct, that is what happened and I hated that even more.

Other good memories. Dad letting me buy a car before I even had a drivers license. It wouldn't go faster than forty miles per hour, but I loved that old Studebaker. Later, Dad gave me the keys to his brand new 1967 Ford with the 390ci engine. Sure it was a station wagon, but that day I found out it could go way faster than the 120mph on the speedometer. Probably my very best memory was in his last couple of years with us. I introduced him to Mark at a family get together at my sister Sue's house. While I was in the bathroom, Dad took Mark around and introduced him as, "Alan's new, special friend."