I know the blogosphere is going to be rife with Father’s Day posts, today, and I suppose this one will probably pass unnoticed. That’s fine. I rarely talk about my father, because, well, frankly, I don’t know why.

Daddy passed away almost 35 years ago (on the 3rd of July, so you can imagine how that colored celebrations of the 4th for awhile). I was 17, he was 74. Do the math – you want to talk “generation gap”? He was a Survivor of the Holocaust – the concentration camps of World War II – as was my mother. We were his second family, as he lost his first wife and two daughters in those camps. A photo of them hung on the wall next to our front door for as long as I can remember. My brother and I were his second chance to leave a legacy to the world. No pressure.

He made the best freaking potato salad and cole slaw ever – a flavor-memory-imprint, if you will – by which I judge all potato salads and cole slaws, especially my own. This was a man who was unafraid to cook, back in the day when men didn’t do that sort of thing at home.

Daddy drove me to school every morning, when I was a kid. One morning, he got up very early and left the house before the crack of dawn. He came back just in time to take me to school. When I got in the car (a yellow and white 1956 Buick Special – awesome!), I noticed that the back seat was filled with crates and burlap sacks. That were clucking. He had driven out to a farm and bought live chickens that he was going to take to our butcher after he dropped me off at school. He got a deal.

When we’d driven maybe 3 or 4 blocks, the chickens – who had apparently been quietly conspiring a jailbreak up to that point – decided that now was the time to make their move. Several of the chickens in the sacks had managed to loosen whatever tied the sacks closed, and burst into the air! They went flying at the windows, flying up to the back of the front seat, flying in my hair – all the while cackling wildly and getting the others to join in the riot. This was not terribly amusing to a 6 year old, I promise you.

I was completely traumatized and refused to eat chicken at home for an entire year. Not roast chicken, not fried chicken, not even chicken soup. I was going to make damn sure that not a single one of those chickens that had shared my ride to school that morning, were still in the house. In any form. Period. To this day, I cannot eat anything (excluding veggies, of course) that I had known personally. Even in passing. I would die on Survivor. He never went back to the farm again. At least, that I’m aware of.

Daddy loved pro wrestling on television (I know!). He thought it was real. He would split a bottle of Schoenling beer (it’s an Ohio thing) with my mother, sit on the edge of “his” chair, and forming imaginary head-locks with his arms, shout advice to his favorites. Big Bro and I usually stayed waaayy clear of the living room, when wrestling was on TV. He had his first heart attack when I was 7. His doctor told him that he couldn’t watch wrestling anymore, because it was too exciting for him. So, no more Schoenling. He waited for times when my mother wasn’t home, and watched it anyway. We were sworn to secrecy.

I was a teenager, and he was an old man. He suffered from what we now call Alzheimer’s, and his faculties steadily declined. He was hyper-emotional and had a terrible temper. Mom said it was because a German guard hit him in the head with a rifle butt. I know now that it was part of the dementia. Back then, we didn’t know anything. They didn’t talk about this shit on TV like they do now.

One afternoon, a few months before he died, he had one of his increasingly rare moments of complete lucidity. I had just come home from school, and found him sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me. “Have you gotten your driver’s license, yet?”, he asked. I’d had my learner’s permit for 2 years, I told him, but Mom only took me driving a couple of times in the school parking lot, and I wasn’t allowed to go more than 5 mph before she became hysterical and started slamming on an imaginary brake pedal on the passenger’s side. I was 17 and still didn’t have my “adult” license. It was embarrassing.

“You’ll never learn to drive if you wait for your mother,” he said. He pulled out his wallet (Mom always made sure he had money in his wallet, even if all he ever did was walk down to the fruit stand a few blocks away, and bought some peaches) and handed me a twenty-dollar bill (a fortune in those days – okay, maybe not quite a fortune, but still a lot of money). “Call one of those driving schools and buy a couple of lessons. They’ll take you to get your license. Don’t tell your mother.” At that moment, I loved my father more than a teenager will ever admit.

When I do talk about my father, these are the stories I tell.

Several years ago, MJ and I made a pilgrimage to the land of (some of) his forbears, Ireland. We traveled on our own to Dublin, took a bus up to Termonfecken to peer at the lichen-covered headstones – searching for said forbears – rented a car in Galway, and adventured our way down the west coast and back up to Dublin, searching for music. We had a blast.

