part 7

I cried exactly twice in the year surrounding my dad’s death; the last time, at the funeral service, as I listened to my cousin Lisa read a passage from the Bible. My brother and I sat in the front pew and I remember that I wanted to stop crying before we had to stand to give the priest the wine and plate of bread.

I didn’t cry when I went to the nursing home to find my dad in a deep sleep, hooked up to an oxygen machine, and was unable to wake him up. I didn’t cry when I got a phone call a few hours later from my cousin Ray, telling me that my dad had died. I didn’t cry between then and the funeral, not at the viewing, when my brother, mom and I sat, lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery, my dad across the room in the suit and tie my mom picked out, his eyes and mouth held shut with some kind of human glue. The only other time I cried was a year earlier, late December of 2002, when my dad told me he was ready to die.

We sat in the living room, he on the blue armchair as I sat on the red couch. Law and Order was on television; the room was filled with smoke.

“I just want you to know that I’m happy with my life,” he said. “I have no regrets. I did everything I wanted to do.”

The words were simple, even trite. When you imagine someone on their deathbed, this is what you want them to say. You don’t want them to regret decisions, to wish they had done more things or that the events of their life had gone differently. But somehow, I cried harder when he said that then I had in years. My chin bobbed, tears streamed down my face. I didn’t want him to see me cry, but I couldn’t help it – he wouldn’t die for another year, but the finality of those words seemed to end everything there. I couldn’t understand how someone could be ready to let go so easily.

I’m not a crier, but since December of 2003, the only things that can make me cry are father-daughter related. I cry at the end of movies, like I Am Sam, when Sam is on the witness stand in court to regain custody of his daughter and he uses Beatles songs to explain that he can’t be separated from her. Paul’s songs wouldn’t have been the same without John, and vice-versa. They were an inseparable pair. Sam says, “Paul wrote the beginning of Michelle, then handed it to John so he could write the part that goes ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ He said it wouldn’t have been the same without that part, and that’s why the whole country cried when the Beatles broke up.”

part 8

When I call my mom for money, tapping into my poor-college-student lifeline, she always sends some extras down with Dale. She works late at the USPS handling building in Warrendale, but Dale gets done parking cars at Tivoli's around 10:30 or 11pm. Tonight he's bundled up in a pair of maroon sweatpants, sweatshirt and ski cap.

"Here's the stuff from your mom," Dale says. We're standing in the doorway of my apartment on Neville Street, only the light of the hallway illuminating us. Dale hands me a plastic shopping bag.

"Thanks." I rifle through the bag. There are a few magazines -- People Weekly, Coastal Living, and Vogue (which is funny, considering I rarely make it out of jeans and a sweatshirt on a daily basis). My mom slipped the Coastal Living into my care package because she has the uncanny ability to remember even the slightest thing I mention. I said once that I like Milano cookies. That was at least five years ago. I get them in every single care package. There's a four-pack of Angel Soft toilet paper. There are some snacks -- the Milano cookies, of course, and some cheddar-flavored Baby Goldfish.

"The Gamecocks, huh?" The team supported by Dale’s hooded sweatshirts is usually a toss up between the University of South Carolina or the North Carolina Tarheels.

"Yeah, check out my socks," he reaches down to his ankles, pulling the elastic ankle band of his pants away from his black and white Pumas. The heel of his sock shows another Gamecocks logo.

"How's school going?" he says.

"All right. I was just reading," I say. I'm lying. In actuality I was probably surfing the Facebook or checking away messages.

"Good. So you needed some money, right?"

I nod. Dale pulls two twenties out of the pocket of his sweatpants and hands them to me.
"Will that be enough?" I nod again. He fishes through his pocket his truck's keys and looks toward the door of the apartment building.

I thank him for the money, for coming down so late, for helping me out. Then I reach out both my arms for a hug. This is the first time I can ever remember us hugging, and I immediately have two thoughts. It is the most awkward moment we'd ever shared -- it feels like a move two young kids would make on a first date. And, at the same time, it feels like the natural thing to do.

part 9

My mother and I are playing the garbage game in the basement. She’s thumbing through papers in filing cabinet, deciding what is important enough to keep and what can become the game’s next victim.

