In which my yenta dad doesn't forget his mission

I was hanging out with my dad and his cancer roommate, Jim. Jim had prostate cancer. It had metastasized.

Prostate cancer confined to the prostate is not the worst, but prostate cancer that has metastasized is very bad news.

Jim had almost no visitors. He and his wife had divorced years ago. He had a stepdaughter who lived a few hours away who came to visit once on a Sunday but couldn't come very often because she had work and it was a long trip.

My dad had lots of visitors because he and my mom had lived in San Antonio for about 15 years before the Sicily adventure. So we shared our visitors with Jim. He was a nice guy and we didn't want him to be lonely or feel left out.

He had nobody to take care of him when he left the hospital. He lived far from his stepdaughter, not that she would have been able to do much. When you work full time, it's hard to take care of a sick person.

Primo and I watched the movie 50/50 last night, about a man who gets cancer at the age of 26. He tells his artist girlfriend of a few months that if she wants to break up, that's OK, because it's a lot to ask of someone to take you to chemo and take care of you when you are throwing up in the middle of the night. She refuses to break up, saying she wants to take care of him.

I rolled my eyes. "This is not going to end well," I said.

Even when you love the person you are taking care of and have a lifetime history, it's very hard. You resent the cancer. You hate that everything in your life is about cancer. You hate the damn hospital and the fear and the despair and the not knowing. Towards the end, we all, my dad included, just wanted it to be over. He would wake up in the morning and say, "Why didn't I die last night?" He felt guilty that our lives were consumed with his cancer. All we wanted was to spend as much time with him before he died. But we still all hated the cancer.

Someone I'd only known for a few months?

No way I would take on his cancer. No way.

And of course (spoiler alert, so skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the movie, which you should because it's not often that you see a cancer comedy), she does ditch him, but only after being a really bad cancer girlfriend. She didn't want to ruin their karma by seeing him getting the chemo, so she just dropped him off at the front door of the hospital and then forgot to pick him up. I didn't blame her for not wanting to be his girlfriend any more, but I do blame her for not breaking up with him right away.

Back to Jim. He was being released, probably because there really wasn't anything else they could do.

"But who will help you?" I asked, which was, in retrospect, not the most sensitive question I could have asked.

"I have a plan," he assured me.

Dumb me. I thought he'd lined up a home health nurse.

He hadn't.

He had a plan for everything not to be an issue any more. When I found out, I was very sad. Nobody should have to die alone.

Unless the person is a real meanie jerk.

But a nice person like Jim shouldn't die alone.

Back to when Jim and my dad were still alive and in their room. I was sitting on my dad's bed talking to him. Yet another doctor made his way in to check my dad.

My dad introduced himself and me, then asked the doctor about himself. He always asked where the doctor was from, then about where else he had been stationed, then about family. He did the same thing with the chaplains. He got several visits every week from the hospital chaplains. His favorite was the Episcopalian chaplain, a woman. My dad, a lifelong Catholic, liked to talk to her about theology. When she showed up, he would tell us that we could go get lunch or take a break.

With this new doctor, my dad went straight for broke. "Are you married, Doc?" he asked.

The doctor shook his head. "No."

Have I ever told you that when I was in grad school and my parents were working in Saudi Arabia that my dad told me in a letter that he had started a support group called "Grandfathers without Grandchildren?" He was dying to be a grandfather. He loved little kids.

My grandmother was on the same bandwagon. She sent me a letter asking me if I had considered marrying a widower who needed help raising his young children. (Because that's just what every unmarried woman wants: the chance to raise a dead woman's kids.) "A friend of your mother's married a widower. They live in Marshfield now. She is very tall."

Blessherheart. I loved my sweet grandmother who gardened, taught me to make bread, walked to 6:00 a.m. Mass every morning, and made sure everyone around her, including my schizophrenic second cousin, was fed, but we had different ideas about life.

I wrote back to my dad and told him I could start my own club: Unwed MBA Mothers or Daughters Without Children.

I knew what he was getting at with the doctor. I had to head him off.

"Not married?" my dad mused.

I casually leaned over and took my dad's hand. I squeezed. Hard.

"What's your specialty?" I asked the doctor, trying to change the subject.

"What a coincidence! My daughter here is sing- OW!" my dad exclaimed as I squeezed his hand again.

The doctor looked confused. Jim jumped a little.

