Tag: west side Chicago

Joints

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

His name was Johnny Holly, but everyone knew him as “Ding Dong” and he tended bar at Wallace’s Tap on the corner of Adams and Laramie in the old West Side.  He was a short, square little man, with thick eyeglasses and a smile that never seemed to leave his face.  He made a big fuss and gave a loud welcome to everyone who came through the screen door, and he made you feel good. He talked to me like I was an adult, although I was only 15 or 16. I liked that.

“Ding Dong” got his name, I was told, from his first job, which was on the old streetcar system. Conductors accepted the five cent fare from riders and then placed the nickel in a slot on top of the fare box. When the conductor pulled on an attached rope handle, the nickel disappeared into the fare box and a bell went off. You guessed it…it went “ding dong.”  Conductors were widely assumed to augment their income by pocketing fares, and I guess Johnny was no exception. Late one night, according to a story my father loved to tell, a Chinese gentleman got on board and handed him his nickel fare. When Johnny pocketed the nickel, the man inquired “No dingy-dingy?” Johnny replied “No dingy-dingy after 12, Charlie.”  The man turned out to be an inspector for the streetcar line and Johnny both lost his job as well as earned his immortal nickname on the same night.

(Author’s note: I know that the story is politically incorrect in 2016, that the man is now Asian, not Chinese, and that “Charlie” was an ethnic slur. but political correctness hadn’t been invented yet. At least not on the West Side.)  

Like any good bartender, “Ding Dong” loved to tell stories, and the one that stuck with me was one he told often. He had been sent by the Army to Alaska during the war where their real enemy was boredom.  An officer had warned the men about their excessive drinking so he and his friends decided one night to drink only until the sun came up. You get it.

 

 

——————

They were called Taverns, Saloons, Bars, Joints, and Taps and they were the province of workingmen. Their neon signs advertised Schlitz, Old Style, Hamm’s, Drewerys, Meister Brau, Miller High Life, Budweiser, Pabst, or Blatz. “Lite” beer was a generation away. Beer route sales guys fought hard to get their beer on tap, and rewarded bar owners with free or greatly reduced beer signage for their windows. Wallace’s, a Budweiser joint, was owned by Mike Wallace; he and his family lived upstairs. It was typical of so many taverns back then, always dark, always cool and smelling like an exotic combination of draft beer, cigarette smoke and something you couldn’t quite put your finger on, but it was reassuring and in my mind I can still recall the “feel” of the place.

Men, and usually only men, sat on the stools at the long bar. They had their cash on the bar in front of them, something that is peculiarly Chicago. Go to another city and place a twenty on the bar and the confused bartender will assume you just want one drink and will then be leaving.

There were booths along one wall, and sometimes small kids would be found in them, sipping their Cokes and munching on bags of Lay’s potato chips while the Old Man had a few beers. It was their version of “watching the kids.” Ball games would be playing on the black and white televisions, later to be replaced with primitive color sets, the greens and reds bleeding into each other.

Women were, under some unspoken set of rules, allowed into Wallace’s. However, a woman would never walk in alone, lest she be thought   a “barfly” or, worse, a “floozy”. Their words, not mine. Sitting there with my dad, I once saw a pretty young woman, nicely dressed, walk into Wallace’s unescorted and Mike came out from behind the bar and asked her if she was lost. She turned around and walked out, leaving me to wonder what had just happened.

A woman needed to be accompanied by her man. In my mother’s case, it was usually after they attended parent-teacher conferences at Resurrection grade school, where all of us received our education from the Mercy nuns. I guess like most families we spanned the scale from marginally good to just marginal, but my mother and father would begin the healing process after five or six such conferences at Wallace’s. My dad’s friend Vinny would often bring his fiancée of some thirty years, Julie, to the bar, and that was OK, too. Thirty years and they never did get married.

While the language was usually rough, it was mostly confined to hells, bullshit, and goddamns. With ladies present, you could receive a not-so- gentle reminder from a bartender or husband to watch your mouth.   The F-bomb, thrown so often and easily by either gender today, would have been rare and contain much more explosive power back then.

