My father was everything a girl could hope for-haired, dark, handsome and crazy about me. He held the number one attribute of a little kid my performance: it was a smooth dancer, smiling like a little Mary Janes my scuffed his wing tips. He was a gentle man and gentleman, so kind that he would fall quarter increase in the toll booth collector cart driver in a line behind him.
My father never went to school but I knew he was smart because he never talked to my brother Jack or me in baby talk. "Do not gesture with your utensils," he would say. "Do not yawn audibly!" My dad once said "no" instead of "shall not." No other dad on the block did.
While I idolized my father, I knew my mother first dibs. Dad was so in love with my mother he used to put the rivets in the hat that spelled TGFM, thank God for Mary. Another acronym of his, used to defuse any small family scuffle, the "BD. Teach Daddy." Dad spoiled me what to expect in a man. (Thank God, I lucked out when I met Joe, though I doubt he'll put on baseball caps TGFML him anytime soon.)
When we were young, our family would flee to a tiny cabin in South Jersey Lake-no hot water or shower, and enjoy our very own outhouse. After dinner, we all sit on the beat up red couch on screened porch. Dad would put arms around us and we would all belt out "You are My Sunshine" and "I've been working on the railroad." But when my dad put in "Carolina Moon," we do not become so just let him sing the night stars in the croon-y Perry Como his style. My mother would hold his hand and smile.
Year after year, I watched my dad loves my mom with a passion as she fell ill with a rare blood disease that would eventually take his life.
With her gone, I tried to be a dad. I would visit him every month in Florida and I'm sitting in a recliner next to his mom and we would watch Seinfeld reruns of his favorite. My father had suffered two strokes, so that he does not talk as much, but his vocabulary never slacked off. During a speech therapy practice, I asked him to repeat: "I feel sad" and he can form words, "I ... feel ... Lu-gu-BRI-ouuuusss."
But the MRI revealed something that I could not fix-terminal of the brain and kidney cancer. I brought my dad back north, so Jack and I could help him feel comfortable. One night, after failing miserably trying to give him morphine, I ran out of darkness, crying, "I am his daughter, not his doctor." When I pulled myself together again, he could not hang on the red leather couch set up for the time and now, his long naps. Curled on the couch, almost 92, he looked almost childlike. "Dad, this sofa remind you of our cabin on the lake?" He grinned at the memory. I whispered, "Remember when we used to sing together?" He looked at me and be my dad started to sing, so quietly that I had to bend close to hear. "Carolina Moon, keep shining, shining on the one that awaits me. Carolina Moon, I'm pining, pining for the place I long to be."
Dad was losing my mother. Let him go to her was the hardest I've ever done. Today, the day his father did not make me sad. It brings back memories, only the starry skies, strong his arms around us, his voice clear and strong in the night. I hear it still. I know this for sure. I will always be his girl.