I looked at the doctor, blocked my left hand with my right as I pointed to my dad with my left, mouthed, "Morphine," and looked back at my dad. Except of course my dad was stone cold sober. He was just a father with a mission.

Jim looked at me and raised his eyebrows. He knew my dad was sober. They'd been talking about their days in Vietnam and my dad's mind was as sharp as a tack. He would get worse as he had to have more and more morphine, but on that day, he was just fine. He'd even been to physical therapy.

"He's the only patient I've ever had who asked to go to therapy," the therapist said.

"I'm bored and I want to exercise," my dad shrugged. He didn't feel too awful once they got the fluid off him and started him on painkillers and got him through his first round of chemo. The first time wasn't so bad, at least not in the first few days. It got worse every time, though. Chemo is really nasty.

The doctor told me his specialty. Which I don't remember because this was 15 years ago. He wasn't a surgeon or a nephrologist because those guys had already come and gone and said they couldn't do anything. This was a teaching hospital, so maybe he was just a wandering student doc, although he looked older than that. But cute. Older but cute. I wouldn't have minded knowing more about his singleness, but it was too weird to have my dad broker the deal.

I had nothing to say about his specialty. What are you supposed to say. "Oh! Cardiology! Well, there's a profession to love!" See? It looks stupid in writing, too. Here it is, 15 years later, and I still have nothing clever to say back to this guy. I probably just smiled and mumbled. That was my usual strategy when put on the spot. I might even had said something stupid like, "I was going to go to med school, but then I took freshman calculus and chemistry and realized I was not smart enough. Plus I realized I don't like being around sick people." Which is not the right thing to say when you are around sick people, so let's hope this sentence stayed in my head and did not come out of my mouth.

My dad tried to steer the conversation back to the doctor's marital status, but was unsuccessful. The doctor left and I was relived. I looked like crap. When your dad is in the hospital with serious cancer and you are spending every other night in the chair in his room, you don't spend a lot of time on style. You just wash your hair, brush your teeth, and hope that your socks match.

My dad scolded me: "I'm trying to take care of you! He could have been The One!"

Maybe. Maybe I blew it. But finding a husband was not at the top of my list at the moment. Bless my dad's heart.

In which my dad is a pincushion for a medical student

My dad was in the hospital. They'd diagnosed cancer and he'd started the chemo, which was brutal. His hair had started to fall out. We had a little head-shaving ceremony outside my mom's room at the temporary quarters on base.

Wait. Let me give you some more context. My parents had moved to Sicily in August 1996 so my dad, who had been retired from the air force for about 14 years, could take a job teaching junior high math and science to the kids at the American navy base on Sicily.

In November 1996, he thought he'd pulled a muscle running a 10K.

It wasn't a pulled muscle. It was non-Hodgkin's blue cell lymphoma. I think it was stage four. If it wasn't when he was diagnosed, it became stage four pretty quickly. Stage four is the last stage. Then you die. If you get cancer, you want stage one. Of course, you don't want cancer at all. That's the best situation.

He had had a major physical before the Dept of Defense schools hired him in August. They don't want to hire sick people to be teachers and pay to send them abroad. That's a waste of money. There was no sign of cancer when he had his physical, but it showed up very soon after that.

After being medivaced back to the US in December 1996, he was at Wilford Hall medical center at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. I was living in Austin and unemployed, so I spent a lot of time down at the hospital. My mom was trying to find a place to live - they had realized my dad would probably not be returning to teaching very soon - and get their stuff shipped from Italy back to the US. It was a time when organized people triumph and disorganized people crater. My mother could move an army with her logistical skills, but even as uber-organized as she is, doing all this while her husband was in the hospital fighting cancer was brutal.

She had to return to Italy to receive their household goods, which hadn't even arrived by the time my dad got sick, and have them shipped back. Even super organized women can't be two places at once. When she went to Italy, I covered for her with my dad. Even when she was in San Antonio, she had things to do that only she could do, so I spent a lot of time just sitting with my dad.

I had been very discouraged that I couldn't find a job after the Peace Corps, but now I am very happy that I had that time with my dad. It was a blessing and a gift. Back then, I was so worried about my employment situation, but if I had to be unemployed for a year to be able to be with my dad in the last months of his life, it was a fair tradeoff. Now I am unemployed again and apparently unemployable, but nobody in my family is sick. I'm not sure how to classify this one.

