I changed my plans about what to talk about, and was uncertain about what to do, and then I realized, “It’s freakin’ Fathers’ Day, duh!” So go ahead, bring your tales of great dads and bad dads to the discussion today at noon central time.
That’s the conversation starter, anyway. I imagine we’ll degenerate into random topics before the end of the hour, and that’s OK.
It’s also OK if you skip it altogether because you’ve just been reminded to call your dad or be a dad.
Well, my dad died this week. 80 years is a good run, especially considering all the strikes against him. His mother smoked like a stovepipe while carrying him, so he had a serious heart defect that required open-heart surgery when he was 18. In 1950. I’ll spare you the details of the procedure, but it was tantamount to a mechanic having to disassemble the firewall of your car to work on an engine valve while it’s running.
So he recovered from that, and continued the chain-smoking habit he got from his mom. When I was living with him in college, I woke to find him flopping on the kitchen floor like a fish, having a major stroke. He’d probably been there close to an hour before I found him. He managed to recover from that, and stopped to buy cigarettes on his way home from the hospital. After I moved away, he had another stroke of equal severity, and recovered fully from that too.
He eventually developed emphysema and had to breathe out of a bottle. He would turn it off to light up, until that one time he got lazy and left the oxygen flow on and lost his beard and eyebrows.
A few weeks ago, he got pneumonia and kept smoking until he collapsed, and spent a day on the floor before he managed to roll over and get his phone out of his pocket. He went into the hospital with kidney failure and bloodwork results that my sister the MD described as “not compatible with a live human.”
Nevertheless, he held on long enough for his kids to visit him in the hospital. All of his siblings and friends have long since died. He finally passed away a few days ago.
RIP Jim Hodgson, 1928-2018
Condolences, Artor.
My dad died last year. He was a WWII vet who didn’t talk about it much. He was pretty much the antithesis of me, being a sports nut (played baseball in HS) and good with his hands as a wood worker. He made toys for his friends in his later years. In some ways, though, he is my hero. He never knew a stranger, and the very best example of that is the fact that the most heartfelt and moving tribute at his funeral was from the waitress who he befriended at the weekly family breakfast. This attitude is one I strive to emulate. It’s good to have unattainable goals, I guess…