My grandfather passed away late last week from kidney failure at the age of 81, and so my dad came in from California and he, my brother, my sister and I packed ourselves into the car and headed down to Pennsylvania for the services. Don’t worry, we’re all fine. Everyone is crushed, of course, but our bloodline is marked by a steadfast immunity against displays of emotion. Most of them will tell you it’s strength of character; in reality it’s the fear that if we cry, someone might see.
My head still hurts from the trip, but it has nothing to do with grief, and even has very little to do with traveling forth and back across the scorched expanse that is central New Jersey (number one industry: the smell of tires braised in raw sewage). No, it’s a result of ten total hours of riding within a car driven by my father.
Taking passage in a car with my dad is an experience much like eating a five pound lasagna and then riding the Rotor or the Gravitron or even a mild Tilt-A-Whirl, in that your stomach spends about half the trip in your throat and the other half among your bowels. For you CS geeks out there, here is my dad’s highway driving technique reverse engineered into a computer program:
{
if (another car < 500 ft directly ahead)
slamOn(brake);
else
slamOn(gas);
}
For the computer illiterate, this means my father (whom my sister Kaitlyn has nicknamed “Brakes McGee”) tends to step on the gas as hard as he can until another car comes into view ahead, and if that car’s brake lights even so much as flicker to life for a half second, my dad will attempt to drive the brake pedal through the floor, only to jam on the gas again as soon as he realizes of course that there was no imminent risk posed to us by the car cruising along a quarter mile up the road.
As you can imagine, five straight hours of this will result in a sickly feeling in the pit of your belly whose discomfort is matched only by the whiplash you also experience from all the braking. Oh, you’ll get there all right, and in good time. But when you arrive, you’ll feel like a victim of Shaken Baby Syndrome. We complain of course, especially after having our heads snapped forward by particularly sudden and unnecessary braking. “JEEZ Dad!” But the same blood trait that allows us to remain stubbornly remorseless in the face of a loved one’s death lets him do the same when confronted with overwhelming evidence that he is doing something wrong. Hey, it’s a life.
Anyway, we did make it down there mostly in one piece and we did meet up with our extended family to observe the funeral with an atmosphere of grim celebration of the man’s life, as is our custom. I’m blessed with 21 of the coolest people I know as cousins, aunts and uncles, and scattered as we are to the four corners of the country it’s always a treat to see them all, sad circumstances notwithstanding. I’ll miss my grandfather, but he was ready to go and under the circumstances I can’t say I blame him.
It’s been a long 2004, marked on my end by a lot of ups and downs, but I could never say anything bad about any year in which the Red Sox win the World Series. Even considering some of the ill fates that befell me this year, I look forward to 2005 with a sense of optimism for the future. Now if only I had the same positive outlook for my aching neck.
Happy New Year, and if you see any men wearing high heels, laugh at them.
