My dad’s funeral will be Friday, July 16th, at 11 AM. Viewing at 10 AM. It will take place at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Corvallis, Oregon. All are welcome.
—
I called my dad at about 10:30 PM on Wednesday, June 30th. He died at around 7 AM on Thursday, July 1st.
I had left work at about 8:30 PM on Wednesday, and arrived at my hotel at about 8:45. When I got there, I proofread, once more, an essay that I had been working on with my boss. I wanted to send it to my dad to get his thoughts before it went to print. But instead, I remember having the thought, “No, this will be a cool thing to surprise him with when it’s published. That’ll hype him up.”
I shut my laptop and went to the hotel bar. I’m actually not sure that this was the exact sequence of events. In fact, I think I might’ve had that moment with the essay after all of this, but for some reason I started writing this entry this way. And for some reason it feels better to tell the story this way. Even though it makes no difference, really.
I brought a book to the bar called A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry. It’s a novel about Irish soldiers who joined the Allied forces on the Western Front during World War I. It was a book he’d read and loved during the pandemic. I flipped it open and saw a little noted date, written by my dad, on the top-right corner of the first page: “5/24/2020.” That’s the date he’d finished the book — he wrote the date like that in every book that he read. I guess when your brain is a bibliography, you need to mark the dates when you add new citations.
Next to “5/24/2020” I wrote “7/21.” Wannabe.
I read Chapter One and drank two Old Fashioneds. (The idea of his son drinking cocktails in a Los Angeles hotel probably makes him roll over in the morgue right now.) The bartender didn’t charge me for the second one. (Hopefully this annotation makes him rolling over in the morgue a little less urgent.)
I picked up just enough in the first 20 pages of the book to feel like I could talk to him about a couple of things if it came up, and I decided I’d walk around the area near the hotel and give him a call. I left the bar and rang him. He didn’t pick up, which was unusual considering he almost never went to sleep before midnight. I shrugged it off and figured he wasn’t near his phone at that exact moment. I walked around for 15 minutes, and called him again.
He didn’t pick up again. So I left him a message:
“Hey, Dad!” I tried coming in enthusiastically, and drew out the “a” in “Dad” a little bit. I was exhausted, and I knew he was concerned about how tired work had been getting me. I think I was trying to sound a bit extra cheery. I remember hopping up onto a curb soon after ringing him. I’m not sure if I’d been sent to voicemail by that point.
I moved quickly ahead, “I just figured I’d give you a try. Hope you’re doing well.”
At this point, I was thinking about the probable entry point in the conversation we would’ve had if he’d picked up. “Uhm. Really proud of Chris Paul — lifelong friend in some ways.” I paused there and my voice lost a little momentum — I think I was looking around. I was on an empty street, walking over what I kept thinking were those gullies where the motorcycle chase happens in Terminator 2 (my dad loved Terminator 2).
“So, pretty happy for him. Uhm, yeah. Just out for a stroll.” I guess I was more attuned to my surroundings than the voicemail at that point.
“Staying in a new hotel tonight;” I was still talking about my location, but I guess I had my footing again.
“Which is, I don’t know if ‘fun’ is the right word, but an experience.” There was a lot I wanted to say to him about living in hotels, being tired, and finishing a piece of writing that I was proud of but that felt like a waste, so I guess this phrasing sufficed as an entry point. I knew he’d pick up on “an experience” when he listened to the voicemail — I guess I figured it would get him to call me back sooner.
“Uhm, but yeah. Talk soon.” Closing out.
“Take care.” Still closing out.
“Tóg go reidh é.” Still closing out.
“Love you.” Still closing out.
“Bye.” Closed out.
And those were my last words to my dad. I know that because when I checked his phone on Thursday night — about 12 hours after he’d died — the message I left him had been listened to.
