Another Bad-Dog Book by Joni Cole

Author:Joni Cole
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: PublishingWorks
Published: 2011-10-17T21:00:00+00:00

Still My Dad

My dad lived in a nursing home for six years. He wound up there because of a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side and did a number on his brain. In the hospital during his long and rocky recuperation, the visiting psychiatrists weren’t sure how much of his mind remained intact. When they asked him to name the Vice President of the United States, or what day Christmas fell on, often he’d stare into space. But after the psychiatrists left, I’d ask him for some five- or six-letter word I needed to complete my crossword puzzle, and plenty of times he’d give me the right answer. Then my mother would yell at him, “Myles, stop being so bullheaded.”

My dad was an engineer; he designed farm equipment for New Holland Machine Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After he took early retirement, but before his stroke changed everything, he had about ten great years. In retirement, my dad’s social life took off. Every Wednesday at six a.m. he’d meet his buddies for breakfast at Friendly’s, where they’d solve the world’s problems from their regular booth. My dad competed in golf tournaments. He played Around the World with his sons and grandsons at the basketball court in the park. Occasionally, my dad would win—and gloat, as was his right as a short, pudgy, Jewish great-grandfather pushing seventy.

When I visited my parents from Vermont, my dad would take my family and I on road trips to the Philadelphia Zoo, Hershey Park, the Strasburg Railroad. He let my two little girls play horsey on his back. He chauffeured my mother and me to the mall because we both refused to drive on Route 30 with all the construction. While I tried on clothes at the Gap or Victoria’s Secret, my dad loitered by the cash registers. He always insisted on paying for everything. One time we were at a drug store and I tried to sneak to the checkout to buy some tampons, but my dad intercepted me at the counter. He wouldn’t let the clerk take my money.

My dad had a woodshop in his basement. He built nice things: TV cabinets, wooden-handled trays, conjoined dancing teddy bears, a sleigh bed with his grown-up grandson. “Myles,” my mom would call down to him from the top of the basement stairs, “Don’t track up any sawdust.”

My dad taught his youngest grandson to fish. He baked homemade bread two or three times a week in what had to be the world’s first bread machine. He drove a friend’s son to all his orthodontia appointments because the boy’s mother had to work. He and my mom took bus trips to Atlantic City, to Dollywood, to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. My dad went to funerals, more and more with each passing year.

Every day, my dad walked his sweet-natured dog, Hannah, a mile to the park and back. Then he would set out again to walk Sir Isaac, the lunging black lab my mother had insisted on adopting, even though my dad didn’t want him.

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