“You’re not going to throw that away, are you?” My dad says. He appears in the corner of the basement next to the green Lawn Boy mower. He’s wearing the outfit I always imagine my dad wearing when I think back on him; holey red sweatpants and a white Hanes undershirt. He stands on the dirty, cold cement floor, a pair of ten-year-old, worn-out Wal Mart moccasins on his feet (this is the second pair he’s owned).

“There’s so much junk in this basement,” my mom replies. “Plus, what are you saving it for now? You’re dead.”

My mom turns back to the filing cabinet. I notice a bleach stain on the back of her navy-blue Bugs Bunny sweatshirt and remember that it’s always been there. I borrowed the sweatshirt in fourth grade, when it still reached my knees; the shirt and the stain had to be at least ten years old. I wouldn’t consider my mom someone who could be characterized by a Looney Tunes sweatshirt, but she seriously wears this all the time. On her, however, it’s funny; it’s not an “embarrassing mom shirt.”

“My death doesn’t erase my possessions of meaning. The kids might want to keep them around,” he says. '

“The kids never come down here. Jen wants to keep your records; BJ fiddles around in the workshop. Other than that, these boxes collect dust.”

“Sticky Fingers is kind of neat," I interject. "You can unzip Mick Jagger's fly."
“That’s the difference between us,” my Dad says. “You’re willing to throw things away too easily. Our marriage, for example.”

“I wouldn’t jump so quickly to assume that I was the one throwing our marriage away.”

“You cheated on me with Nick. Then as we were trying to reconcile, you shacked up with Dale,” my dad defends.

“Don’t bring me into this,” Dale says. He comes down the stairs. “I never intended to break up a marriage. I kept my distance for years, the first few years we worked together at Tivoli’s. I liked her, but I never stepped in.”

My mom, dad and Dale are now having, in my mind, the three-way conversation that never occurred in real life. My mom is now playing referee as two of the timelines of her life collide.

“I don’t understand why you hate Dale so much, why you refused to let him be a part of the kids’ lives,” my mom says.

“I don’t hate Dale. Obviously, I don’t even know him. We’ve had maybe two conversations, ever. I hate what Dale represents.” My dad scratches the salt-and-pepper beard scruff on his chin and lights a cigarette.

“And what’s that? Being in a relationship that’s actually reasonable?” In my head, my mom is sassy. She shoots this question at him.

“What’s more reasonable about your relationship with Dale?”

“Well, it’s an actual relationship,” she says. “He doesn’t expect me to be a housewife and have a job, while he comes home from work every day just to sit around.”

"I never stopped loving you. From when we divorced until the day I died. When you visited, when you brought the kids to the nursing home, I pretended like nothing had ever changed," my dad said.

“For whatever reason, there were no more sparks,” my mom says. “Don’t you believe in sparks? Why hold onto something when the reason for having it is gone?”

part 10

Dale and I are riding home from Ligonier again – this time it’s Easter. My laundry basket is sandwiched in between us in the cab of his truck and I’ve got my feet propped up on the dashboard to avoid stepping on the paper bag of leftover ham, cheesy potatoes, corn and rolls (un-burnt, thanks to the preparation skills of yours truly) that sits on the floor. I’m telling him about a boy who I’ve decided doesn’t like me as much as I wish he did, as much as I like him.

“When I met your mother,” he says, “I just knew.” He adjusts the black Pirates hat covering his shaved head. “I hadn’t even met her yet. I just saw her. I knew things about her – she was married, had you and Beej. She had everything I didn’t want, yet I still found myself wanting to spend time with her.”

“I remember the first thing she said to me,” he continues. “We were sitting in the break room at the restaurant. I lit up a cigarette and she says, ‘you’re a smoker?!’”

Dale does a good job mimicking my mother’s voice, the tone she must have used. I can imagine it in my head – she doesn’t ask a question, she shoots it at you like a dart. The waitresses in the other room probably heard it, too.

“I was tongue tied,” he says. “And you know me. I’m usually pretty snappy with the rebuttals.”

Dale tells me about being young – the years he spent living in Nags Head, surfing and working, seeing girls here and there but never settling down.

