My 10 Tears of Remembering

Ten years ago, on July 23, 2003, the darkest day of my life happened. That was the night I got the call from my mother that my dad had died.

It's been 10 years. Damn. I hate even thinking it's been longer than one year.

I'm going to do my best not to attempt stunning prose (because I will fail miserably). I'm not writing about this as some form of therapy (because I never went the therapy route and never wanted to ... welcome to my life of eternal internalization). No, I'm just going to try to share and relive some memories on the 23rd of each month this year because by the time July 23 rolls around, I want to try and think of something, anything, other than that horrible day that ruined me in so many ways.

I don't have a set schedule of topics. I was trying last week to be witty and come up with a set post idea (Sports, UK, food, movies, etc) but I found that either the topics overlap or in some cases (Sports) my fingers would likely fall off before I finished writing it. Instead I'm just going to throw out some stuff and see what sticks. I'll try and stick to a narrative or theme if I can, but there's just no telling where a particular entry may wander to.

As this is the initial setup post, I'll briefly talk about my flight of fancy or lunacy, depending on how you take it.

About six years ago I jotted down some notes (now unfortunately lost) in what I'd hoped would be an outline of a memoir of sorts. It would have been, more or less, just about me and my dad. The peg would be that I would run a marathon, and I'd recall past memories of my dad while interspersing bits about how insanely stupid it is for me to try and run a full marathon thinking that this was a sound reason to think I could live just one day longer than him.

He was 53, and I retain this "think about it every day" fear that I'm going to shuffle off this mortal coil at the same age. The men in my family lineage haven't always stuck around very long (Campbell and Duffy women, however, are epic long-lasters, so my sister is in luck). This fear has shaped a lot of decisions that have affected not only myself but with the wife and so on. For one thing, I sure as shit go to the doctor a lot more often, and read more articles about coronary health than I probably should.

Shocking no one, sports was a big connector for my dad and I. So unless I can conjure up some golf-related way of honoring him (I've had thoughts but other than shooting in the 70s I can't think of much else), I thought maybe something like running a marathon would be cool. It would mean me getting on a better path to healthiness and also conquer something that feels scary (it's 26 freaking miles of running nonstop) and satisfying (did I mention its 26 freaking miles?) all at the same time. To document my prep for such a thing and actually do it and blend that in with memories of my dad could be something worthwhile, if even for myself.

I have no talent for writing long form, but I figured at worst I knew a couple people who are stronger writers than me who could help if it ever came to fruition. But then I lost the outline and haven't tried again since. Hell, the content may only fill up 50 pages so it could make a nice novella for someone to use as kindling when the zombie apocalypse arrives.

And with that, I'll close out this initial post, but there are at least 11 more to come. If I'm smart, I'll sprinkle a few smaller ones in here and there just for good measure. And speaking of good measure, I'll let you all in on classic memory. My dad loved the movie Scrooged. Sure, everyone loves it, but he loved it above all else for the ending. I'm a bit of a scrooge when it comes to birthdays and holidays. He'd sit and rewind and re-watch the final 10 minutes more often than I can count. He showed a hard exterior but inside he was a hopeless sap just like his son.

Maybe one day I'll take a long vacation and try to rediscover that outline. Maybe I'll do it just for the sake of myself, to try and remember as much as I can so I don't forget things. It's the least I could do for someone I so desperately have missed for the last 10 years.

Cobblings from My Memories

I'm reluctant to give up comfortable T-shirts. It's rare to find a shirt that fits you just right and is super comfortable at the same time. It's even better when, as you retire shirts from the public, the truly good ones live a long afterlife as shirts to do yard work in, generally be lazy in or just sleep in.

So it's with sadness that I have to send this shirt to the cotton grave. It's been a good one, but holes are starting to form and it's just time to say goodbye, which is a concept I wish Steven Tyler could grasp, but alas he must continue to make music that barely appeals to deaf dogs, let alone music consumers.

This shirt does hold a special place for me, which is why it's hard to give it up. This was one of my going-away gifts when I interned at the St. Pete Times back in 1999. The reporters and copy desk folks pretty much hung out at two bars on regular basis, either The Garden (my personal favorite, where the bartender Bill always had two screwdrivers waiting for me at 1 a.m. after my shift was over) or The Press Box over in Tampa where all the media types hung out.

So getting a T-shirt from The Press Box was a nice gesture considering I was just an intern (and one of 15 at that), yet somehow they took to me and I made friendships that still last to this day with the likes of Donna, Ecton, Todd, Gerry, Liz and many more. I was lucky enough to have done so well at the internship that they left me a standing offer to come back full-time once I graduated, which I quickly accepted. So this shirt has history behind it and reminds me of many great times, making it a bummer to give up.

