last year my dad should have died in florida. to be fair though, in the past 5 or 6 years, there are several times he could have died, and i have to assume the same could be said about most of his 20s and late teen years. the difference being that in his early life the near deaths were more likely from making poor life choices, whereas now you can name an affliction and he probably has it. i've definitely stayed more unaware about all that is wrong with him than a good son should, but from what i've gathered he has... drum roll please... leukemia, milofibrosis, a very low platelet count in his blood, something with his heartbeat (it's irregular), rheumatoid arthritis in his hips (though one has been replaced and the other will be shortly), his large intestine sometimes just turns off, there was something with his spleen (it was way too big), he had little tumours on his spine that were pinching the nerves off to his legs (since removed), he's really clumsy and he has severe resting bitch face (undiagnosed). would you believe though, that it was none of these things that should have killed him in florida last year, no, that was pneumonia and sepsis. variety is, as you know, the spice of life...
anyway, my parents had rented a condo in panama city beach for the entire month of february and they were nice enough to let me tag along for the first week or so. we were going down in the car, which is something we'd never done before, as my brother was a little fidgety as a child. seeing as there is no such thing as the internet (there is) or gps (there is), my dad had gone to caa and had them tell him the best way to get to florida (drive south). my dad has never really been one to embrace technology. he cannot use a cellphone, he can barely use a cordless phone and i genuinely worry for him when he and my mom might decide on getting a new electronic of some kind. the only reason my dad ever used a computer in his life was to play solitaire, and he was only able to do that if my brother, my mom or i turned on the computer for him, opened the game for him and reassured him that if something happened he could call us and we would help. he would play for a bit and then eventually yell "i'm finished," which was our signal to go close the game and turn off the computer...
anyway, we left on our drive a day early as my dad had checked the newspaper and there was a storm coming the next day that we had to be ahead of. here is what i can tell you about a drive to florida; detroit, bad. toledo, bad. cincinnati, good. nashville, good. birmingham, bad. montgomery, real bad. as we had left early, we arrived early and checked into a hotel for the night. the following morning we had to kill about 7 hours before checking into the condo, as mom and dad gooding like to get an early start, and we had checked out of the hotel far earlier than necessary. we had breakfast and the waitress had a very southern accent. we drove up and down the main street many, many times. we went grocery shopping, which is so much better in the states (the cereals!) we played goofy golf, a gooding family vacation staple, and also where the line of logan and mom vs. connor and dad begins to be drawn. logan and mom are right handed, connor and dad are wrong. connor and dad like going to the bar to watch the sports, logan and mom like going to craft shows to look at crafts. there are many more. the one important to this goofy golf anecdote though is that connor and dad believe in "do-overs", logan and mom believe in "do it right the first time or learn from your mistakes, we don't care that you're 6 yrs old and a spaz, if you want to win you should have to earn it". my brother just wanted to cheat, my mom and i just wanted to win and my dad just wanted everyone to have a good time...
anyway, the condo was very nice and i was probably the third youngest person on the entire resort, which was enormous. i think that, outside the resort, i was actually the sixth youngest person in panama city beach. the first few days were filled with a lot of restaurants, more goofy golf, not much sunshine and a few board games (mostly dad and i). something you should know about my mom is that she does not do games, nor did she ever really do games. she wanted to be the fun parent... but she just was not. my dad though, was all about games, so long as there was no electricity involved beyond whatever was being used to light the room. there was always plenty of yahtzee, where dad always had to blow on the dice before rolling, a fair amount of chess and the occasional game of monopoly or guess who. our favourite though, was poker. i vaguely remember being surprised around age 9 that my friends didn't know how to gamble, as my brother and i had been learning to play various poker games from a very early age. every vacation we went on, dad always brought the margarine container full of pennies for us to make our bets with, playing 7 card stud, dime store and texas hold 'em. by the time i was 10 and connor was 7 our great aunt jenny had taught us how to play "one eyed jacks and whores" where queens and jacks were wild. in fairness to my mother she could occasionally be rooked into playing scrabble, where she would ultimately be destroyed by whoever was playing. when i was younger i could sometimes get away with making a fake compound word like "bedsweat" which is obviously when you sweat in bed (i know what you're thinking, this is kind of like a do-over, something i hate, and you are correct in thinking this). that particular time, my mom followed my turn by comically playing a word she pronounced as "she-arrrr", that i was quickly able to identify as her having actually played the correct spelling of the word "chair"...