Bars also shared a number of services and features that made them as predictable and as dependable as a McDonald’s menu or a Holiday Inn’s rooms. Men ordered draft beer and not long necks, mostly. If you were a regular, you could write a check for cash. Bartender’s held the stakes for wagers made on everything from horseraces to prize fights to disagreements on historical facts. Their back bars seldom changed, so if your picture hung there for some reason, or your trophy was on display, you were practically immortal. Throwing a punch in a bar could get you banned for life, the sole judge making the decision being the bar owner.  Juke boxes were common, but if the patrons at the bar weren’t in the mood for music, it was not uncommon for the owner or a surly patron to unplug it in mid-song. Package goods (bottled beer in quart bottles) were always available from the cooler, so you could keep the party going at home.

Some bars would cash your whole paycheck, the better to keep you drinking there. My wife likes to tell the story of Hanna Higgins, whose iron worker husband was paid every Friday in cash. Each week she would allow him his hour or two in the bar, then head out, broom in hand, to chase the old man home before he drank away the rent and grocery money. As a teenager, I would be sometimes allowed to accompany my dad and drink Coke while he drank his Budweiser. My father also favored a Sister Lakes bar known as Ade’s Glass Tap, a place where time stood still. I swear the memorabilia I saw on the back bar at age twelve was still there when I was fifty-two.

As a young man, it was my father in law, Marty Hawkins, who introduced me to the bar scenes around Division Street and North Avenue. Marty would go to the bar each night at precisely 10 p.m. and leave about 11:30 p.m. Saturdays he stayed a bit longer. He had his rules. He only drank Buds in a short beer glass and smoked only when he drank. His smoking style was right out of a British movie, where you pinch the cigarette between forefinger and thumb and raise it to your lips with the remaining fingers splayed out.  A devout Catholic, he still went to the bars in Lent, but drank only 7-UP. His family quietly prayed for the coming of Easter.

He favored three of four local bars, including a hole-in-the-wall joint known as Joe Pouch’s. Joe had owned bars his entire career and made enough money that he didn’t really need the business. He installed a buzzer entry system on the front door and Joe and only Joe decided if you were worthy enough to gain entry. It was as close to a private club as I’ve ever seen. There were no more than eighteen to twenty five people he allowed in. Frustrated would-be patrons would pound on the door, clearly seeing the drinkers inside, Joe would wave them off, snarling at them to go away. It was great street theater.

O’Neill’s was another regular stop. Frank O’Neill was a short tempered, baldheaded Irishman who was purported to be an IRA gun money guy. As it turned out, the Feds really had been following him for years. O’Neill’s featured a pipe organ on a revolving stand at the bar’s center, and it was definitely more elegant than most joints around the neighborhood.  A woman would feel a lot better about being at Frank’s place than most of the bars on North or Division. And I never saw Frank offer a free  beer to a living soul.

——————

The bar scene today is very different. Describe someplace today as a saloon and someone will ask you where you parked your horse. Pubs, Brewpubs, Clubs, some noisy, some glitzy, some straight, some gay, have largely replaced the workingman’s pub. You can still find them in many neighborhoods, but somehow they don’t seem the same, or maybe I just aged out of the scene. In a lot of cases, they have become “Sports Bars”, with more T.V. sets than you can count, in case you didn’t want to miss the hockey game between Bulgaria and  Senegal. The unspoken rules of gender in a bar are long gone. The need to cash a check at the bar has been replaced by the ATM. Disagreements on historical facts? Google.  Sponsoring softball teams, ladies nights, Super bowl parties, bachelor and bachelorette parties and any other gimmick you can think of to pack them in is the ticket to success for bar owners.  And they are loud places or I’m just too old, not sure which.