Thankfully I still have my other keepsake the staff gave me, a priceless Mugato doll. One Saturday morning Todd, Ecton and I spent three hours editing stories and talking about Star Trek and debating who the greatest comedic alien they ever threw into an episode (we settled on Mugato and the Gorn as the best ones). This is what happens when you work the night shift on Friday night (until 1 a.m.) and then have be back into the office for the Saturday morning shift (7:30 a.m.) and everyone's feeling a little punchy.

So in the end I must part with this shirt. But I do know it will live on, since I found a company that will accept unwanted or tattered shirts and recycle them. So somewhere that Press Box shirt will be still out there, which is cool.

Cobblings from My Memories

I recently stumbled across this photo on my phone. Upon first glance, you'd assume this was taken in a bathroom from a hotel. More specifically, a Hampton Inn. That's what it says right there on the towel, right?

Well you'd be wrong. That towel is in my bathroom back home in Louisville. And it's not alone. There's probably 10 or so more towels exactly like that, from hotels all over this great land of ours (more specifically, the route between Louisville and New Jersey).

I don't know how to describe it other than to say my family loved taking mementos from our vacations. My father's favorite thing was taking hotel towels. I'm not saying we were the Bonnie and Clyde family of Kentucky. No gunplay or violence. For one damn reason or another, we ended up with a whole washroom filled with towels from vacation hotels. There's no better explanation than that.

Once on a trip to Florida my dad convinced me to steal a dinner plate from a restaurant just because it was shaped like a fish and I thought it was cool. I don't think I have that plate anymore, but I'll always remember how funny it was to be talked into stealing dinnerware from a seafood restaurant when I was 20 years old. That's the weird things we did on our family vacations. Malice or ill will was never part of it, and we didn't go into vacations thinking we'd snatch a towel.

It'd just happen. You're a family of five crammed into a hotel room and when you wake up to leave everything just gets thrown into luggage and the occasional towel made it in. It started happening so often that we all got a chuckle out of it, and I'll always be secretly convinced my dad did it on purpose as a joke. That was the kind of guy he was, teasing my mom when we returned home, "Don't throw away that towel that's a remembrance of our trip!" Mom would roll her eyes, fold it up and toss it on the basement shelf with the 15 other ones. Good times.

Cobblings from My Memories

At the end of dinner at Medium Rare last night, the server brought over a parting gift, a piece of Bazooka Joe bubble gum for each person at the table. What surprised me was not that they gave us the gum after we had already had dessert and paid the check (really, a second dessert? why bother with the dessert menu if I'd had known gum was coming?), but the fact that it was Bazooka Joe, a gum I honestly had not seen since I was probably 13 or 14 years old.

It's always amazing to me the things that take you back to your childhood or formative years. Innocent things like ... say ... a piece of gum. You see, I'm not a gum person. I only chew it on extremely rare occasions (I can only count 3 times in the last year that I've had gum, and two of them were after concerts where heavy drinking was involved). And yet there was the piece of Bazooka Joe, instantly transporting me back to The Loop Barber Shop on Dundee Avenue in Louisville. Just blocks from my childhood home, this was my first and only place I went for a haircut until I went to college.

It was your typical barber shop, and judging by the photos still looks pretty much as it did in the '80s when I was there. I loved that they used scissors to cut your hair instead of buzz trimmers, because it meant you had to take your time and actually talk to each other instead of it being a factory system atmosphere. To get me to sit in that chair for the whole time and not wiggle around (and thus be stabbed in the noggin with sharp scissors), the barber would promise me that if I sat still he'd give me, you guessed it, a piece of Bazooka Joe. I always thought this was so cool. I loved the moment when he got the vacuum out and sucked up all the hair from the chair and my shoulders because that's when he reached into this drawer that was filled with nothing but gum. Plus it was great to chew the gum and carefully open the wrapper so as not to tear the comic strip that came inside each wrapper, along with fortunes or lucky lottery numbers.

I'd then sit and chew on that gum for the next 30 minutes as my dad got his hair cut and listened to the news, weather and traffic radio station that blared on the old radio next to the old cash register with the enormous buttons to depress and the loud 'cha-ching' noise you don't hear anymore yet everyone knows what it means. I'd rummage around looking for the box in the back that held all the gum and could never find it. It's where I read Sports Illustrated for the first time, and where I always thought it weird that there was one barber who in a decade or so of going there to get my hair cut never had a single customer but was always employed and was just there. He was an institution of the place, so he always had a chair.

It's really bugging me now that I can no longer remember my barber's name, because he was a cool dude who was nothing but the friendliest guy and always asked the right questions of his customers no matter their age. I know he died sometime while I was in college or shortly thereafter, and I'm sad about it now as I was then, since I spent more time with him sitting in that shop over the course of 10 or so years than I did with many extended family members. Though it looks the same, I'm sure the place has changed, as all things do, but at least it's still there, cutting hair and maybe doling out candy to the kids who need the bribery in order to avoid an accidental lobotomy. It'd be a tradition worth carrying on, and it's nice to at least know Bazooka Joe is still an option to fill up a drawer when an unruly kid won't sit still..