I want to say something about "fighting" cancer. I hate it - hate it - when people praise cancer survivors as being "fighters" and "tough."

What cancer survivors are mainly is lucky.

When you say someone who survives really fought or really wanted to live, what you are implying is that someone who dies from cancer just didn't fight hard enough. Just didn't want to live enough.

I know that's not how you mean it. It never even occurred to you. But when I hear it - when other people who have lost loved ones to cancer hear it, what we hear is, "Only the people who really want to live survive cancer. Only the people who do it right live. If you die from cancer, it's because you did it wrong."

Which is not true. My dad didn't want to die. We sure didn't want him to die. But not everyone is cured. Someday, maybe, I hope. But today, people still die from cancer and it's not because they gave up. It's because they were unlucky.

My dad was in the hospital. We got him a day pass to leave and spend some time outdoors - it was a nice February day in south Texas. He was too weak to spend much time doing anything but sitting, but we pulled some chairs out to the sidewalk in front of my mom's room and sat in the sun.

Because of the chemo, his hair had started to fall out. Chemo kills all the fast-growing cells in your body. These cells include cancer cells, but also include hair cells and white blood cells, which is why some people lose their hair and why most people going through chemo have to be very careful about germs - they have no resistance with their white blood cells wiped out as part of the cycle.

The falling hair was becoming a nuisance. He asked us to cut if off. My mom had gotten an electric razor from somewhere. She must have borrowed it from some San Antonio friends. She is one of the most prepared persons you will ever meet, but even my mom doesn't carry an electric shaver around with her as a matter of course.

She does carry her gardening and house tools with her when she travels by car, though. The first time she came to visit me in Memphis, she spent the days doing minor repairs on my house and working in the yard while I was at work.

My mom is the houseguest you definitely want to return. She does not lie around waiting to be entertained. She doesn't complain that she can't watch TV and she doesn't drink all of your booze. She finds problems to solve and solves them and then she helps with dinner.

I asked my dad if I could give him a mohawk first. He rolled his eyes, maybe remembering my brother's mohawk when he was in high school.

At least my brother never got a tattoo. Hair grows. Tattoos are forever. I am very glad tattoos had not become fashionable when I was in high school. Not that I would have gotten one - I faint when someone pierces my skin with a needle, which is the appropriate reaction.

I shaved the sides of his head, then my mom took a photo of him smiling uncertainly with his mohawk.

It was not a pretty picture. He'd been in the hospital for over a month and had gained a bunch of weight (edema from when his kidneys started to fail before they started the chemo), then lost it. He was now much thinner than he had been, and he would get even thinner yet before the chemo was over. His normal weight was about 170, which is average for a man of 5'8". At its lowest, he was about 120 and skeletal. He was too weak to move. When the young airmen would change his diaper and his sheets - oh, yes - that is one of the things that happens with chemo - you lose control of your bowels - the one would lift my dad in his arms like a baby and hold him - a cancer pieta - while the other stripped the bed and re-made it with clean linens.

The entire time he was in the hospital, I never heard any of these young men ever call my dad anything but "sir." None of this first name business. Bad enough to lose your physical dignity but to lose all psychic dignity as well? That would be too much.

I shaved the rest of his hair off his pale head. He smiled again. A very small smile. It's hard to smile when you feel like crap and know you are probably going to die a lot sooner than you had planned.

A few days later, they wanted to give my dad a lumbar puncture. The test was to see how far the cancer had spread. The doctor came in with a team of medical students. The one intern was about to do her first lumbar puncture.

They can't anesthetize you for a lumbar puncture. I guess it's because you can't anesthetize bone? Any physicians reading please chime in.

My dad was wearing a hospital gown and nothing else, which was fine because he was covered with the bed linens. But the intern needed to have his back exposed to her. "Lie on your side and be perfectly still," she instructed as she pulled back the sheets and lifted his gown away from below his waist.

"I'll wait in the hall," I told my dad, as I could see that he would be almost naked for this procedure.

I stepped into the hall and stood next to the door. A few moments later, I heard a smothered scream. "Come back in here!" my dad gasped.

"I don't want to see your penis!" I told him in a loud whisper as I leaned around the door frame. And I didn't. Sooooo inappropriate.

"I don't care," he breathed. "Come back in here and hold my hand."

I walked back into the room carefully looking at my dad's face and not anywhere else. I sat next to his shoulder, still looking toward his face, and holding his hand. He clenched it so tightly that it hurt.