I think sometimes of those hundreds of bars around Chicago, serving my immigrant grandfathers, my first generation father and father-in-law, and then guys like me. These men were short on formal education, and they worked the trades, put out the fires, kept law and order, drove the trucks, manned the offices, and set the stage for the next generation to get college degrees and become the managers and bosses. Simple men for whom family was everything, and who needed a place now and again to get away and talk with other men. When I recall those old joints, I see my dad in his white tee shirt and dark pants (shorts were for sissies, I was informed) sitting in Wallace’s blowing cigarette smoke and shooting the breeze, asking Vinnie when he was going to marry Julie, while watching the White Sox on T.V. A contented man on a warm summer’s day.

I also see Marty Hawkins standing, not sitting, reading his evening paper, cigarette in the ashtray and short beer in front of him. He is friends with most of those in the bar, but they respect his desire for solitude and give him his space. He talks now and then and when he does they listen, because they know him to be an educated man and not a loudmouth.  And he takes a quiet pride in having his sons and son-in-law sometimes tag along with him, something most other men envied.

In my memories, it was always summer and the beer tasted cold and crisp and you were in a place where men felt good about being in each other’s company . I know it wasn’t always that way, but I love my defective memory. It brings me comfort.

 

 

 

 

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Roots-Grandma Wogan

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

When I try to remember my Grandma Wogan, I always end up in the same place and it’s probably where my siblings and most of the Monroe Street neighbors end up, too. I can see her on a warm summer day, sitting in her wicker chair in which she logged thousands of hours. She would be on the front porch of

the two flat, the porch guarded by two white stone flowerpots filled with petunias, wearing her print dress with an apron, glasses on, her white hair in a bun, and she would be rubber-banding newspapers. The Daily News, the Austin News, The Austinite, or Goldblatt’s circulars, depending on which boy had which paper route. Her hands were always busy, as befitting someone who was an expert seamstress for many years.

She was a caring, loving, old time Catholic grandmother, who bore on her back the lonely burden of young widowhood, making it somehow work for her two sons without the social welfare benefits so many enjoy today, and going it alone in her adopted country. But she mostly kept whatever joys and pains she felt to herself. To be honest, she was not warm, at least not outwardly so and certainly not given to outbursts of any kind; maybe that was the cost of dealing with her lot in life, which she met with determination and courage, and usually all alone.

But she was not dull. At the risk of making a generalization, there are two words not often used to describe the Irish: nuanced and subtle. She could be blunt, as was her way, but it made for some pretty good stories. My mother told me how she and my dad shared the news of my impending arrival with her. She is said to have responded, “So, two wasn’t enough for you,” referring to my older sister and brother. And yet, upon my arrival, again according to my mother, she swooped me up in her arms and I was not seen again for about the next twelve years. My mother was a little prone to hyperbole.

My father told the story of her being invited to her relatives, the Lancaster’s, for dinner. Theirs was a fancy home off Columbus Park, and the husband was the all-powerful Alderman Lancaster. In those days, power descended from the Lord God Almighty through the Mayor of Chicago to your Alderman and finally to the local Police Commander and maybe the Catholic Pastor.  According to my father, she was uncharacteristically quiet throughout the fancy dinner, served by maids on fine linen and china. When asked by Claire Lancaster how she liked the evening, she replied, “Well, you’ve come a long way since you used to haul a loin of pork to your father’s tavern.” That was their last invitation.

————

Mary Maeliff

My Grandma was born on July 17th, 1881 but we never celebrated her birthday. She never cared to and I never knew why and, by extension, I guess we learned to overlook it in a house full of birthdays every year. As a consequence, we lost track of how old she was, and I think maybe she did, too, but she was just shy of 95 when she died on April 9, 1976.

She was born in County Westmeath, Ireland in a little nothing of a village called Tinnymuck, near the larger town of Moate. My Irish brother-in- law Jim will be only too happy to tell you that Tinnymuck translates into “Pig’s House,” the better to get a rise out of his wife, my sister Mary Ann. I found Tinnymuck on my first visit to Ireland years ago, and the “village”, once located after asking directions twice from the locals, consisted of four houses in a row and dog named “Doogan” who I had to kick out of my way in order to drive the car down the road. If ever I wondered that I might be descended from wealth, that visit took care of it. My father’s cousin, Mary Colgan, now deceased, lived in the house then, a humble home with the smell of countless turf fires burned into the walls.

