“Tony, you’d better go move your car.”
“Are the roofers here yet?”
“No, but they’re coming soon.”
“What time is it now?”
“Five fifty-eight.”
Why fight it? He gave me life, right? I moved my car at 6:02 A.M. Now we’re even.
By the time I shuffled back into the house, I could see well enough to notice my father’s feet. He was wearing a pair of slippers I’d bought him a year ago—but they had large strips of bright yellow tape around them.
“Why do you have tape on your slippers?” I asked.
“The soles fell apart, and I taped them together.”
“Dad, this isn’t Valley Forge. Let’s get you a new pair.”
“They’re perfectly good this way,” he insisted.
“It’s bright yellow tape, Dad. You look like a police crime scene. The slippers cost eight dollars at Wal-Mart. We’ll drive down there. I’ll buy you a new pair.”
“I don’t want you wasting your money on me,” he said.
“Dad, at your age wasting my money would be if I bought you a Jet Ski or a hooker. A pair of slippers is life-sustaining.”
That evening we went to dinner at Steak & Ale (a chain specializing in warm food), where I was not only the youngest diner, I was also the only one who could see well enough to go to the salad bar without a guide dog.
“Take me around the salad bar. They have a very good salad bar here,” my dad said, meaning the foods are in various shapes and colors. The more different shapes and colors he can pick out, the happier he is. I could park my father in front of a Lava lamp for weeks.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Cauliflower.”
“There is no cauliflower,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to something on his left. “That looks like cauliflower.”
“That’s potato salad.”
He moved around the salad bar slowly, like we were circling some wily prey.
Now he pointed to something on his right.
“Is that cauliflower?” he asked.
“No, Dad, that’s the potato salad again. It’s on your right this time.”
“Are you sure it’s not cauliflower? It looks like cauliflower.”
“You can’t see, Dad. To you, I probably look like Harrison Ford.”
He put his hands on my face and smiled. “I may not see well anymore, but I see well enough to know you look a lot more like Henry Ford.”
I see myself in him more and more these days. As he shrinks, as he steadies himself after each step, as he uses a magnifying glass to clip out the “25 cents off” coupons for macaroni and cheese from the Sunday newspaper, I see the man I will become and am becoming.
His wife—my mom—died twenty years ago. He has been alone for so long, he has become used to the silence in the halls (which is why he turns the radio up so loud), and the indentation on the side where he sleeps on the big bed, and the familiar smells of himself in the rooms. There is no one for him to dress for anymore. He takes for granted the face that looks back at him in the mirror.
I looked up from the tape-wrapped slippers.
“What happened to your teeth, Dad?” I asked softly. There were gaps. Rose Mary Woods gaps.
“My upper plate keeps falling out. And last month I broke a tooth on the bottom.”
“Last month? When are you going to see the dentist?”
“I have an appointment in three weeks. But I don’t know if he can fix them.”
“Of course he can fix them,” I said. “You’re going to a dentist, not an accountant.”
“It’s very tricky, working with teeth.”
“That’s why he went to dental school, Dad, not bartenders’ academy.… You can’t walk around without teeth, Dad. I love you. But you need teeth.”
“I’m fine without them. I can eat anything. Let’s go to the rib joint now and see.”
“I’d love to, Dad. But I forgot where I moved the car.”
This Home Was Made for Walkers
Many of you have been kind enough over the years to say you’ve enjoyed the columns I’ve written about my father and the idiosyncratic things he’s done: like collecting Styrofoam trays in case of a worldwide Styrofoam shortage, or driving thirty miles out of his way to pick up a tin of spice for four cents less than he could have bought it one block from his house.
That was in the old days when he was still driving, before they took away his license. I knew he was done as a driver when he stopped at what he thought was a stop sign—and it was a mailbox.
The last time my father renewed his Florida driver’s license, they flunked him because he couldn’t identify the gigantic E at the top of the eye chart. Of course, he brought that on himself by facing the wrong wall. My dad was stunned that they wouldn’t renew his license at eighty-five for three more years. He insisted that the people at the DMV were anti-Semitic.
I just came back from visiting my dad, and he’s not as mobile as he once was. In the past year, he’s broken both of his hips, so he has to use a walker. He’s in a retirement home, with a caring live-in nurse named Barbara who cooks bacon and eggs for him every morning. He’s so happy, he’s gained twenty pounds.
When my dad lived alone, he scrimped on food. His pantry was stocked with boxes of macaroni and cheese. (It looked like a child in East Asia had adopted him.) He made a two-pound chicken last five days. He’d strip the bird like a ’57 Chevy; he did everything but make the carcass into a party hat. Now he eats like a Rockefeller.
“How come you’re eating so high on the hog now?” I asked him.
“Because you’re paying for it,” he said.
My dad watches Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire every night. He tries to answer every question, but it’s hard to keep pace because he can’t see the questions on the TV screen. Sometimes the question will be: “Which of the following is not a mushroom? A. portobello. B. shiitake. C. Steve Forbes. D. porcini.” And my dad will blurt out, “Give the Dog a Bone,” clearly the answer to a previous question—perhaps from yesterday’s Wheel of Fortune.