—
There is a great quotation from a book I’m going to re-read when I’m able to better train my eyes on external things (I Love Dick by Chris Kraus):
“Study’s good, because it microcosms everything—if you understand everything within the walls of what you study you can identify other walls too, other areas of study. Everything’s separate and discrete and there is no macrocosm, really. When there are no walls there is no study, only chaos. And so you break it down.”
Trying to think about my dad’s entire life — all his impact, all his stories, all his jokes — is chaos. It’s impossible to wrap my mind around. And when I try to, the dinging of the ping pong balls in my head gets too loud to handle. When that happens during the day, when I’m manically running errands or exercising, I try to start writing — to start building up the walls in my brain that I need to function. When it happens at night — the last three nights between midnight and 5 AM — I pour three shots of whiskey into a single glass, shoot it, put the bottle at the opposite end of the house, and then try to write again. My dad would hate this, too. Oh well.
That voicemail, mundane as it is, is a useful microcosm. (In part because it’s not his voice, which I can’t listen to yet.)
“Really proud of Chris Paul — lifelong friend in some ways.”
When I was growing up, the most exciting moments of every year were when my dad would take me to Portland Trail Blazers games. He usually had to teach the next morning (weekday games were easier, and cheaper, to get), so we’d drive the 100 miles up to Portland right after I got out of school, get some pizza, and wait outside the Rose Garden (the arena in which the Blazers play, for people not in the know).
Home games usually started at 7 PM, and they’d open the doors an hour before tip-off. So my dad and I would show up at 5:30 and wait dutifully in line — I’d talk about how excited I was to see the star of the day, and my dad would historicize everything we were about to see. The doors would open, and I’d race ahead of my dad to try to get as close to the players warming up as I could. When they exited the court after warming up, they’d sign autographs for the people lining the areas between the court and the locker room. For me, this was the single coolest thing in the world. And every game we went to, I would compete my ass off trying to get as many autographs as I could.
My dad would stand on the stairs nearest the swarm of autograph-getters. Naturally, he became good friends with the usher in that section, and he’d talk with him while I tried getting autographs. Here’s a picture of the two of them, and a useful visual of where exactly I considered the happiest place on earth (you’ll also notice binoculars in my dad’s left hand — a marker of the fact that our seats were definitely not in this section).
On November 10th, 2006, my dad and I made our usual trip north. The Blazers were playing the New Orleans Hornets, and Chris Paul was coming off of a rookie year that made it clear he was going to be pretty darn special. My dad, basketball mind that he was, told me he thought Chris Paul had the potential to be the next Isiah Thomas. Unlike with other parts of his life, my dad was not prone to hyperbole when it came to scouting basketball talent.
So, when I bolted through the doors at 6 PM and made my way down to Section 107, I was hoping to see Chris Paul. And there he was.
I had just turned nine years old, and I stood there gawking at this little point guard taking mid-range jumpers and practicing his dribbling. As he made his way toward the locker room — the moment of truth — I pressed towards the railing. And as I did, a 30-something-year-old dude shoved me out of the way so he could get in front me.
This was another aspect of the autograph-getter section: For the most part, it was young people, but there were some known “sellers” there — grown men who would get Chris Paul to sign a basketball card, and then put it on eBay for a couple hundred bucks. My dad just called them “losers.”
Lucky for me, Chris Paul saw this older fellow shove me — a sign of things to come, I wonder, for the superiority of his court vision. So Chris Paul walked directly over to where I was and said, “I see you little man.” He signed my autograph book, and kept it moving. He signed for every single person in the section. He was there for about ten minutes.
When he was done signing, he said, “Did I miss anybody?” The guy who shoved me raised his hand and said, “Me, Chris!” Chris Paul looked at him, turned around, and walked towards the locker room.
He’d earned a fan for life. And I told my dad the story about ten different times (and ways) the rest of the evening.