Grandma and her sister Kate left the hunger and joblessness of Ireland in 1905, seeking the America of hope and freedom that countless other Europeans sought. My brother Terry found her ship’s passage documents and most notably that her Captain was also the same Captain Smith whose luck ran out a few years later as skipper of the Titanic. Glad you dodged the iceberg on their trip, Captain.

Kate and Grandma worked as maid and cook for a Protestant businessman, we were told, until she met Thomas Wogan, a man from Tullamore. They were wed in 1914, and the Marriage Certificate said she was 28 years old and he 29. The numbers don’t work, by the way, because she was 33, but if we want to start arresting every woman who fibbed about her age, the jails would be overflowing.

He would be dead four years later of tuberculosis that he probably carried with him to the New World. She was left with her sons Bill and Tom, my dad, then about six months old. She and her husband had purchased a two flat at 5347 Monroe, where three generations of Wogans ended up living until 1968. I can’t even begin to imagine how scared and alone she must have felt at that time in her life. There was no welfare network back then, no social security, and probably little or no insurance. My father told me that she was advised to sell the house, but she didn’t.

A word about two flats, that marvelous economic engine that allowed immigrant generations to own a property, many for the first and only time in their lives, and pay for it with rental income while keeping a roof over their own heads.  Three bedrooms and a single bath on each floor, a wooden back porch, coal furnace, and hot water radiator heat. The west side was and is a virtual sea of two flats. Having grandparent owners on one floor and your family on the other was quite common. The Lithuanians and Bohemians in Cicero took it a step further, adding a basement or “Garden” apartment and renting the top two floors, building their wealth and security faster.

My Grandma lived on the first floor and rented the second floor to make her mortgage payments. Years later, in the 1950’s I believe, she added a basement apartment as an additional rental unit. She took in sewing to buy the groceries and she toughed it out for all those years.  She worked outside the home once, during World War II at Simpson Electric. Because single apartments were scarce after the war, she also took in “roomers”, single men looking for a private bedroom and breakfast, the original “bed and breakfast”.  I remember a parade of them as the occupant of one of the three bedrooms. They could tie up a bathroom mightily in the morning, and more than once my brothers and I ended up using the standpipe in the basement. First class accommodations.

—————–

These are some of my favorite Grandma Wogan stories……………………

Wash Day

She was locked in mortal combat with Mrs. Stack, the grandmother of the Junius family two doors east. On wash day, if she looked out her back window and saw that Mrs. Stack had hung her bed sheets to dry on the clotheslines that crisscrossed the small back yards, it was if she had spotted an enemy sail on the horizon. She would moan that “The Stacks have their laundry out, the day is gone!” Then quick to the basement to get her sheets out of the washer and put a shot across Mrs. Stack’s bow.

Baseball

She loved baseball and the White Sox and listened to them in her back bedroom on summer nights on an old Philco Radio. The radio was a rounded four foot high wooden box, with about fifty knobs, only two of which ever seemed to do anything. She had a television, but didn’t trust it, having been around before even the invention of radios. I can still see her clapping her hands when Nellie Fox got a hit and drove in “Leetle Louie” Aparicio from second base. What mystified me was how she learned the game. Baseball is perhaps the most complex of modern sports and she really did know what was happening on the field. My dad and uncle both played ball into their late teen years, so she picked it up from her sons, I guess.

Don’t mess with my religion

Grandma Wogan was very devout, praying always to the Virgin Mary and fingering her rosary beads at least once a day while muttering to herself the Hail Mary’s, Our Fathers, and Glory Be’s. So when Vatican II came along and made so many changes in the 1960’s, the biggest of which were turning the altar around and killing off Latin (which needed killing, in my opinion) she was understandably a bit confused. One day, walking back from church, she sked me, “Who’s this fella Yahweh they’re always talking about? Does he live in the parish? “I didn’t quite know how to answer her.

