1-28-20

I made a Facebook account a while back so that I could view something a friend wanted me to see. But I didn't want an account, so I put up my father's name and birthday. As a result, I have been getting birthday wishes. It is very sweet and I am touched. Truly.

My father was a hell of a great guy. He would be ninety today, but he has been gone a long time now. He has missed a lot, but he hasn't missed much, if you know what I mean. He was thick and strong from working on the farm in his youth. He boxed in the navy in WWII and later trained boxers at my uncle's gym. He used his G.I. Bill to go to trade school and learned to be a tool and dye maker. He worked at that the rest of his life. It was a rough life, I think, working every day and often overtime, making all the money he could. Then, every year, there was a two week vacation. But my father was a romantic and wanted to travel. When I was young, he twice quit jobs to take my mother and me around the country for months. We saw everything. One year, after returning to Ohio, the Little Miami River flooded our house and my father decided to move to Florida. We had been there several times, and it was still a frontier.

But after that move, he never really travelled again. I remember as a kid that a man my father knew, "Lucky Lochier," who my father called a millionaire, bought a yacht and asked my father to sail it with him. My mother, of course, said no, and that was that. From then on, he worked his fifty weeks, taking us some weekends to stay with my aunt and uncle who lived near the coast. And there was the two week vacation in August.

After twenty years of marriage, my father and mother got a divorce, and my father left everything. He moved into a little one bedroom duplex and lived alone until I came to live with him a year later. He never got remarried and died when he was sixty.

The gods turn their backs on the aged. That is what I learned then. If you don't have people, and often even if you do, you are on your own.

I tried to work through this terrible flu I've caught, but that only made it worse. Today, I've called in sick. I will drink soup and sleep and try not to think of all the things that have piled up on me that need to be done. I will put on music and doze on the couch and hope to feel better in the morning.