“I had this self-centered mentality. But then I met your mother and I forgot all of that,” he says. “And the thing is, I still feel exactly the same way about her today as I did the first time I saw her.”

part 11

My mom, my brother and I are sitting on the empty bed in my dad’s double room at Baldock. This is the nursing home where he would spend the last three months of his life – today, it’s Thanksgiving. We’re visiting him for the afternoon before having dinner at Dale’s parents’ house. My dad will die in about two weeks.

“We have to go,” I say to him. He’s lying on the bed, propped up by pillows. He’s covered by one of the brown, fuzzy blankets emblazoned with a giant lion’s face that we’ve had in our house all my life.

“Where are you going?”

“We’re having dinner at the Young’s in Ligonier.”

“Oh,” he says. He looks around the room, up at the flickering scenes of the Food Network on the television in the corner. “Can you put my watch on for me?”

“You have your watch on,” I say. I look down at his wrist. He touches the face of his watch with fingers so skinny they look like sticks.

“I want my other watch.”

“You don’t need two watches.”

“I don’t have two watches.”

I fish through the drawer at his bedside table for the watch that hasn’t ticked in months. It has his phone numbers in it; maybe that’s why he won’t let it go.

“Joe, you don’t need another watch, you have your watch on,” my mom says.

“Please just put it on,” he answers. “And can you get me a piece of candy? A red one.” I don’t know what it is, but cancer gave my dad a constant craving for hard candy.

I sift through Tootsie Rolls, Werther’s Originals, bubble gum (which he always vetoed because it is not, in fact, a hard candy – even though my mom always shoveled some in the bag anyway). I find a cinnamon candy and unwrap it for him.

My brother and I walk outside while the nurse talks to my mom and dad. After the nurse leaves, my mom lingers in the room with him for a minute or two. They talk about nothing in particular; she unwraps a few more candies for him, places them on the table next to his head. She puts the second watch on his wrist beside the first.

part 12

“Jen,” my brother says to me on the phone. “I want you to look through all the stuff I cleaned out of your closet. Let me know what you want to keep.”

My brother played the garbage game in the closet of his bedroom, which for a time was my bedroom after it stopped being my dad’s bedroom. When I moved my belongings into my first apartment, I left some things behind – my white Adidas shell tops from the summer I worked at Kennywood, one blue and silver pom-pom from middle school cheerleading (what had happened to the white one, I wondered?), a flat soccer ball, and some other high-school related paperwork.

I’d come to a recent revelation. I don’t know if it can be applied to my family, because when it comes down to it, all revelations are personal. I decided I want to get rid of all the junk, all the relics of my past, the physical manifestations of memories I already have filed away in the corners of my brain. I don’t want to take two truckloads and two carloads of stuff with me when I move out of my apartment on Neville Street in August.

But I find myself struggling – which memories had lost their importance only intermittently? Which ones, in thirty years, would I wish I could stumble upon that seemed irrelevant right now? Do I need ticket stubs from every concert I’d ever been to – did I need a ticket to remind me that I went to see the Foo Fighters one July with a man, the 28-year-old nuclear physicist friend of a girl I was working with at Kennywood at the time? Do I need folders full of notes from every class I’ve taken at college – if I need to know about the myelin sheath, can’t I google it instead of digging through a notebook from Intro to Psych? Do I need this closet full of sweaters, old soccer t-shirts, pairs of jeans I never wear? When I snap out of this need for catharsis, the need to feel free of this clutter (which I inevitably will), what will I miss? I want to know what matters – who we are, or what we remember?

So, I start digging through this pile of junk my brother has set aside. Underneath some of the inconsequential (according to my recent decision) things was the cardboard wine box – the picture box. I am halted. This box never ceases to captivate me for hours, each time I see it, despite having looked at every picture tens and hundreds of times. On top were letter-sized envelopes with clear plastic windows – school pictures from every year since third grade. I notice the progression of my hairstyle – short curls in second grade, a frizzy triangle in third grade, long, combed-out curls in eighth grade, a poor attempt at straight hair in ninth grade. Always bad. The box itself is full of all the stages of my childhood, stacked upon each other like singles on a roof. I sift through the pictures – the time I dressed as a ghost for Halloween, a hole cut out in a Tivoli’s tablecloth for my painted-white face. A picture of my brother and I bundled up for winter like the kids in the movie A Christmas Story. A picture of my mom, dad and newborn me on the patterned couch in the apartment on Ross Avenue, surrounded by the seven kittens born a few weeks after me in July of 1984. This box is my childhood – memories exist like pictures, thrown in a box.