The intern couldn't get the right spot. Her face set with determination, she tried again. And again. She poked that needle in against the bone.

My dad squeezed my hand harder. He bit his lip, but I could still hear his moans. I felt the tears rolling down my face. I hated that intern. I hated her.

She finally got the needle in the bone. "Be very still," she warned, as she sucked out the fluid.

I stroked my dad's bald head and squeezed his hand back as the intern pulled his gown down and put the covers back. I didn't even look at her. She was dead to me.

I know she was just doing her job and that everyone has to learn somehow, but maybe she could have practiced on something or someone who wasn't my dad first. I felt sick to my stomach then as my dad breathed heavily and quivered in pain and I feel sick to my stomach now as I write this, 15 years later. I can still feel his hand squeezing mine so hard that it hurt. But I didn't mind: I was glad to share his pain. If I could have, I would have taken it from him and felt it all myself. Is there anything worse than watching someone you love suffer?

The tests revealed nothing. The cancer had not spread that far. Yet. Extra pain. For nothing.

In which I run over the neighbors' mailbox and nobody holds me to account for it

I was 16 and I was up late doing something with my college application. It was warm enough that I could walk out of the house after dark in just my nightgown. It was dark and it was a very modest nightgown. Now, of course, people go to church in their pajama pants, but 32 years ago, it was considered tacky to wear nightclothes and visible undergarments in public.

I went out to put whatever it was in the mailbox and saw a car come careening down the street, over the curb, and on to our driveway, where it smashed into my dad's car on the passenger side, completely destroying the passenger door.

I stood absolutely still, shocked and stunned. Then I started screaming and ran inside to get my mom and dad out of bed. They had already fallen asleep, so it took a minute or two to explain that someone had just CRASHED INTO THE CAR!

My dad ran out. Nobody was hurt, but his car was in bad shape. The crashing car had already backed up and was on its way when my dad came out. He got in front of them and made them stop. The driver was a young man and the passenger was a kid of about 14.

The man claimed his foot had slipped and he'd hit the gas instead of the brake. We knew there had to be more to the story because we lived on a dead-end street that was only two blocks long. Our house was in the middle of the two blocks. How does someone get going that fast accidentally? Although you don't have to be going very fast at all to damage a car broadside.

I don't remember if my dad called the police. I say he should have. He suspected that it had actually been the kid driving. Which may be illegal. I don't know. It is definitely unwise. When my dad taught me to drive, a very stressful experience for the both of us, as I maintained that the lack of a traffic signal in my lane meant that even though the light was red in the other lane, I still had the right of way.

Thank goodness it was late at night and there was no other traffic. I'm surprised my dad didn't have a heart attack.

I maintained that only once, though.

I don't think the driver had insurance. I definitely would have called the cops with that. The few times I have bumped bumpers with someone, the first thing I have done is write down my insurance information for them. Each time, the person has told me he would rather just get cash from me, but I'm all, "No way jose. Just deal with USAA. That's why I have insurance." Funnily, they never do. Which makes me wonder who was at fault, really. I know that the few times someone has hit me, I have been all over it, wanting my money from their insurance company.

The one time the guy did take my insurance information and called the police, the insurance company AND THE POLICE HAHAHAHA! said that the accident was his fault, not mine, so pay up buddy.

I had to go to court to get my ticket waived. When the cops first showed up, they gave me the ticket, even though the guy had been turning right from my left side. I took photos of the accident - this is why you always have a camera on you - and of the area around the accident. I took the photos to court, along with matchbox cars to re-enact the accident, only to discover they already had little cars there.

"Nobody has ever brought her own cars before," they said.

I wore a suit. I was the best-dressed defendant in there. I say that if you want the court to rule in your favor, it might help just a little if you don't wear baggy sweatpants and dirty tennis shoes. But that's just me.

Anyhow, when the administrative judge looked at my photos and heard my explanation, she said, "You couldn't have caused that accident" and cancelled my ticket.

The insurance company said the same thing.

I hope they went back and gave a ticket to the guy who hit me and then lied to the police about it.

My friend Leigh, who is five feet tall and 90 pounds, was hit once when the other driver, a big lady, ran the light. Leigh got out and asked the big lady and the big lady's friend for their insurance.

They had none.

"That's illegal!" Leigh hissed. A witness came and pulled Leigh away from the big lady.