Anyway, I was pleased to see my dad still has his sense of humor. We were walking down the hall on the way to the elevator, and he looked at me and said, “I think you’ve grown.”
“I haven’t grown, Dad. I stopped growing thirty-five years ago.”
“Maybe. But you definitely look taller to me.”
I smiled at him and pointed out, “Dad, you’re hunched over a walker, you’re legally blind, and you’ve shrunk to about four feet. The bathroom sink looks taller to you.”
I don’t understand why people get angry when I point out that my father has shrunk. Of course he’s shrunk. He’s eighty-nine years old. Whaddaya think Wilt Chamberlain would have looked like at eighty-nine? Like my dad—only darker.
People decried how insensitive I was the last time I did a column about him because I wrote: “I could fit my dad in the overhead baggage rack of the plane.” I apologize for making that offensive statement. I would never say that again. It would be wrong. Now I could stow him under the seat.
The retirement home is quite nice. My only complaint is with the elevator. Because of the common use of walkers, the elevator doors are timed to accommodate a slow pace. They tend to stay open for, um, ever.
My dad lives on the second floor. I got into the elevator on the ground floor, pressed “2,” and waited for the door to close. I was in there for a while, and the door remained open. I pressed “Close Door.” Nothing happened. I waited a while longer. Still nothing. I pressed “2” again, harder this time. Still nothing.
Now I figure I’ve been standing in this elevator as long as it took to film Titanic—or worse, as long as it took to watch it. It’s not just that I could have gotten to the second floor faster by walking. I could have gotten there faster by going outside and shinnying up a drainpipe.
My visit with my dad was great. I was there four da
ys, bunking in his old apartment not far from the retirement home. So I was able to sit by the pool and plug in to all the old, familiar conversations about the Holy Trinity of retirement—food, money, and major medical.
Here is a typical conversation at the Sands Point condominium:
“Did you see where an egg omelet costs $8.99 now? It used to cost $2.99. It’s just three eggs. Chickens have a union now?”
“I can’t eat eggs. Too much cholesterol. My stocks should only be as high as my cholesterol. I can eat Egg Beaters. But for what Egg Beaters cost, I can buy a new car.”
“My sonny just bought a Lexus. I wouldn’t tell you what it costs—fifty-one thou with the heated seats. I remember when all we got from Japan fell apart in our hands.”
“Is something wrong with your hands? Mine are killing me. These pills I get from the Medicare, they don’t help at all. They’re so big. They’re like horseshoes. Who can eat pills like this?”
“Okay, you convinced me. Let’s eat.”
All the while, Muzak is blaring around the pool—vaguely familiar tunes. And then I realize what it is. It’s “Love Her Madly” by the Doors. Only there’s no Jim Morrison. No words, even. It’s actual Muzak of the Doors! The next song is “Honky Cat” by Elton John, then “More Than a Feeling” by Boston.
These are the very songs—rock songs from the ’60s and ’70s—that these people loathed. And here they are, forced to listen to them in their old age. At a volume you could hear on the moon!
Imagine me being eighty and sitting around a pool in Florida listening to Coolio.
Classic rap.
I think I want an omelet.
Fire in the Sky
This is the column I never wanted to write.
My father, Ira James Kornheiser, died on July 4, a few weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday.
People ask me if it was sudden and unexpected. I tell them it is always sudden. One minute you’re on the phone with him, talking about how your air conditioner conked out, and the next time the phone rings it’s your aunt calling from Florida, saying, “He’s gone.”
That’s what she said: “Tony, he’s gone.” It was 6:15. I was getting ready to drive to the Mall for the fireworks. My dad had been in the hospital for a few days because he had fluid built up in his lungs. I hadn’t liked the tinny sound of his voice when I’d called the day before, and I’d asked my aunt—who lived near my dad in Florida and visited him every day—if I should hurry down.
She said the doctors assured her this sort of thing was episodic; there was no immediate danger.
“Come down in August, around his birthday, like you’d planned,” she told me.
The day he died, I’d phoned my aunt and left this message: “I didn’t call my dad today because I stupidly left the number of the hospital at work. Tell him I’ll call him tomorrow. I figure he’s okay, because you’d have called me if there was anything terribly wrong.”
I was walking out the door when she called to tell me he was gone.
She had been there. They’d been chatting. My father mentioned I hadn’t called him yet—I called every day. “He’s probably playing golf,” Dad said. “He’ll call me tomorrow.”
Excuse me, Tony, but are you going to be funny in this column?
Sorry. Not this one.
My father was born in 1910, before radio stations, before frozen foods, before Babe Ruth played major league baseball. He lived so long, he saw Halley’s comet twice!
He wasn’t cheated like my mother was. He was healthy, and his mind was still sharp. He got more answers right on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire than most of the contestants.
My dad’s problem was his eyes. Macular degeneration hit him in his mid-eighties and left him legally blind. He had to give up driving. (This, as I’ve written, was a godsend for other Floridians, because he couldn’t tell the red lights from the green lights; once, he stopped his car for what he thought was a stop sign, and I said, “Dad, you’ve just stopped for a mailbox!”) Then, walking became problematic because his eyesight was unsure.