The Blazers won the game that night 92-91. Chris Paul had a pretty underwhelming performance, by his standards, and Zach Randolph poured in 31 points for the ‘Zers. Normally, my dad would have had to teach at 8 AM and I would have had school (we did this many times — my dad driving almost four hours to watch a basketball game in Portland on a school night), but this time around it was a Friday, so I got to revel in my pre-game success in Section 107, and my viewing success in (probably) Section 318.
What a night. What a memory.
“Really proud of Chris Paul — lifelong friend in some ways.” That entire memory rests in that sentence. For both of us.
—
Two of the first places that come to mind when I think of my dad’s happiness are the Rose Garden and County Galway, Ireland. He loved it over there. And I mentioned County Galway in that 26-second voicemail, as well. You may not have noticed it. He would have.
This morning I sent this message to my cousin Cole, who lives in Galway:
Hi, Cole — I'm trying to figure some Gaelic out that my dad used to always say: Whenever he ended a phone call he’d say “Toe-ger-ray.” We said it as a family often. This is a butchered spelling, but I’m wondering if you know how to spell it or it’s definition. Thank you!
He replied a couple of minutes later (with some niceties attached, of course):
So it’s tóg go reidh é. ‘Tóg go reidh é’ means take it easy. People use it a lot in Ireland.
“Tóg go reidh é” is how my dad ended every single phone call with me and a lot of other people. His mother, a native Gaelic speaker (and Cole’s great aunt), did the same thing. For my dad, it was a signal that the “Old Country” was deeply a part of his identity. And he lamented how many white people in America had to find identities anew in the so-called “great melting pot” — and how destructive their search usually was.
What I didn’t know until today is that “tóg go reidh é” means “take it easy.” I knew it was a way of bidding farewell, so of course this doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, but for some reason it does add to the general somberness of my last words to him.
Words sure do take on a lot of meaning when the person you were saying them to drops dead eight hours later:
“Hey, Dad! I just figured I’d give you a try. Hope you’re doing well. Uhm. Really proud of Chris Paul — lifelong friend in some ways. So, pretty happy for him. Uhm, yeah. Just out for a stroll. Staying in a new hotel tonight, which is, I don’t know if ‘fun’ is the right word, but an experience. Uhm, but yeah. Talk soon. Take care. Tóg go reidh é. Love you. Bye.”
The day my dad died, someone sent me a poem by John Updike. I’m going to reproduce it here:
Perfection Wasted, by John Updike
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.
I was just reading your great introspective writing from a distance but I wanted to share a similar memory that branches off of one of the topics here, because it was a personal experience as well as a view into the close bond that you and your dad had.
It was maybe 2007 or 2008, and I was about 10 or 11 when me and my father went up to the Rose Garden along with you and your father. They were both friends from OSU or something like that. We drove up from Corvallis, went to the gate super early (this was a totally new experience for me - had no idea you can go up to the players early!) and got some autographs.
My memory isn't fantastic but I want to say it was against the Boston Celtics, who were really good that year, and your father was wearing a Celtics shirt, which of course was in contrast to the rest of us, who were Blazer fans first and foremost. Our seats were back to the wall and I didn't know at the time that at one point the Blazers scored with 6 men on the court, and yet the basket still counted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-nylJLVhqQ) but I do recall us having a great time even though our backs were to the wall (you could still see the "Twin Towers" of Pryzbilla and Oden on the court, but enough about esoteric NBA trivia) and seeing the home team win over what would be the eventual NBA champions that year. I think there was some rebelliousness in the fact that you (and potentially Bridget, I can't recall) were sticking it to the old man with a "Celtics Suck" chant, haha.
One of the things I do remember was how nice your dad was and the bond between you guys. It was special and rather eye-opening because I hadn't really seen that before as a possible dynamic. Maybe my father noticed as well. I'll probably never know, but it was obviously a great friendship on top of everything else.
Your writing is very poignant and extremely well done and I can't imagine what things have been like the past couple of weeks. Your talent and drive is immense, best of luck in the future.