"Just sit here and wait for the police," the witness said. "Let them deal with it."

So the driver didn't have insurance and my dad ended up getting a new door at a junkyard and doing all the repairs and body work himself. When my mom and dad drove up to see me perform with the Small Private School Marching Band at the Small Private School- Big State School football game (oh what a tradition that was - Small Private School vs big State School for the annual humiliation), the new door was still yellow with filler in it, a lovely contrast to the green of the rest of the car.

Good thing my dad grew up working on cars and knew how to do these things. He sure wasn't getting any money from the driver.

I say all that as preface to the real story, which is what I did to a neighbor's property late one night. And then didn't have the guts even to apologize to them.

I was late to driving. My dad taught me some when I was 12, when we would drive around empty parking lots. But when it came time to really learn so I could get my license, I was slow. We moved from Panama back to the US when I was 16. In Panama, you had to be 17 to get a license, so I didn't even take driver's ed. They might not even have offered it at my high school in Panama. I never paid attention.

I took driver's ed at my high school in San Antonio and my mom and dad took me out to practice, but then I failed the test my first time. I refused to take it again right away. I didn't need to drive: I took the bus to school and my part-time job was at Woolco, which was walking distance from our house.

That spring, though, my mom insisted I get my license. I had secured a summer job teaching swimming on base and I would need to drive to get there. "I am not going to drive you to work every morning," she warned me.

So I practiced and I got my license, even though I was and still am a very bad parallel parker. It's not something you need to do much in the south. There's enough parking there. And here, Primo does almost all the driving when we're together because he is a control freak who can't bear it if someone else is driving while he's in the car.

I was also, apparently, a bad backer upper.

One night, I backed into our neighbors' mailbox. I knocked it completely over. I didn't even see it. That's what happens when you don't look.

OK. That happens. That can be fixed.

But I didn't do the right thing.

I knocked it over and instead of leaving them a note or going to their house the next morning to tell them that I had knocked over their mailbox and I was sorry and I would arrange to have it fixed, I said nothing to them.

Nothing!

I wish I could write them a note of apology now, but they're dead.

It wasn't even like they were mean people and that they would have been nasty. They were a lovely elderly couple who were always nice to me. I didn't like being in their house so much because of the cigarette smoke, but they were nice.

I didn't tell them, but I told my dad.

He raised his eyebrow at me.

He should have told me to get my butt over there to apologize, and then come home and get ready to work.

I am now really curious about why he didn't do that. Maybe he thought that if he hadn't taught me the right thing to do by this age, it was too late.

A few hours later, I saw my dad across the street, digging a hole. He poured concrete down the hole and then stuck a 2 x 4 in it. Once the concrete had set, he attached the mailbox to the beam.

Nothing was going to knock that mailbox down. Perhaps my dad was thinking that he still had two other kids who would be driving and he might as well take care of the problem for once and for all.

He never said a word to me about it.

In which I punch a neighbor in the nose and my mom is glad I did it

My dad was not a violent man. He was not quick to anger. I never saw him get in a fight or a major argument, although my brother surely tried his temper more than once.

He was quite fond of political debate, though, and argued, via my daily message service between them, with my seventh-grade Texas history teacher, Mr Wilson, he of the doubleknit polyester jumpsuits in many colors, about whether one votes for the party (Mr Wilson) or the man (my dad, a GDI). Mr Wilson tried to convince us seventh graders that we should affiliate ourselves with a party for that was the path to political power, but the only power I wanted as a junior high student was the power to transform myself into a popular girl with Farrah Fawcett hair, gauchos and a wraparound sweater, an event as likely to come to pass as the sun falling from the sky. And yet I dreamed.

I wondered why history was sooo boring, although Mr Wilson's drone as he talked about the battle of San Jacinto or about Santa Ana making his escape in an enlisted man's uniform or how Texas retained the right to divide into five states might have had more to do with the dreariness of it all than with the subject matter, which, now that I have read a lot of Texas history on my own, is not dull at all.

More than politics, the main complaint that my dad, a Russian history major, had with Mr Wilson, was that he (Mr Wilson) was making history seem boring. Texas history! Boring! Only the worst of the worst of teachers could make Texas history seem boring.

Yet even with all of that, my dad never found it necessary to hit Mr Wilson.