Last year he fell and broke his hips on two separate occasions. But he was still hale and walking reasonably well with a walker. Surely there is a technical medical explanation for what my dad died of. But I say it was from old age. His body just wore out.
After he moved into a retirement home sixteen months ago, I kept up his condominium in the event he ever wanted to come back—but I told him point blank: “I’ve thrown out all the Styrofoam trays. I’m sorry because I know you thought if there was a worldwide shortage of Styrofoam, you had the market cornered.”
I tried cleaning out the apartment last winter, and I found collections of things that only someone from the Depression would value: nails, rubber bands, pencil lead, old combs. He had a comb that said VOTE FOR ABE BEAME. Abe Beame first ran for mayor of New York in 1965! (My dad had combs everywhere. Have I mentioned how much I hated him for living to almost ninety with a FULL HEAD OF HAIR?)
Life at the home obviously agreed with him. In the past year, Dad had gained fifteen pounds. He was shrinking vertically and expanding horizontally. In five years, he’d have looked like a Brunswick bowling ball.
“You should see how he eats, Tony,” his nurse, Barbara, an angel, would tell me. Bacon and eggs every morning. Big hunks of red meat for dinner.
“What happened to macaroni and cheese?” I would ask him. “I remember when you bought four of them for a buck and ate them every night. You ate like a pensioner.”
It made me laugh because I knew why he was suddenly eating like a truck driver: because he thought I was paying for it!
Another few decades, and maybe I could begin to pay him back for what he gave me.
Years ago I’d made my peace with my dad about how this would end. I had brought him up to Washington to look at an apartment in a Rockville high-rise. “I don’t want to live in cold weather,” he’d told me. “And I don’t want to live in a high-rise. I want to stay where I am.”
“Okay, but it means you’re going to die in Florida, and I may not be there when you go,” I said.
“I love you,” he said. “And I know you love me. Now let me live where I want.”
I called him every day. I made sure to say “I love you” during every call. I don’t regret a second of our relationship—other than being one thousand miles apart.
The last time I saw him was in late spring. The family was down in Florida for a week, and every night my son, Michael, and I went to see my dad. We’d watch TV with him, and then, when he got tired, we’d leave. I kissed him every night, never knowing if I’d get the chance again.
The day he died, I was up early, walking my dog, and in the still of the predawn morning I could hear myself saying out loud, “It’s not really important if he makes it to ninety. Because his tombstone will read ‘1910–2000.’ Which is quite a run. And if he died today, on July 4, then every year there’d be fireworks in his honor.”
It was a premonition, I guess.
When my aunt told me he was gone, I stood there holding the phone for a second, remembering the day twenty-two years ago when my dad called to say my mother had passed away.
I never had any brothers or sisters. Now I had no parents.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “We were just going to the fireworks.”
“Go,” my aunt said. “He’d have wanted you to go.”
Actually, he’d have wanted to go with me. (Which would’ve been fine, as long as he didn’t make me drive twenty-five miles out of my way to get nutmeg on sale for forty-nine cents instead of the usual fifty-nine cents.)
I wrote about my dad often and told funny stories about the quirks he had. I used to tell him not to read them, but he did anyway. And he’d call and say, “You’re exaggerating terribly about me. I didn’t drive twenty-five miles out of my way to save ten cents on nutmeg. First of all, it was paprika—and it was a big tin, and I saved a dollar.”
I went to the Mall to watch the firew
orks. I sat back, listened to the great, booming noises, and watched the colors explode all around me, rising and falling in giant plumes, and I thought: This is how I’m going to remember him every year.
I am still in shock, I think. At least once a day I pick up the phone to call him, then I gently put it down. I want to tell him about Elizabeth’s summer job as a baker and how Michael is doing at camp. I never did anything major in my life without consulting my dad and seeking his advice and his approval. I want to ask him about buying a new car, or how often to clean the gutters, or how much I should tip the plumber. And I’ll never be able to do that again.
Love in the Time of Viagra
Good-bye AAA
What separates man from the lower animals?
Concierge service.
(Concierge is from the French and, loosely translated, means “For a good time, call Babette.”)
Concierge service, baby. They have it in hotels. They have it in law firms. They have it in office buildings. They have it in high-end health clubs.
And now it’s in my car.
I recently bought a car that came with a year of OnStar service. That’s one of those global-positioning deals that direct you when you’re lost, or you have an emergency—like you’d kill for a tall skim decaf latte with extra foam and a shot of vanilla.
To activate the service, all I have to do is press a button on the console attached to my rearview mirror. Though with my astonishingly low level of technical skill, this is easier said than done, as you’ll see:
There are three buttons. The one on the left has a plain white dot. The one in the middle says “OnStar.” The other one has a red cross. To activate OnStar, I pressed … the one with the white dot! Sometimes it’s like I have the IQ of a ficus tree.
Nothing happened. Duh. (God knows what I was waiting for, someone to shout “Whasssup?” As it turns out, the white button is the “off” button. Who knew?) So I pressed the “OnStar” button. The next thing I heard was a voice saying, “What can I do for you, Mr. Kornheiser?”
This was an actual person calling me in my car!
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