The following year, we heard about Celtica Tours to Ireland, headed up by Robbie O’Connell, a nephew of our favorite Irish Trad group, The Clancy Brothers. We couldn’t resist and booked ourselves in. Again, we had a blast. Despite the swan dive and face-plant I did off the top step of the bus at some castle or another. Not their fault, though. That was all me.

It was so much more relaxing to let someone else do the driving (except maybe on some of those narrow, twisting back roads, when it became tour bus vs. compact car, or worse, tour bus vs. tour bus), and we really got to enjoy the scenery. And there were “sessions” every evening. And the camaraderie of our fellow travelers – characters themselves. Like Anna the Puppet Lady from Boston.

That’s where we met the Zoo Lady and her hubs, who hail from Arkansas. The Zoo Lady and I hit it off and had many wonderful conversations over a Bulmer’s or Guinness and cigarettes in the hotel parking lots. We kept in touch via e-mail when we got back, mostly during hurricane season (she has family on the Florida west coast), especially when storms approached or passed (“Are you guys okay?” “Did your folks have any damage?”).

This past Fall, we discovered – through forwarded and personal e-mails – that we even share the same political views. Which was a relief. You know how you just don’t want to offend someone whose views you’re unsure of, because you like them and don’t want them to cut you off? It was like that.

The Zoo Lady was in Florida last week to visit her family and help out with stuff, but we couldn’t manage to coordinate a visit. Still, we had the first voice-to-voice contact since Ireland, and it was just like being back there. ->Sigh<- A bright spot in an otherwise dismal week of more dusting and straightening and digging out at my FIL’s. Yes, that mess continues. Although the living room pretty much resembles a living room now, and we discovered an actual couch and coffee table in the FIL’s “office”! Seriously, I thought it was all a mountain of junk, but when you cleared off the junk, there was furniture under there! Un-freaking-believable.

Anyway, the Zoo Lady reads this blog, too. I know you’re out there – I can hear you breathing… so if you don’t like your nickname, come up with something better. And leave a comment. Yo.

At this moment in time, I should be in a cushy Charleston, South Carolina hotel, perhaps just stirring to make some coffee and preparing for, oh I dunno, maybe a walk over to some famous breakfast spot we saw featured on one of Tony Bourdain’s travel/food shows, tiny camera in-hand ready to snap a few things for my photo blog.

But that’s not going to happen. MJ’s mother passed away Tuesday morning. She will be cremated, with no service of any kind. It’s weird. Definitely not what I’m used to. While the emotional ground has shifted under both his and his dad’s feet, neither one of them seems to be mourning in the traditional sense.

I’m trying to figure out how to talk about this without sounding like a cold-hearted bitch. BJ was passive-aggressive and emotionally distant. She was always civil, but never welcoming. If we went to visit them (they live only about 45 minutes from us), she started looking at her watch after about half an hour. I’m pretty sure she didn’t care for me at all, because she couldn’t bully me, and mostly, because I reminded her of her own MIL: independent, strong-willed, and only barely deferential because she’s my MIL.

I’m also pretty certain that she suffered from some form of clinical depression or another that escalated as time went on. She didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about much of anything. Except old TV game shows and QVC and HSN. She collected dolls and jewellry. She didn’t cook, she didn’t clean, and she wouldn’t let anyone into “her” room. She refused to see any doctor (except the dentist, for some bizzarre reason) since MJ was an infant. Doubly weird, since she was the daughter of a doctor. In the last several years, she barely ever left the house – even when “Dad” was in the hospital. So, when she fell a week ago, and was carted off by Fire/Rescue over her vehement protestations to the hospital, it should not have been too much of a surprise to discover that she had more things wrong with her than you’ve got fingers. But no one expected her to die. At least, not immediately. Six months, maybe a year. Not a week.

Both MJ and his dad (who seems to miss her in the sense of the “her” that was when they married), seem to look at this as an opportunity to clean up all of the crap she’d accumulated, reorganize (the one thing she did do was pay the bills, and that started slipping through the cracks over the last year or so), and get rid of the two-inch accumulation of dust that has settled throughout, because she wouldn’t let anyone touch anything. I’m not kidding. Think Miss Haversham in Great Expectations. You can’t put anything down on any surface without raising great clouds of fluffy dust.

So, we’re spending our days over there sorting, filing, and dusting while wearing dust masks. The company who makes Claritin is going to make a fortune on us over the next couple of weeks. Buy stock.