Six long years ago and I was still a damn kid. I had hit
34 years a few months before but had little idea what came next…those long
years that sucked away the breath. It was right about then a colleague told me
I was in for it (or that I could be in for it depending on the length of the
haul), but words don’t hurt. Prophecies mean nothing without a rearview mirror.
But I now feel like the most of it is life in the rearview…
Those prophecies--they were taking sips from the horizon;
I guess the gulps came when I wasn’t watching.
That ocean of ours—the steadying Pacific—it’s still a beautiful
painting. God’s great fake sky of late fall and winter still echoes the all of
us, but it all seems so close now. Any great voyage out seems proximal; the
enigma has decreased slightly. With dad’s ashes below, maybe it has been pushed
closer. When fading mind is the new black, it’s still the new black. Hope still
exists, so everything else is trendy. And I don’t keep up with trends. But
maybe I should have…
I can’t quite get the opening exterior shot in this
episode right. Is it a bird’s eye view of my following my dad as he struggles
to find his way home? A zoom in from high above the clouds? A helicopter rush
in from the Pacific over Cabrillo or Point Fermin and over the residential
roads surrounding San Pedro High School? Or is it through my eyes looking over
the dash, looking over the crux of my life, not knowing, but knowing? Knowing
that he needed help, and very soon he would not drive at night again. So it’s
probably both, and then a flash forward to an empty ride home after tomorrow
night’s game. But maybe it’s not empty, but it’s emptiness I feel right now.
And again…prophecies are just words until you see them in the rearview.
You think things can get better, but they don’t. Not at
this point in medical history. So those trends keep passing you by. I observed
them but rarely could feel fully immersed. The shadow of who my dad was grew
bigger, and I wanted to live in that. Because of that, I missed the newest
trend of a mind leaving. I was scared, unprepared, stubborn, inexperienced, a
know-it-all, a know-nothing, and too-cool-for-school to let anyone help me
through this. And when I wasn’t too cool…I was paralyzed.
I was the guy whose silliness you had to excuse because I
was too youthful in coaching career to know that my enthusiasm could be taken
for a lack of humility. We won a tournament championship, and it was new, and I
Tebowed aside a hideous 6-foot-tall trophy that still lurks in the back corner
of my classroom like an albatross of my life. Everything was new in that first
year, but on that night I could feel that still air of the Pacific…that perfect
combo of a mild winter Santa Ana wind stalemating the westerly breeze…that same
air I know so well now that holds moments in the air for longer than a moment.
It’s that same air that paints glass atop the nighttime tide to the point where
the lights reflect and you’re not sure if you are walking through a painting of
a populated stretch of a European beach you’ve never seen before of if you are
just strolling atop Torrance Beach. But even though it was cold, it was there
that night. Something from the future brought warmth, because in my mind it
feels one way and in the pictures everyone is bundled up. It was love combined
with the scariest of feelings—the Prodigal Son had his comeback, but now Sonnet
73 had written itself into his life. And all I could do was follow along. All I could do after our championship victory
was follow behind dad and watch him struggle to drive through a neighborhood he
knew so well. The streets of San Pedro were his veins and arteries.
I don’t even remember all the details of the drive home.
He made a wrong turn at one point, but I think he figured his way out of it.
Maybe I helped guide him and maybe I didn’t. You don’t want to know the details
of Alzheimer’s whether it’s the early stages or the late stages. There’s
nothing heroic about severe mental decline. I saw its ugly face that night. I
saw it take away the last breaths of freedom—my dad’s, my mom’s, mine. And so I
belabor the story. It doesn’t matter which way I tell it because we all knew.
Whether he drove again at night another time or not, the freedom to do so was
gone. Whereas I had seen a miracle—I had seen my dad come back from the
impossible—there would be nothing like it again. This was reality—this was the
abyss I was driving into right in front of my dash. I had no choice but to
follow it because we follow the ones we love.
San Pedro was his home and his livelihood. He had snuck
under the guise of night one more time to get back to his life force. He had gotten a pass to independently come to
cheer me on in my first few weeks as head coach. But after the celebration of a
tournament championship subsided, it was time to drive back to the
house—reality changing, teetering on the fringes of hell.
That’s about all I got. I’m trying to fix my rearview so
cosmically it can capture more. I see that memory. I see a year closer to
now—the last time he ever saw me coach, days before we put him in a home. A
home game against South Torrance and the next day the world changed. I thought
we could watch Dodger baseball together and make the best of it but life away
from the past reality was chaos…constant chaos. God bless the people who made
that chaos tolerable? That’s not really the right word but God bless them for
trying. God Bless them for making their lives’ calling caring for those in
on-Earth Purgatory. Life as we know it never happened again. He never came back
to the house. I try like heck every day to erase just about everything from the
last four years of his life. I try to build from that point backward—to
reestablish the average of who he was. And if I can keep traveling through time
I will have the reality of who he was. The good. The bad. The cognizant mind.
Hopefully tomorrow’s game at San Pedro takes me one step
closer. And out over the horizon the Pacific will fill again.
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