"Eddie Spaghetti with the meatball eyes!" I would chant this and run to my father as he came home from work. Oh how I hugged him too. My father never got tired of hugs, even when I didn't think he wanted one. I was his "boss." He took me everywhere, including his Hopewell Junction haunts. He would have a beer and I would have a ginger ale with a cherry. My father, a veteran of WWII, successful business man, "townie." I was his mascot. Pop loved his Pall Mall cigarettes, his Pabst Blue Ribbon and good food and a good game of pool. He was a great poker player. He loved the competition. His only prized possession was the used olive green Mercedes that he bought many years after we were through college. He wasn't into "things."
Since Christmas is almost here, I have been thinking about "Pop" lately. He lived his life exactly the way he wanted to live it. He had a very dry sense of humor and one Christmas Eve, I understood why humor was so important...
Pop was 70. They found cancer in his mouth. Had he taken care to go to a dentist all those years, they would have found it earlier, removed it and he would have been fine. A lesson for all of us...I suppose. After his diagnosis, he was scheduled for a rather horrid operation where they would remove the cancer and reconstruct his jaw. And so they did...Pop couldn't wait to get out of the hospital but it was a long frustrating stay. Finally, the day before Christmas Eve they let Pop come home and boy was I happy. Mom diligently and expertly decided to cook the annual rib roast. How we all looked forward to that too. It was almost a religious experience. She prepared the roast but my father, would not be able to chew it. He would never be able to eat anything properly ever again. So, Mom did the only reasonable thing...she pureed Pop's portion of the rib roast including the gravy. There was no way he wasn't going to have that rib roast.
It was a tense moment though. We all sat down and the dinner looked fabulous as usual. A joyous, tense moment. Mom served the beautiful vegetables and sliced the rib roast. We looked at Pop. He had everything he needed even if it was well, pureed. Our eyes were fixated on Pop wondering what he would say. He spooned his rib roast, ate it and said, "Jeez Mickey, the roast is tender!" We all lost it...right there and then...laughing, crying all at the same time. I remember that moment to this day. My father had found humor. He embraced his circumstances and was thankful and graceful. Christmas would ensue and we would be grateful, if not relieved. I didn't realize it at the time but Pop had given us the greatest gift we would have ever received...laughter.
Four years later, he lost his battle. The surgery had bought him four years and my mother made sure that each and every day he was eating something extraordinary. She took all the necessary steps she knew to take. The weekend before he died, he told me to go "raise hell" at a community theater celebration. I didn't want to go but he told me to go. I did raise hell and I had a very, VERY memorable time. The next day, I went to the hospital and told him so. The blue eyes I knew so well sparkled, and the grin that always reassured me, appeared. He was at peace.
Humor is something we have clearly forgotten to have in our relationships, in our day to day dealings with the world. Lately, my world has been too serious and I had indeed lost my sense of direction. Today, as Christmas approaches, Pop reminded me that when the world gets too serious, find the humor. Find the joy. The intensity and the seriousness always finds us. We are not immune. We will never be immune. "Eddie Spaghetti," who by no means materialistic, or needy left me and my sisters the secret. Find the humor, even when the bathroom was crowded at six a.m. with your daughters,..Even when work was challenging...even when you're confronted with the passage from this world to the next. Find the humor...raise some hell.
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