But the physical memories begin to blend with the ones tucked away in my head. I can remember things there are no pictures of: my mom and dad sitting next to each other on the piano stool in our living room, her fingers laced over his, teaching him to play a song. I remember the time I picked a green bean the length of my forearm from our garden – I was wearing a white t-shirt and a red and black plaid skirt. I remember the time I picked all the still-green tomatoes from their vines. I put them in a red plastic bowl and proudly handed them to my mom. I remember going to the Cogos across the street from our house in Wilkinsburg; I’d always ask my mom to buy me Sixlets.

My lockbox is an orange Fossil watch tin. Inside are the things that will never fall victim to my own garbage game – a phone number scrawled on a piece of Blockbuster receipt tape, stale sticks of Juicy Fruit from soccer camp. Some other things I snatched away that don’t have much meaning, except they belonged to my dad – the elephant necklace, an Allegheny Refrigeration keychain (shaped like the ice cubes from the machines he sold). I’ll never throw these things away, and as I go along I find ways to stuff more things into this tiny tin, which someday might expand a shoebox and then maybe a Rubbermaid bin or an empty wine box. These things I will never get rid of, but I also know that I haven’t stopped collecting.
“Can I inherit the picture box?” I say to my mom. She and my brother were in the room as I was picking through the pile of closet stuff awaiting the fate of the garbage game. My mom folds my laundry onto the dining room table as my brother is watching television on the couch.

“Do you think it’ll be safe with you?” she asked. “Or do you think I should inherit it?”

“No, I want it,” I answer. “It’ll be fine.”

it's 5am, alicia and i are up late after a rousing random saturday. we began our day in shadyside at dean's, where alicia got a haircut. she may or may not have led the hairdresser to believe that i was her girlfriend, so that's good. we then waited for maybe forty minutes at the bus stop on craig street where we saw approx 9 billion couples enjoying late-afternoon dates. on the way there, a creepy man sidled up next to us as we walked down neville street and attempted to pick alicia up. however, he did not show the dedication to his endeavor that i think was necessary, as he mumbled most of his words. he asked us if we go bar hopping and if he could buy us a drink. then he asked if we wanted to go to a party -- but this invitation was after he already walked across the street away from us, so i'm surprised it made it the distance it did considering his volume problems.

we spent some time at barnes and noble (the highlight being the man we saw with a shirt that read "i am NOT a dinosaur") and ate dinner at eat n park. it was decided that i will attempt to get a job at the squirrel hill eat n park so i can hook alicia up with the hot waiter who checked her out at the salad bar and tossed her the skank eye while we waited to pay our check at the register. our next stop was alicia's apartment. as we walked through the parking lot, we stumbled upon my friend ian from high school. this is probably the weirdest oakland sighting i've ever had. i had not seen ian in about two years, so i was quite giddy. he doesn't even live in oakland so it's kinda weird to just run into him in the middle of a hospital parking lot. he invited us to his senior film showing at point park next weekend, which will probably be a ridiculously awkward high-school reunion. it was nice to see him, though.

spur of the momently we decided to go to buckhead's saloon with dan ruef and craig. it turned out to be horribly boring. we decided in the future to refer to this bar as "meathead's" because there were many meatheads in attendance, with their lack of necks and popped-collar shirts. the cover artist of the night played a bon jovi song and alicia got mad because she dislikes bon jovi. i drank two rolling rocks. mmm. we left, walked to downtown to catch a bus, but not before alicia called mark. he was at the matrix, and we would have gone in but the cover was $8 which is TRULY OUTRAGEOUS. so we came home. i passed out for maybe two hours, woke up, and here we are.

Alicia and i (clearly with nothing better to do) have decided to launch a myspace blog series of point-counterpoint arguments on various aspects of culture. the first in the series relates to the technology of tivo. alicia will take the affirmative position: why tivo is awesome; i will take the negative: why tivo is the worst.

