Moe

Today is my dad’s birthday.  He would have been 85 years old.

Funny, when he died at 70, I thought that was a pretty good run.  Now I’m not so sure.

It wasn’t marked on my calendar.  I wasn’t anticipating it.  But when I placed my watch on the counter yesterday, to time how long I cleaned my contacts, I noticed the date was wrong, that I hadn’t advanced it, hadn’t accounted for the brief month of February.  And if it wasn’t February 30th, then it was…  I started doing the math in my head.  Well, it must be March 2nd, which means tomorrow will be March 3rd.  Why does that date ring a bell?  Why is it significant?

Must be somebody’s birthday.  First I thought of Mark Levy, down the street.  His was the first birthday I ever remembered.  But that was April 2nd, well, maybe not the 2nd, but certainly April.  And my sister’s birthday is March 15th.  Then it dawned on me, the 3rd is my DAD’S!

I felt almost sacrilegious forgetting.

But aren’t you supposed to celebrate the day they die?

I’m not exactly sure what day my father died.  You see at dinner, he told my mother he wasn’t feeling well, that he needed to go to the hospital.  My mother implored him to ride it out.  But my father INSISTED!

The last time my father insisted was when he gave up the wheel on the way back from Boston.  My father could be nodding out, he could have driven for hours, but he would NEVER relinquish the wheel.  But he had this pain in his back, it was just too much.  It was cancer.

Actually, I diagnosed it at Mammoth, where we are right now.  He went out to pick up a pizza with me and while we were waiting he had no desire to case the real estate, one of his favorite pastimes.  He just stood with his forehead resting in his palm by the cash register until I became so bizarred I had to remove him, had to take him back to the condo.  And after returning from finally retrieving the pizza, my father was nowhere to be found.  My mother told me he’d gone with Jill to the airport, to search for her husband.

YOU LET HIM OUT OF THE CONDO?

I had an argument with my mother, I told her there was something wrong.  She said my dad had just had his annual checkup two weeks before and he was fine.

That was two months before the drive home from Boston.

I spoke with my father the night he died.  My mother put him on the phone in the hospital.  I don’t know if he’d taken his hearing aid out, but he couldn’t hear a single word I said.  He was so very afraid.

He died hours later, early in the morning.

So, yesterday I anticipated today.  Wondered if his birthday would sit with me, unnerve me.

And it did.

Because he wasn’t here.  And he would have liked to have been.  On a bluebird day, when he could have gotten a glass of wine on the deck and reveled in his efforts that resulted in this lifestyle.

Last night, just before I went to bed, I was reading a throwaway publication, about Mammoth.  And there was an article on skiing after fifty.  It freaked me out, I’m over fifty.

And just now, lying on the floor of the Mammoth Mountain Inn, doing my back exercises, I remembered that my father thought he’d never make it to seventy, since his dad hadn’t.  He just limped in, he passed away mere weeks after he became a septuagenarian.

I used to think his superstition was just that.  But as I age, I now only count on living to seventy.  And that’s not even two decades away.

Now it seems like my father was robbed.  He might not have been cut down in the prime of his life, but he was still alert, still vital, still as sharp as ever, he hadn’t lost a step.  Can death just sneak up on you?  As I sit here feeling about twenty eight, can something be mutating in my body, eating me alive, and when I find out will it be too late, will I just slide into home, will that be the end?

Funny, when you are in your twenties, trying to find yourself, wasting so much time, angsting, you think you’re going to live forever.  But as you get older, you find your place in life, but you suddenly realize you’re not going to be here ad infinitum.  Usually you can forget the end, but every once in a while, like today, on the anniversary of my father’s birth, the finality creeps in.  It looms like some grim reaper in a black hood.  Does everybody feel this?  I’m not sure, but the movie ends the same for all of us.  Hopefully later rather than sooner.

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