Post-Mortem Rehabilitation

"Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going."

-Tennessee Williams

Another beautiful morning up here in the new condo.

The view is always nothing short of spectacular, with the hills shifting in color and shadow as the day wears on and the weather sweeps past from the west.

Do you have a soundtrack playing in your head all the time? I do, for better or worse. Peg says there's no music playing in her head, ever. I wonder what that must feel like. My intracranial jukebox belts out the hits every waking hour.

For the last couple days, it's dredged up a song Genesis released in 1982, one of my favorites back then but long forgotten until recently, titled You Might Recall.

I've always found the chorus sort of melancholy.

Oh my hopes were as the leaves upon the water

Ah, sunk in the night

And though I know you couldn't care, you oughtta

Oh, the end of a life

And maybe when you're older, and you're thinking back

Oh, you might recall

Now did I act carefully, did I do right?

Or were we meant to be, all of our lives

In love and harmony, all of our lives?

So now, take my hand

Come, hold me closely

As near as you can

Believe in all that we could be

And all that we have been

And all that we are

A young person looking ahead to the end of his life, and imagining himself remembering it all with a tinge of self-judgment and regret.

Sort of an odd song to have been part of the soundtrack of the summer I turned 18, graduated from high school, and left Hemet to start the rest of my life. But as a teenager I always had a gloomy side.

Sometimes I think these songs in my head show up randomly; other days it seems like they're dredged up in response to an inner conversation I can't perceive at a conscious level.

I'm thinking You Might Recall could be a response to the death of my father four weeks ago. This has been a strange transition into the new reality of both parents being gone. The Dad I knew in the last decade or so of his life was a mean old drunk, then a mean old dry drunk, addicted to Fox News and dripping with disdain for his libtard lawyer son. Except when he was affectionate, which happened sometimes. Mostly he was just a sad figure, in the end curled up in a diaper on his couch, barely able to speak and gazing mouth agape at Hannity or Levin or whichever villain the network was broadcasting that day.

For my birthday, Peg assembled a collection of vintage Howard Johnson's art and menus from the glory days of the company, when Dad was just starting out on a journey that would take him from running the Hobart dishwasher in the kitchen to managing every HoJo west of the Mississippi River.

That Dad was a different character altogether. Charismatic in a way I could never touch, brilliant at his job, boundlessly energetic. I may have been afraid of him back then, but I was also extremely proud to be part of the family that was riding with him to the top of the company. The entire time, the seeds of his eventual destruction were there for all to see, the boozing and the chain smoking and the lack of introspection that would hold him back and force him into an early retirement from the restaurant business well before he turned 60. But all those bad things were years in the future on an evening in Kansas City or Moline when one might find those posters and menus in the stores (they always called their restaurants "stores") he managed in his 20s.

I recall one conversation we had about a decade ago that likely revealed one source of the bitterness he felt toward the end. "The worst part of life now," he explained, "is that there isn't some next thing. There won't be any next thing, no new challenge or adventure."

Too bad, that sentiment. I realize it's easy for me to say, but perhaps he could've treated as his next adventure the challenge of growing old with dignity and meaning in that difficult season of life. I've heard it said that this is a uniquely American disease, which Dad endured acutely: He couldn't get over the fact that he wasn't young anymore, and the harder he pushed back at his declining health and shrinking world, the worse his life became until he eventually just gave up.

Again, easy for me to say.

But this week I find myself looking back over the decades at him for the first time in a very long while, and missing the cocksure little guy who saw himself rising from the cotton fields of Yalobusha County to the C suite with the confidence of youthful inexperience. You would've really liked him. Everyone did.