Great! You ought to submit it for print publication somewhere.
Your father’s eyes in the photo on your home page, tell me so much about him, and about you.
Thank you, I envy you.
Thanks RC... I have found that interesting that, as I get older, I have those fleeting experiences where I look in the mirror, and I see my father’s face looking back at me… and I don’t find that a bad thing at all!
My wife and I were watching the Clint Eastwood movie “Gran Torino” the other night, and I found myself subjected to a wave of nostalgia. It was funny, my wife picked up on it to… from some angles and with some facial expressions, Clint Eastwood’s character in that movie looked very much like my father.
There was one scene where it showed him sitting on his porch looking at his car, and he put a cigarette in his mouth, lights it with this zippo lighter, takes a drag and then holds the cigarette away from his mouth in a contemplative pose… my wife said “boy, he sure looks like your father there…”
That was my dad. He always had a cup of coffee in one hand, a T-shirt or sport shirt on, sitting in a chair somewhere, and he would pull out a Pall Mall (one of the unfiltered ones, of course) stick it in his mouth, tilts his head slightly to the side and open the zippo lighter which was filled to the brim with lighter fluid. When he let it, the flame always looked like it went up about 6 inches, this big, broad yellow flame, just like that little cigarette. And then with a sharp clink, he would close the zippo and put it away.
As a matter fact, when he had a stroke, that was one of the last things he did as a whole, functioning human. It was interesting, we were all sitting around the table on one of our family get-togethers, and I was sitting across from my dad. My dad went through his cigarette lighting ritual, but instead of lighting the cigarette, he held the cigarette in one hand, then lit the lighter with the other hand and sat there looking in puzzlement at both cigarette in the burning lighter. While the lighter was still burning with that high yellow flame that was so characteristic, he deliberately placed it down on the table upright, as if he were placing it there to service a candle. He then continued to look in puzzlement at the cigarette, turned around in his hands, and just looked confusedly at it.
As I sat across from him, alarm bells went off in my head because it was so odd and out of sequence. We didn’t know at that single moment, but he was in the process of having a huge crippling stroke, which paralyzed one entire side of his body, and ended up taking his life 5 months later.
God, how I miss that man! While he did resemble the kind of dried up, desiccated aspect of Clint Eastwood’s character in that movie, he didn’t have the cutting, nasty acerbic side. He was nothing like that. He was a good, generous man, who treated everybody he encountered with respect, regardless of their station in life.