My dad did, however, teach me to fight. "Don't put your thumb inside your fist," he counseled. "You don't want to break it." He was a practical man. He showed by example that not punching other people is the better way to go, but he also understood that sometimes, a punch might be called for.

And indeed, I have found a judicious punch in the nose the appropriate solution in a few cases. Sometimes, war is the answer and anyone who thinks it is not is a hypocrite who is perfectly happy to rest on the blood of soldiers without acknowledging the necessity of their methods. Do you really want to still be an English colony? Do you really want the South to be a separate, slave-holding nation? Do you think Hitler should have been allowed to take over Europe and murder all the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals?

I have not punched anyone for decades, but most of the times I did, I do not regret. It wasn't necessary to stop a genocide or to protect my property, but it did feel good. Yes. Punching someone in the nose can feel good. As long as you are not punched back. That's the key. Hit first and then get away.

The first time I punched someone in the nose, I got in my shot and it was over. It was not necessary. I didn't need to hit this girl and in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have, but at the time, it seemed like a good idea.

My best friend Lisa and I were maybe ten. Our families had gone out for pizza. Lisa and I were through eating, so we went outside to run up and down the sidewalk. Holding hands. For that is what little girls do with their best friends: they hold hands.

Some older girls saw us and started name calling. They called us "fags," which was a word that meant nothing to me as the concept of homosexuality had not yet been introduced to me. I knew all about fallopian tubes and vas deferens, thanks to the Time Life sex education books my parents had bought when I was in second grade, but the actual mechanics of sex eluded me and the idea that there might be so many variations was not on the horizon. I didn't know what a fag was and I will bet they didn't know what it meant, either.

I was ten. Back then, kids didn't have to learn about condoms and venereal disease and alternative lifestyles in fourth grade.

Yet I knew just from the way they were saying it that it was not a compliment.

We stopped in front of the name callers.

"If you don't stop saying that, I'm going to punch you in the nose," I said. (Advice: if you are ever in a real fight where you are truly threatened, don't tell the person you are going to hit him. Just hit him and run.)

The one girl bent over so her face was right in front of mine, then very slowly and deliberately said, "Fag."

So I punched her in the nose. And made her cry.

Yeah, it felt good. But yeah, it was completely unnecessary. Better to walk away from that kind of situation than to hit someone. Still, I'll bet she thought twice before she name called again.

The next time I hit someone, it wasn't necessary, either. But it still felt good, even though I didn't get away with it. That's the problem with hitting: it's so satisfying when done right.

We lived in a cul-du-sac in Lubbock. Nice neighbors all around us. G-mother and Alan, our adoptive grandparents with the candy drawer and the TV next door. We were not supposed to watch TV over there. The reason my parents did not have a television was not because we were poor, which is what everyone would ask when they found out. "Are you poor?" would be the horrified response, as nobody could imagine any possible reason for someone who could afford it not to have a TV.

Even though Primo maintains my family was poor because we ate out only about once a year and didn't go on flying vacations or to Disney World, which is crazy because in the mid-70s, only rich people did that sort of thing, we didn't have a TV because my parents didn't want us to waste time watching it when there were soccer games to be played and books to be read. When we were visiting my grandparents, we got to watch Wild Kingdom and Walt Disney, but as soon as Sonny and Cher came on, the TV was either turned off or we were sent out of the room.

When I was in eighth grade, my parents bought a TV. It was rarely on. We were allowed to watch Happy Days, which my parents liked, especially my dad, as he had gone to college in Milwaukee. My mom and dad would watch Mary Hartman Mary Hartman after we had gone to bed.

We had it for one year, then we moved to Central America. No point in having a TV when you live in a place with nice weather year round and the ocean a few minutes away.

This TV deprivation led me to some bad decisions as a college student and as an adult, when I would watch complete trash, just because of my earlier TV hardships. At the same time, I was not getting drunk every weekend (or at all) as a college student because if I ever wanted a taste of my dad's beer, he would let me have some. TV, not alcohol, was the forbidden fruit at my house.

The moral of this story is that you should let your kids have a little bit of everything so that they don't go crazy when they are on their own.

Back to our cul-de-sac. Next to G-mother and Alan was a family with three little girls. Then there was Renee's family. Renee was a teenager who wore halter tops, bell bottoms, and blue eyshadow and was an object of awe to us all. She smoked. She had a boyfriend. Who had a car.

And that's where the conflict was.