Apparitions in the night

She managed one stormy night to scare my cousin Billy half to death. By brother Bill,  our cousin Bill and I had been awarded the most coveted sleeping spot in the whole house… the pull out bed on the screened in back porch. On hot summer nights, it was as close to air conditioning as you were likely to get. One particularly bad stormy night, with lightening flashing and thunder booming, my cousin Bill awoke to a sight my brother and I had long grown used to. My Grandma Wogan in her white flannel  floor length nightgown, white hair undone and falling around her shoulders, walking through the kitchen saying prayers and tossing holy water (holy or not an excellent conductor of electricity) from a small vial about the house. It was her way of asking God to spare 5347 Monroe and perhaps smite someone else’s house.

The lightening flashed and lit her up like an apparition from the Other Side and Cousin Bill must have been sleeping soundly, because he let out a yell and bailed from the bed, headed toward the back door. We caught him in time and needled him for weeks about it.

The Apple Story

I have told this story to my grandsons and, for whatever reason, it has stuck with them. I was watching my Grandma eat an apple and she simply consumed the entire thing. Stem, seeds, core and all. I was probably ten and I remarked to my Dad that I had seen her do this. He sort of shrugged, looked at me with a smile and said, “You’ve never been hungry.” It struck me that I hadn’t ever known hunger, never in my life for more than a short time. None of us had, but she remembered what it felt like to not have food, and for your body to miss it and to let you know it missed it. She could remember going to bed with an empty stomach. And she was never going to let food go to waste again.

Housing Arrangements

My siblings needled me about being “the king” because I got to sleep in the front bedroom and the rest of them shared bedrooms upstairs. Over the years, however, I shared the bedroom with my brother Bill, and later my sister Mary Ann occupied the back bedroom, after the parade of ”roomers” ended. The basement apartment, always smelling damp, was occupied by a string of renters, some memorable and some notorious. The last one was my Uncle Jimmy, who kept Eskimo Pies in his sort-of freezer and built models of all sorts. You can’t get cooler as an uncle than that.

The Phone

I always thought it ironic that in my business we made and received millions of phone calls over the years, but Grandma never made a single phone call in her life. In those days, phones could only be leased, not purchased, and the phone company kept a strict control over ownership of phones. My Dad knew a guy in the Linesman Union who rigged up a bootleg office phone in my Grandma’s flat, then ran a buzzer from the legitimate line upstairs to this illegal extension. The extension had neither a ringer not a dial because the phone company was known to dial into homes and check the voltage. Too much voltage and they knew you had more phones than you were paying for each month. They would send an inspector over and he would locate and remove the device. Small wonder no one liked the phone company.

Grandma Wogan never did get the hang of telephonic communication. When the buzzer rang she would pick up the handset and say hello, but if the call was for me or one of the other kids, she would hang up and call your name, disconnecting your call. The few times the call was for her was when a relative named Tom Byrne called in to report on the death of someone. She would listen to Tom, whom we christened the “angel of death”, and then say “Ok, Thanks” and hang up. Not one to waste words, Grandma Wogan.

Last Rites

I remember when I was ten or twelve, she got sick and my parents called for a doctor, then a priest. Over her headboard hung a crucifix that also served as a handy kit for entering the next world in a properly Catholic fashion. The crucifix was about two inches thick and made of wood. Push Christ’s body up and to the right and the front part of the cross swung out to reveal all of the pieces and parts needed for Extreme Unction, or Last Rites. Candles, a little holy water, a small purple stole.  I’ll bet you that crucifix hung in every Catholic home in Chicago. We might not have a first aid kit handy, but by God, we weren’t shoving off without the Last Rites.  She didn’t die, by the way.

My Grandma the Physician

I cannot verify these little tales, but here is what I was told:

She fixed my Uncle Bill’s forehead which had been slashed somehow. She used scotch tape.

She noticed one of the newborns, Bill, I think, was tongue tied and solved it with a snip of her sewing scissors. My mother was horrified, but it worked.