I went home this weekend for Easter. Before arriving in Jeannette where we still enjoy the luxuries of extended basic cable, I stopped at my mom's house in Penn Hills. As we grilled hot dogs and drank Dr. Pepper, my mom's boyfriend Dale excitedly described to me the circumstances that led an English Premier League soccer player to do a series of backflips. He mimed the motion and then said -- "hey, i'll just show it to you." A series of water-drop sounding clicks through a menu later and we were watching the recording of the acrobatic feat of this spry young athlete from a week or so earlier. Dale then began reading off the values of the Tivo system: he could record any program he wanted, he could tell the Tivo which shows he liked and it would record them any time they played. The Tivo would even use its electronic brain to make educated guesses about shows you MIGHT like based on the ones that you tell it you like. Possibly most amazing of all, it enables you to stop and rewind up to a half hour back in a live tv show.

Sure, this seems convenient. I guess no one would rather fiddle with a VHS tape and make sure the TV is on the correct channel (the reason I have still never seen the final episode of Seinfeld). However, Tivo is essentially cheating. It blurs the lines between "sitting down to watch TV" and "sitting down to watch a movie or other form of entertainment not dependent on an outside schedule." Also, it can completely misalign your own schedule with that of the rest of the television-viewing public.

The whole point of watching on TV is the elusive quality the shows have. What's the point of releasing a tv series one week at a time? To get you to make it a point to sit down and watch that show. It keeps you coming back and in turn, keeps you seeing the commercials advertisers have paid to show. No one likes commericals, but without them, cable would be way more than $50 a month (which is outrageous anyway, but i digress). The point of Tv is telling yourself, "I'm going to sit down for a half an hour to watch One Tree Hill, and on the commercial breaks I am going to use my time wisely in such activities as walking to the kitchen to microwave some leftovers or go down to the washer to change the laundry, etc..." It is the existence of an external entertainment structure that you buy into. This is a different attitude than what one takes when they sit down to watch something pre-recorded. If I'm watching a movie, I've said to myself that I have two or so hours to kill. I do not watn to be bothered by commercials and if I desire to have a snack, I will hit pause. I will save the laundry for afterward because right now I am entertaining myself with the always lovable slapstick comedy of Jim Carrey. Tivo turns television into movies, which it is clearly not meant to be. If I am watching the Pirates game, I don't want to be able to stop and replay a questionable pitch. I will watch instant replays and/or suck it up because I missed it. Tivo sucks because it mixes these two separate entertainment options into a hodgepodge of viewer control.

And that gets me to what this hodgepodge creates: it throws the watcher off the schedule of everyone else's live TV viewing experience. For instance, I'm sitting here watching the Steelers AFC championship game. I'm waiting for Mike Vanderjagt to kick his field goal..he's lining up...he's doing that two step thing....the ball is snapped.... in the world without Tivo, I see the result of this kick with the rest of the world. However, in Tivoland, I stopped live action earlier to replay that awesome tackle made by Ben Roethlisberger. I said, I need to see that again! However, my live TV is now ten or fifteen seconds behind "real" live TV. So the ball is snapped.....it's in the air....and before I can tell if it's good, a car goes by outside, hootin' and hollerin. Unless it's the one Indianapolis fan in the tri-state area on this game day, the ending of this game has just been spoiled. Seconds later, after I already know the outcome, the ball flies wide right. This illustrates my second point: Tivo creates a viewer's own little entertainment world, misaligned from the schedule everyone else is on. It's like a little mini-version of time travel. After stopping for that one play, my live TV schedule is off for the rest of the night. Fifteen seconds doesn't seem like much but it adds up...ten here, five there and before you know it, shows are ending at five after like every channel is TBS or something. The essence of live TV is it creates a watching community: we're all seeing this as it happens. It may not seem like a big deal, but Tivo, my friends, Tivo = CHAOS. It's freakin me out, man. I don't believe in Tivo: it's cheating. Watch it with everyone else.

The end.