Renee's boyfriend liked to drive really fast in our little cul-de-sac. The cul-de-sac with the three little girls who played in their yard. (This was a long time ago when children actually played outside. I miss those days. There are kids in my neighborhood, but I almost never hear them because after school, they go to after school care instead of going home and playing outside.) With my sister, who was in third grade - not a big kid - who also played in the yard.

My dad asked Renee's boyfriend to slow down. "There are kids here," my dad said. "You need to be careful."

The boyfriend did not slow down.

The next time Boyfriend was spinning his wheels in the cul-de-sac, my dad called the police. Who came, gave Boyfriend a talking to or a ticket or whatever.

Renee was not happy about this.

I was out playing in the yard (because even seventh graders played in the yard back then) when Renee was out one day. We started talking and she started talking smack about my dad calling the cops on her boyfriend and I said you better shut up or I'm going to punch you in the nose and she didn't so I hit her and she hit me back and gave me a black eye.

Of which my mother has a photo. That she took after whispering, "I'm glad you hit her."

I was, too.

In which the scent finally leaves my dad's clothes

For years after my dad died (in 1997), I had this dream where I would hear his voice calling me from the kitchen. It was the kitchen in my place in Miami. I lived there after he died and of course he never visited. But I would hear his voice clear as day and I could even see him standing there and I would wake up and run to the kitchen because maybe his death had been a bad dream and he wasn't really dead.

Every time I got to the kitchen, it was empty. I would be left bewildered at how I could have been so sure that he was alive. I had heard his voice! It was his voice. I had heard him. And yet there was nothing.

And each time I woke up and found out he was really dead, it was like he had just died. You never get closure. Those grief counselors they send to schools every time something awful happens? Do they do any good? Talking about death does not change it. Telling someone you feel crummy doesn't make you feel less crummy.

You never get over losing someone you love. You just get used to it. But sometimes, even when you think enough time has passed that you accept that this is just how life is now - Life Minus One - you will be shocked at the sharp, fresh pain that stabs you. That pain should be dull and small by this point, but it's not. It's almost as bad as it was the first time.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I suspect that if a parent or sibling who was never All That dies that those left behind don't mourn so much. Maybe they feel guilty about things that were unresolved or feel guilty that that don't mind that the person is dead, but they don't have a big empty gash inside of them that never quite heals. That, too, is sad, because who wants a crummy parent who won't be mourned? Then the mourning is for the relationship that never was.

And of course I am talking out of my elbow here because how can I possibly know how someone else feels? I have no idea. I can just imagine. Let's just say that there are some people in my life whose absence I will not mourn as much as others and I would think that others would have similar situations.

I digress. I have lived over one third of my life now with my dad dead. I have almost 14 years of memories that don't include him. I don't look around my house now and think, "Oh! I remember when Dad repaired that dripping faucet!" I don't think, "That was the year Dad got the turkey skin out of the trash." My home now doesn't have cues about my dad.

All I have is a photo on my dresser of my dad and me from 25 years ago, taken in the front yard of our house in San Antonio, a few years before my parents moved to Saudi Arabia. I am standing behind my dad with my arms around him and clasped around his neck. We are both wearing red, which was not something I did much in those days even though really, I look good in red. My hair is John from the nice beauty shop in West University blonde; my dad's is silver.

We are both smiling broadly and naturally but with our eyes open, a rare instance indeed for both of us as we are both not photogenic at all and quite awkward in front of the camera. Usually, we have forced grimaces, but my mom caught us at the perfect moment - laughing but before our eyes squinch shut.

We look happy.

There are reminders all over my house of my mom. When I vacuum in the basement rec room, I think about my mom spending three hours pushing the carpet cleaner back and forth to suck the water out of the soaking wet basement flood carpet.

Oh yes. We have annual basement floods. Have I told you about them? Perhaps I'll write about them later, but let's hope that I don't have any new material this summer because the floods put Primo in full freakout mode. Fortunately, they are followed by full engineer mode and we have saved our carpet each time, but it is a pain in the neck.

I see the irises in my front garden that my mom brought me from her garden and that originally came from my grandmother's garden up north. I have a bottle of leftover soy milk in my chest freezer for her next visit. Fortunately, lactose intolerance is something I have not inherited from her. Most people would probably agree that chubby thighs, a small bosom, and a tendency to migraines would be enough of a heritage to inflict on anyone.