This one I can verify: When I was twelve I caught a bad cold. No problem, Grandma fixed me up a hot toddy. Warm whiskey and lemon juice in an eight once glass. I drank it down and lost two days that I flat out don’t remember. Mom was not too happy.

——————

It occurs to me that I only really knew my Grandma Wogan as Grandma, from the time when she was about 70 until her death. I did not know her as a girl, a young immigrant, a young wife, or a young widow. I did not know much about her life through two World Wars, the Roaring Twenties and the GreatDepression, her years of motherhood. In the same way, I only knew my parents from their mid-thirties through the rest of their lives. I can look at pictures of them as children or as beautiful young people, but I can’t know, no one can, what they were like at that point in their lives. Would we have been friends if somehow we were the same age? Would we have been alike or different from each other?

Only one sort of relative knows your story from the beginning through today. Only your brothers and sisters make the journey with you from start to finish, know you as a child, a teen, a young adult and all of the stages of your life. For that reason alone, we should value each other all the more and count ourselves blessed that there are those out there who know us best, celebrate our successes and forgive our faults.

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Special thanks to my brother Terry and my sister Mary Ann for providing the research on this.

A Mother’s Quiet Act of Love

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

In 1963, my brother Gil was standing in formation at the Oakland Staging Area in California. This was the final stop on the way to Vietnam for countless thousands of young soldiers, and he assumed that his orders would take him there, along with all of those standing in the formation. He was eighteen, an enlisted Army volunteer, and had been trained in communications at Fort Gordon, Georgia after doing “basic” in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He was probably going to be assigned as a radio operator (RTO) in an infantry unit, which meant that he would be target number two, after the officer or sergeant leading the unit in the field.

Gil was really my half-brother, as his father, Gil, Sr., had been killed over Japan in June of 1945. My mother remarried in 1948 to my father, a young widower and single parent and father to my half-sister, Maureen. Six more children, including me, followed.

Gil, like his dad, was slightly built and about 5’6” with curly blondish hair. He kept his father’s last name, Finn, in part to honor his dad’s memory and sacrifice, but also because of the V.A.’s ever-changing rules and because my mother knew he would receive an insurance inheritance from the V.A. upon turning twenty one. A name change complicated that reward. The words “half-brother” or “half-sister” were never used in our house, anyway.

—-

Gil heard his name called out and took a step forward. Whoever called it out handed him new orders. He would be going to Korea, not Vietnam. He didn’t know why, and the Army isn’t given to long explanations, so off he went, returning a year and half later with some exotic stereo stuff and some cool silk suits and some great stories. But returning alive, unlike some 50,000 others.

A few years before my mother died, we were sitting at a party in my sister Rita’s back yard, when the talk somehow drifted to Vietnam. Someone talked about the “tunnel rats”, the slightly built G.I.’s who weaseled down Viet Cong tunnels to flush out the enemy. My mother, nursing her “highball”, (never more than two!) casually mentioned that that was why she had kept her son out of Vietnam. A bit cynically, I suppose, I asked her how she managed that.

She had read an article in Life Magazine on “tunnel rats” and figured her slightly-built son Gil would end up as one. She told us how she had researched the “sole surviving son” act, the same one that is the premise for the movie “Saving Private Ryan”, and that she had written her senator, who I believe was the legendary Everett Dirksen at the time. On the premise that Gil’s father had been killed in World War II, Gil was a sole surviving son, and therefore exempt from combat. The Senator had enough juice with the Army, and Gil got his orders changed.

We were astounded, and Gil most especially, who never knew why his name was called that day. She had kept this amazing story from all of us for some thirty five years before casually sharing it with us. A mother can show her love in countless ways, but I have never forgotten this quiet, determined act of love, nor the strength if took to actually pull it off; and then to be content for so many years to keep it to herself.

Happy Mother’ Day, Rita Wogan.