anyway, towards the end of my stay, my dad started to not feel so good. he was having more trouble walking and felt more or less like he was getting a cold. you would think that due to the fact that he has (almost) everything, he would think it wise to go see a doctor, just to make sure... but no. my dad envisions himself as the toughest man on the planet, an island where sickness just does not go, a man who uses his clint eastwood grimace to scare illness away from him (it's not working dad!). coincidentally he also uses this face when he sees a squirrel somewhere in the yard and hobbles to the door to clap a couple of flip flops together and grit out a very gran torino "get off my lawn" in hopes of scaring them off and teaching them not to come back. he actually, at one point, had a squirrel trap in the backyard and would catch and then relocate squirrels to a woodsy area by the highway a few kilometers away from our house in case they were too stupid to get the hint made by the flip flops clapping together. in short, do not be a squirrel on my dads lawn. actually, if you can help it, don't be a person on my dads lawn. as kids, before we had a real pool, and just made due with those small plastic kiddy pools, we were only ever allowed to have them on the cement patio because the weight of the water would crush the grass. another "in short", don't cannonball into the 14 inches of water in the kiddy pool on the cement, it hurts the knees. you can imagine how he felt about crocodile mile...
anyway, it came down to my last night in florida. i was just getting to sleep, having edited my mothers and my soon to be unsuccessful (but hilarious) audition video for the amazing race canada until about 2am, when my mom got me out of bed because my dad had collapsed on the bathroom floor and she couldn't get him up. not ever having been serious people, neither my mom or i had any idea how to emotionally deal with this very real situation, both laughing and crying at the ridiculousness of it. we eventually hurled my dad back into bed, where he had been for a couple of days at this point, and he looked me, and i could tell he had no clue who i was. this was a nightmare. my mom and i decided that because we couldn't trust him to not try and get out of bed again, she had to drive me to the airport as early as possible the next morning. another very early gooding start to the day and my dad had a weird moment of clarity as we were leaving. he remembered when my flights were, tallahassee to miami then onto toronto. he told me to have a safe flight and that he loved me and i knew that that was the last time i was ever going to hear him say this (before you get too sad, remember i said he should have died in florida last year) and i was again faced with a very real situation, feeling as though i was truly saying goodbye, the goodbye, to my dad. i don't think it really hit me until i landed in miami and i tried getting a hold of my mom while waiting in line at starbucks. she didn't answer the phone and after the fourth attempt i left her a fairly hateful voicemail, sent her a string of even more hateful text messages, got a latte and went and ugly cried in a bathroom stall in a very full mensroom at the airport for 15 minutes...
anyway, he had finally been dragged to the hospital, where my mom spent valentine's day and her birthday, by herself, sleeping on a chair, hoping her husband wasn't going to die, all the while maintaining her sense of humour and posting a picture to facebook of a very pathetic birthday dinner from some sad fast food place. he was eventually airlifted home in a jet and somehow managed to stay alive, all the while talking some crazy shit to my mom and aunt shannon while he was still whacked out from the blood poisoning and the medication. my favourite one-liner he had was when he suddenly became very alert, looked right at my mom and said "dayle! hold in your stomach!"
losing my dad, even though i didn't, i just thought i was going to, was the worst thing that ever happened to me. this was my dad, he can't die. he's part of the reason i'm here and i am this way. i think i can attribute some of my more distinct character traits like being mean to the people i care about and worrying way too much to him. i also hoard elastic bands like he does for some reason. my dad likes to pretend that he doesn't love us as much as he does, but this man cares about his family 10 times more than i've ever cared about anything in my life. i wish i was as friendly as he is or that i was able to just not care at all what anyone thought about me like he's able to. i wish that if i were in the same boat as him that i would be as okay with it as he can be, but i know i would be the worst. i wish i was as nice and as selfless as he is. i wish i had his metabolism... but my brother got that.
i remember talking to my grandma once about him, her talking about how my brother and i are lucky to have him, how my mom is lucky to have him. she told me about a convesation she had with him when my brother and i were little, and who knows how accurate her re-telling was, but essentially my dad said he didn't know if he was going to be a good dad. he hadn't had a very present father, so how would he know what to do? she asked him if he loved us, he replied that of course he did, more than anything. she told him he would be a good dad.
he's a good dad.
