“Purple suits you,” I said with a slurp, tearing a lobster shell from my teeth. “It’s the color of power”. Picking up my glass and rising to my feet, albeit with a plastic bib, 'Cheer’s Dad, same time next year’.
His eyes fell to the plate, which had barely been touched. The last surgery to abate the stomach cancer gave him two years - but there was no getting out of this recurrence, and it was just a matter of time. I broke into the claw with vengeance, fighting back tears, and missing the way Dad and I would, under normal circumstances, have had a race to the tamale.
“What wish never came true for you? I asking. His eyes wandered listlessly through the dining room at that seaside restaurant. “I always wanted to drive a fire truck”, He said. “I wanted to lay on that horn, and drive fast through the city, and say...”I’m coming through, ya bastards, get the fuck outta the way”! His volume was loud enough, and out-of-the-blue cursing made the neighboring tables notice, and my mother to bark a familiar response, “Arthur! Please keep it down”. She embarrassed easily, even after fifty two years of marriage to Mr. Brooklyn. Tonight, he didn’t have the stamina to protest.
“A-nnnd....” He added, “I was never a virtuoso.” My father was a beautiful tenor, not a “professional’ in the modern sense of the word, but his voice was a trained instrument. As ‘cantor’ of the Cape Cod Synagogue, he’d led a congregation of hundreds for many years. Singing had been the way to assimilate Orthodox Jewish roots, and spirituality with his God-given talent.
“I know, I had a good run, he said picking no bones. “But, I would have liked to have Mastered it, perform with other great musicians...A virtuoso”! He yelled, striking his hands in the air like a conductor.
That was the weekend my folks retired our family home on the Cape. They were consolidated to Florida. I loaded my car with as many pieces of small furniture and pictures as it would hold, knowing a moving truck with the big pieces would arrive after the contracts were signed. “You want everything, right?” Dad mocked, “Where the hell are ya gunna put all this crap”? By crap, he was referring to the antique heirlooms my mother had collected from her mother. I laughed, “I’ll take it all except that shirt on your back”. Pink was an anomaly in my wardrobe, not his.
The week before Thanksgiving I got ‘the call’ - Dad had spent the night in the ER, was going home to begin Hospice care. In the days that followed I spent time in Dad’s closet, watching him sleep through a crack of light, watching him sleep through the morphine, waiting for brief lucid moments to touch his face and hands. Every Father’s Day shirt was hanging there, neatly buttoned, hangers color coordinated along the rack. I chose a few eye-catchers, my sister and brother did the same. The nurse was trying to wake him up for another round of dope but he didn’t want it. “No”! He said loudly and to the point. The nurse persisted. And so did he. In Spanish, just in case those listening had any doubt, “Adios! He laughed....”Adios, Motherfuckers!” He was going out like Bruce Willis in Diehard. That was my father.
When I cleared his office of files I found a folder stuffed with seating charts to a hundred venues. My parents were avid theater goings, music lovers, supporters of the arts. They had shared a rich life together - “la dolce vita” as he’d say often. They loved nothing more than getting dressed-up for a night out. How could I toss such memories?
That was the winter of my discontent. We had record snowfall, business dropped off worser than average and I was desperately alone. Grieving the loss of my father unleashed the prisoners of my mind’s cell block. I’d practiced depression before but this was a new ‘dark night of the soul’. The Sequel. The Fucker. But on one more whiteout weekend, friends from Austin rescued me. They came to record at Levon Helm’s place, they were friends of a friend...like family...and we laughed, toasted and roasted each other for a week leading up to their performance at the Midnight Ramble. As Carolyn chose her stage clothes for the night, she thought out loud, “Hmmm, needs bling” and lucky for her a bling’ity beaded vest was recently acquired in a box from mom. Turning to Robbie, the drummer of this blues-rocking band, “What about you, need something in a large, right”? And, then it happened. It was as if the purple paisley shirt with the pretty pearl buttons jumped off the shelf and threw itself on his back.
That night Dad sat-in from far away. At the Helm, as it were, to the hottest ticket in town. No chart needed for the best seat in that house, my beloved father had made it to the masters chair. And as I watched mom’s beads glitter in the stage lights and dad’s colors flailing rhythms, they were together once again beyond the music.