Close to Death…a reflection on losses

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

We were in Dublin, Ireland, having just awakened from a jet-lagged midday nap. This was a family trip, planned for months by my wife and me for my brother and his wife, a friend who had lost her husband, and one of my four sisters. Another sister remained behind in Chicago, and the other two lived north of Galway, but had taken the train over to Dublin to meet us and spend a few days in the city before all of us headed west to their homes and the real heart of our vacation.

It was the Monday after Easter, a bank holiday in Ireland, and nothing but pubs and taxies were operating. When my Ireland sisters arrived, we were just about recovered from the flight, having napped and showered. Our mother was in a hospital in Muncie, Indiana, scheduled for a routine gall bladder procedure earlier that day and, once we are all together in our room, my sisters urged me to call and see if we could talk to her. I had arranged to call my Muncie based sister-in-law and my brother who I guessed were bedside around then, and my sister-in-law answered on the first ring. The tremble in her voice hinted my worst fear and that feeling of stepping off a ledge from a great height rushed toward me.

My mother was gone. My wife saw the shock on my face as I absorbed the tearful words of my sister-in-law from the other side of the ocean. As I stammered what I heard to the others gathering in our room, my sister’s legs went out from under her. My wife did what she was born to do, and which she does better than anyone, which was to give comfort to those around her. The gaiety of a joyful family reunion spun into a chaos of disbelief, bewilderment, a hundred questions. The next few days were a blur of last-minute travel arrangements, tearful phone calls and a coming home to be all together. It was April, 2004.

———

I was eighteen, and was sleeping in the back bedroom of the two-flat we lived in on the west side of Chicago. I was between colleges and was working as an entry-level guy in the newspaper printing plant below the Chicago Tribune. I had been thrown from the languid pace of the college freshman into the world of hardworking, middle aged, tough men and there had been no orientation session. The work paid exceptionally well, but the hours were brutal and the environment somewhere between downright unhealthy and medieval. Up until that point in my life, it had been the hardest I had ever worked. The army would up the ante later, but I didn’t know that then.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. my mother woke me, clearly panicked. I woke my older brother, and together we ran into the living room, where my father lay on the floor on his back. He was wearing his usual nighttime summer wear, boxers and a white t-shirt. His eyes were fixed toward the ceiling, not focused, as if he were looking far beyond the plaster layer that was eight feet above him. A look of almost amused surprise was on his face.

I was working on pure adrenalin, scared, but not paralyzed. My brother had been in the army and had learned something of first aid and perhaps emergencies. He knelt down next to our dad and began mouth to mouth resuscitation. My mother had found a bottle of whisky (old Irish remedy, I guess) and poured a small glass of it into his open mouth. It ran out the corners of his mouth and onto his chest and then to the floor.

I straddled his chest and had my hands on his heart, which was beating wildly, as if it wanted to get out of his body. I felt it literally banging inside his chest for however long I can’t remember, and then a hesitation, two weaker beats, then nothing. A few moments later he gave up what I later learned was the “death rattle”, a sort of final rush of mottled air in the lungs, tinged by the smell of the whiskey. His big frame seemed to partially collapse under me. My father was gone. It was July, 1968.

——-

I have reflected on these two experiences of loss many times over since then, and especially my proximity to the two events. In the case of my mother, death reached out over 3,600 miles to touch me with its electric shock. In my fathers’ case, death had to reach only a few inches from his face. Same shock. Yet many years later, my personal proximity matters not at all, except as good stories.

I have shared an abbreviated version of these two stories only a few times, and usually only with those grieving for the loss of someone close and that grief aggravated by their not having been there to share the goodbye moment. I have shared the stories in hopes of easing that part of the pain for them. Did it help? I don’t know. I talk a lot and maybe it seemed like just so much more talk to them. Or maybe talk wasn’t what was needed at that time.

I only know that as time works its magic, when I ponder how blessed I was to have those two people in my life and as my parents, it’s the thousand little memories, the good stories, the little lessons and kindnesses they left in their wake that grow in importance and meaning. Where I was when the gift of their lives went away from where I was at that moment drifts into insignificance. Goodbye will always be goodbye, but the smiles remain. And the gratitude.