Did I mention I'm getting something like a B- in argument? And it's a comm class. Basically I suck.

plenty of things have happened since i last posted in this thing. i forget 80% of them. however, i will give you the cliffs notes version of what i can remember.

boston: best trip ever. some memories include: inventing the reverse birth sexual position, shooting the stink eye and tossing the skank eye, ordering a coors light at cheers because i am an idiot, dancing the "irish jig," throwing up after three yeunglings and a shot of southern comfort, peeing in the sand on the beach, hotel parties with kindhearted yet sleepy asians, mark's disappearing acts, moments of magical realism in boston commons (watching ice skaters in 70 degree weather), the doors as a motif, searching for an hour for wendy's, sitting outside a shady green door while the boys visited fenway park, riding the subway for the first time ever, alicia puking inside a bed, bath and beyond, nicknames nobody liked, and many other things i cannot remember but i wish i could.

it was pretty much the best time ever and i wish i could go back.

some other noteworthy events of march include: watching lots of basketball and mash while drinking PBR, a metaphysics test which i either failed miserably or aced but it's still up in the air, formal where i went from stone sober to puking drunk in record time (best tasting lethal punch ever), drinking on more weeknights than is really responsible and not feeling bad about it whatsoever.

i have become somewhat of a basketball fan recently, and i am very disappointed that LSU did not advance to the championship game. i have learned in life that the team i root for hardly ever wins. in fact, i can think of only one time that a team i like has won, and it was two months ago when the steelers won the superbowl. for instance, i always root for the "red team" on real world/road rules challenges. most of the time, this is the real world team. for the gauntlet II, it was the veterans team. the red team always loses. after pitt lost to bradley i resigned myself to feeling mostly unconcerned with the turnout of the rest of the tournament. then i caught some sort of interview on TV featuring LSU's team, and i decided glen davis is pretty much my favorite athletic personality in recent history. he just sat there with the dumbest look on his face. also, they showed clips of him dancing after a win wearing a yellow feather boa. he is more or less, as alicia said, an SNL character waiting to be born. anyone with a sense of humor should have rooted for LSU. unfortunately, that didn't pan out, and now we have florida and ucla. neither team has such potential for hilarity. all we have is ben howland and that guy that plays for florida with the hair. so when does baseball season start?

last wednesday i enacted a new "senior skip day" policy, which entails me shirking responsiblities in response to being denied for a job (probably because i spent four years shirking responsibilities). i went to work, but left at noon because "i had to write a sonnet." this "sonnet" ended up being a crappy poem in the style of yeats, which i turned in via email because instead of going to poetry class at three, i got on the 61C and spent a few hours walking around barnes and noble in squirrel hill. this is what i do when i get sad; i walk around bookstores, then i buy books i can't afford. alicia called, and we got some Dr Peppers and $1 slices of pieces from "the american deli," or really, "that deli next to cumpie's." if you haven't had this delightful treat yet, i suggest you do. they should probably rename atwood street "pizza street" or something more clever but equally indicative of the wide selection of pizza you can purchase on that street. antoon's, sorrento's and dollar slices. mmm.

while i was perusing the shelves of the barnes & noble reference section, i stumbled upon a book of lists. intrigued, i flipped through and was caught by this headline: "Sean Connery's Eleven Favorite Movies." among them were a bunch of titles that seem like movies you would pick as your favorite if you were purposely trying not be predictable and list obvious choices. and wouldn't you know it? number eleven on sean's list was "Finding Forrester." not only did he overlook some of the more likely choices for "best sean connery movie" (such as one of his bond appearances, the hunt for red october, that one with catherine zeta-jones...ok clearly i don't know anything about sean connery movies but you catch my drift), but he also chose to put the movie starring himself last on the list. obscure taste and modesty...what a guy.





ok clearly that didn't really happen. the list only had ten movies and finding forrester wasn't one of them. however, i like to imagine a world in which sean connery would make a list of his eleven favorite movies, not ten, and that list would include finding forrester.

boston in two days...i'm pumped. alicia and i watched elizabethtown, then decided we would try to find odd roadside attractions along the route from pittsburgh to boston. so far the most exciting one is the coffee-pot-shaped building, which is unfortunately too far out of the way. also of interest are the crayola factory and the world's largest glacial pothole. so we'll see how that turns out.