Mood:
not sureNow Playing: Come Fly with Me - Sinatra
Topic: Noz Update
For those of you who don't already know: I'm in Toronto. I have been for nearly two weeks, and I leave in just under one week more. I've not been getting in touch because I came here to spend time with my dad in the hospital, so I've been keeping some space for myself and time for my family.
I’ve already blogged about my Dad. The situation is improved. He is now in a rehabilitation center where he is getting settled into the life changes that follow such a major stroke. I think - I can't say for sure because I've been so wrapped up in my own recent dramas - that my family is also settling into a rhythm of living with the situation. My own emotional capacity to handle things is also leveling off. I don't call or email enough, but I do call and email. Lo, with her saint-like benevolence, thumps me on the head periodically to make contact. The situation is still very hard for me, and I have to live with the sort of emotional limbo imposed by being so far away.
I am now going about the long task of assimilating the new facts into my reality. Again, Lo's support and love have been key in reminding me which way is up, when so often I confuse it with counter-north-clockways.
Staying with him these last few days at the hospital has been intense. It’s an emotional gauntlet that I have to run to try process all the different things that it affects and changes practically, and all the things that it confronts me with emotionally. It’s not actually seeing him in the wheelchair, or the thinness, or the single-side paralysis that shocks me most, it’s the moments when he seems so totally and honestly him. His sense of humour is exactly the same, and he’s able to articulate his emotions much more clearly than he has in years. I think what’s happened him has short of forced him to accept a physical vulnerability, which has had a philosophical and emotional impact in kind. I’m also seeing this business they always talk about where the young gain new appreciation for experience when they actually sit down and listen.
The experiences of an 84-year-old man who’s traveled around the world more times than most people even dream of doing are something to be reckoned with. I usually think of “experienced” as “10 years in the automotive industry” or “15 years on the hard-core fetish scene of London”. My father has a whole lifetime behind him, and has a wealth of experience that is on a totally different plane. Fuck, for all I know, he did spend 10 years on the London fetish scene.
When I walked in to see him on Saturday he was in the common room listening to the four tenors. He was singing along and tapping out the beat on his wheelchair lunch tray. I walked in and said hello, and he looked up into my eyes and just said, “Hell must be a place with no music, no?” And in a single offhand phrase he made me feel more his son than he has in years. Yes, hell must be a place with no music... or maybe only country music. We share that as an inherent truth of the cosmos.
We talked that day about the time he spent growing up in Genova in the North of Italy, where he would spend each day playing on the beach all day long until they rang the dinner bell for the big evening meal. He said that at the time the celebrities of the day were the tenors. All the young fisherman would cross the bay to an island to drop their nets, and they’d sing their messages to each other across the peer or between the boats. The Ottolongi family, on my paternal Grandmother’s side, were part Italian and part Austrian. The family was only settled there for a generation before they started moving out of Italy again. Having come over from Peru to live with his Grandmother, he didn’t fully understand Italian, but with the similarity to Spanish, and the way that the fisherman reacted to each other’s songs, he could deduce that they were singing messages and instructions to each other.
He told me about being 15 years old and stealing port from his father’s wine cellar, and how the labels said on them “Bottled for the house of Don Luis Urbina”. The boys, at 14 years old, would make meringue of eggs of sugar, and slowly infuse in the port. He told me about how they would lick the bowl clean and then slam it briefly in a hot oven to caramelise the outside. As he spoke the rapture from these moments long past coloured his voice.
He told me, “I had a childhood full of freedom.” I thought on my own childhood of adventuring through the city on my bicycle or skateboard with my parents having only a dim notion of where the hell I was at any given moment. I remembered listening to music with my friends 90% of my waking hours, turning the stereo up to 11, and beating out rhythms against the furniture with sticks. I remember singing Metallica choruses on buses and making up huge vats of instant potatoes at 4 in the morning, stretching our basic cooking skills to the limits to make them taste at least non-toxic. I remembered fucking around doing god knows what mischief in the valleys and little forested parks in Toronto - Earl Bales, G Ross – and watching the sun come up over the horizon before we started the walk home.
I thought to myself, Christ, this man is my father; the soil in which I germinated and grew. I never really appreciated the gentle guidance that is the influence of a father’s own personality and ways, just by virtue of his being around and being my reference point for what was righteous, fun, decent, and great.
He’s still stubborn as hell. The nurses said that most people after 3 months of controlled diets, daily blood pressure tests, or taking medication twice a day would’ve resigned themselves to these things as parts of their day. My dad still tries to get out of it. He refers to all the other seniors and stroke victims as a “cripple convention” and occasionally is very inappropriately mocking, as he always would have been when he wasn’t one of the wheelchair posse.
We’re still not really “talking” about us or our feelings in the new age tv-drama sense of father-son talks. I have resigned myself to the fact that’s never going to happen. I also feel my need to have talks like that is waning with the months. I’m at present not sure why. Nevertheless, he is much more expressive than before – possibly than ever. He is a romantic at heart, and I know more now than ever that he loves me.