When my mom visits, we talk about my dad. We tell Primo about him and Primo politely listens. Primo somehow turned out to be a very nice person, despite everything, and for that, I do thank his parents. They did one thing right at least and that's all I'll say about that for now.

Primo watched the videotape my mom gave me of my dad's last days. Someone lent us a video camera when my dad was in hospice for the last week of his life and we taped my dad telling stories. He lies there, bald and shrunken, 50 pounds underweight, in his hospital bed. In one shot, my brother, sister and I gather around him, unsmiling, with flat eyes. It's hard to radiate joy when your father is dying. But my dad, of all of us, makes an effort. He tries to smile and put a good face on it.

When he is telling stories, he genuinely smiles. He talks about hitting a big seagull once when he was riding his bike down a long hill in Panama. The bird got the short end of the stick as Force = Mass times Acceleration, which would have been

Force = [My dad's then-170 lbs] x [about 9.8 meters/second squared and I say "about" because that is the rate of gravity in an environment with no friction, but as my college physics prof always advised us, I am ignoring friction even though friction is real and you can't ignore it and also disregarding the fact that my dad would have been descending at an angle as opposed to dropping straight down, so you would have to throw in some other math there to make it come out right - so about but definitely less than 9.8 m/s2]

Force = whatever the math works out to but definitely more force than an eight-pound seagull could absorb without losing some feathers and the contents of his bowels

My dad laughs as he tells this story. Primo turns to me and says, "Wow. Your dad really had a strong [regional] accent," which is true and which is something I had never noticed before because he was just my dad, you know? But now that I hear that accent a lot, I recognize it a lot easier. Ainso?

I visited my mom earlier this month for a few days. She had a minor outpatient surgery to improve her vision and I went to help out during her convalescence. My "helping" turned out to be griping about having to get up at 5:15 a.m. to take her to the surgery center. After that, I got the ice pack from the freezer and put salve on her eyes. And made her supper and did the dishes. And kept her company.

Don't you wish you had a daughter like me?

It should have been my dad doing all that. Not that I minded - well, I was not crazy about the getting up early part - but you're not supposed to be widowed when you are only 54, as my mom was. Even 68, as she is now, seems young to be a widow. Lots of men older than that still hanging out, taking their slow walks around town in their sensible brown shoes and stopping to talk to me about the apple blossoms that have finally appeared or when to plant tomatoes or the millwork on the old Victorian house down the street.

One afternoon, while my mom was taking a nap, I went into the big closet off the guest bedroom. My mom has decades of her clothes in there - things she will probably never wear again but cannot bear to part with. One item is a beautiful belted, tailored yellow dress she made from a Vogue pattern, which, for those of you who do not sew, is the fancy, expensive brand of clothing patterns. But the dress is lovely and has bound buttonholes, which, again for those who do not sew, are a real pain in the neck but a sign of Quality.

If I had put that much work into a dress, I would not get rid of it, either. I would make a little shrine around the dress showing that I used to be able to sew like a pro. There is almost no point to sewing one's own clothes any more as decent clothes are available at a more than reasonable price at consignment stores and nice fabric is so expensive and who wants to do all that work with cheap fabric? It's like when I knit - I buy real wool because I am not going through all that with acrylic.

She has her clarinet from high school, when she got a One at State. Her dolls from when she was a little girl. Needlework from my grandmother.

And my dad's clothes.

Not all of them. Enough. A few suits and sport coats and a track suit.

She has moved three times since my dad died. The clothes have moved with her. Every time I visit her, I go into the closet to run my hands over my dad's clothes and to smell them. For years, his scent lingered. I would bury my face in the silk sport jacket and inhale.

How do you save the smell of someone you love? Every time I smell the combination of moth balls and lavender, I am back at my Granma Sylvia's house. Primo and I had a month-long breakup during our courtship. I didn't wash his bath towel the entire time. Instead, I kept it hanging on the shower curtain rod and sniffed it every time I went into the bathroom. I could pick my mom's pillow out of a dozen random pillows. I still put on Polo cologne every time I am in a department store because that is what my college boyfriend wore and he smelled so good.

This time, the smell was gone. My dad's scent was gone. I can't even remember what it was like. Maybe a combination of clean sweat from riding his bike to work, airplane fuel (he was more or less an aircraft mechanic), and Old Spice. The Dad Smell. It's gone. It will never come back.