...

I guess at some point I have to come across the inevitable topic of Death. I’ve been dealing with death in one way or another recently, from the suicide of my friend Nate, to the impending death of my dad. I’m still not sure as yet how to deal with that type of loss of life. At this point in our country’s latest police action, close to a thousand young men, fathers, uncles, brothers and friends have lost their lives overseas. Every night there is a new set of numbers to be added to the thousands of memorials around the country.

Still, death is a thing that’s still a very external reality, albeit inevitable for all of us at some point or another. The only reference I had to death up until recently was that of my grandfather’s back in 1985. His was very sudden and took everyone by complete shock. Oddly enough, no matter how much you may be prepared for the death of a loved one, the shock of the actual event still leaves you breathless, as if you’ve had the wind knocked out of you.
As far as my own dad is concerned, his has been a long and drawn out ordeal. It seems rather morbid to look at it like that, but in light of the fact that he has been in such poor health the last few years-since I was in the Navy in fact-that the reality becomes more of an expectation. So, it becomes more of a waiting game for the family. The next phone call I get from my mom is the one where she tells me that the old man is gone. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare me a little bit. It scares me a lot. Not because he wouldn’t be around any longer, although that would be a part of it. The part that scares me most is to not be able to tell him that I’m sorry for hating him all of these years. I don’t want to have to explain to him why I hated him, that’s my problem. But I feel I owe it to him to at least tell him I’m sorry for feeling that way.

It’s becoming clearer to me now that no matter how I may have felt about it in the past, I wasn’t the one who was being pushed away from everything. For most of my life I felt like an anomaly, a stranger, an outsider. I felt like the one who didn’t quite fit into the picture quite right. I spent a lot of my time shoving people away from me. Not pushing, shoving. My dad, as much as he tried in my youth, did everything he could for us kids. He may not have made all the right decisions or choices in what he did for work or where we lived, but he always did it with the best intentions in mind. All that I’ve ever done was to shove him away.

Now as I’m looking at and almost expecting the next call from my mom to mean the end of his life, I feel an overwhelming need to atone, to repent, to say that I’m sorry for shoving him and the rest of the family away. Let him know that nothing that happened in the past means anything anymore because us kids all turned out all right. I think as the sick, lonely old man that he is right now, he needs to hear it from me. My mom has said that she’s pretty much forgiven him for his transgressions against her, and my sisters have as well I believe. Once more in grand style I’m the last holdout, mostly because I’m a stubborn bullheaded sonofabitch. If I don’t do any of that soon, I’ll be regretting it for the rest of my life.

My brother Flagg was staying at my apartment a few years back when I lived in St. Paul. He had come on his way back East to a sailing ship in Massachusetts and stopped on his way through. Before he came to Minnesota, he had stopped in Colorado to see his father, who was in poor health at the time. He did what all sons should do at that stage in their father’s lives and made his peace with him. About a week or so after he got to my place, he got word that his father had passed on. I didn’t even have to ask when I walked into my apartment that day. He and I had ironically been talking about it the day before, and now here he was actually dealing with the reality of his father’s death. He and his dad had a worse relationship than that of my dad and I. At the end, they both realized that their feelings toward each other in the past meant nothing and that their meeting before Flagg’s trip out East was going to be their last on this earth. They both knew that and understood what that meant. How my dad and I come to that level has as yet to be seen, but I do know that this is something that I have to do, for my sake, as well as my family’s.

Walker

I get around the streets of Duluth quite a bit, either by walking or my trusty mule (bike). I think it's safe to say I've encountered a good number of the residents of this town whilst pounding the sidewalks and pedaling the streets, and there is one old fella I seem to run into...randomly... everywhere. He's a kindly gent, about 80 if he's a day, with tan skin and whitewhitewhite hair. I've spoken to him briefly on a few occasions, either to tell him the time (odd, because I gave up wearing a watch in 1996) or to just acknowledge his presence in this reality. Mostly we exchange a wave as we pass by one another. I've run into him mostly around the blocks between 7th and 9th Aves and 1st to 4th streets, and as far away as downtown. Mostly he walks, but sometimes I've seen him with a broom in his hand sweeping sidewalks and steps to people's houses. The other day, I saw him across the street from my house sweeping the sidewalk in front of the duplex across the street. He even went so far as to sweep right up to the stairs and up onto the stoop and doorstep before he returned to the small pile of debris at the corner near the storm drain.

He sort of reminds me of the twin sisters that used to live down the street from me when I lived in St. Paul. They'd walk to the store every day, arm in arm always with the matching scarves and coordinating lipstick and sparkling blue eyes. My friend Beth pointed them out to me one day as we were smoking and drinking coffee on the front stoop of our building. They would take that same walk almost every day for three of the four years I lived there. About a year before I moved to Duluth, one of the sisters passed away. It was strange to see one without the other walking down the street. I almost didn't recognise her walking by herself. She would take the same walk she and her sister used to for about another year or so, and then one afternoon she didn't come walking down the sidewalk. About a week later I found out that she too had passed on.

Lake Superior Martini

This is a random thought I had while walking to work in Canal Park one winter morning...

The icy southwestern tip of Lake Superior
Is like a humongous martini.
(stirred, not shaken)
Duluth is a piano bar,
I am a piano player.
My feet tickle the wooden ivories of the lakewalk
As I walk to work on a cold winter morning.


November 2002