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For Pop, this morning marked the four-month anniversary of moving into the nursing home where he never wanted to live anyway. Happily, we enjoyed a lusty laugh for one of the few times since last summer.
Knowing my father’s penchant for passivity, especially at diplomatic junctures, I ventured an inquiry/
Did my kid sister land the position that she had regarded as a cinch to win?
Pop chuckled. He had a hunch why I was asking, instead of telling, him the answer.
It seems my kid sister has been broadsided by the financial crisis. Even though she is a hardline Democrat, she is in a looser squeeze this afternoon than Rod Blagojevich.
Still, with the onset of winter, she needs to go back to work today or tomorrow.
Is she working? “I don’t know,” Pop said.
I have a basketball team full of sisters, and if you have been to Iraq lately, or you have read about the differences Iraqi natives are experiencing, you may understand why I march on tippy-toes around some of them.
My kid sister was to learn the decision last Thursday. But afternoon melted into evening without a call, indicating that the worst scenario had happened.
The two of us did not talk for several days, and the subject did not arise in our subsequent conversations.
Answer May Come in a Dream
Since I didn’t want to nudge her any closer to despair, I made the ultra-cautious decision not to mention the job until or unless she did. She did not.
Sis and Pop live 75 miles apart. They speak daily on the telephone, as Pop and I do. The awkward three-letter word, job, however, never has been broached in their conversations or in mine with her.
Pop was hoping I held the answer on my sister’s prospective job. Since I didn’t, we presumed she remains a reluctant soldier in the army of the unemployed — unless either the governors of New York or Illinois appoint her a U.S. Senator in the next several days.
Otherwise, we will maintain our vigil, and today that was a cause for at least two belly laughs. Pop thought it was funny that neither of us was aggressive enough to directly ask her.
Having sat yesterday afternoon with Police Chief Don Pedersen in his second-floor office, he was the latest to learn how shy and tongue-tied I become when a tough question needs to be posed and none of my assistants is within range.
Interrupting a Train of Thought
Pop said he understood why I didn’t blurt out my curiosity to my kid sister in light of a terrible incident on my first fulltime newspaper job that haunted me for years. To suggest, delicately, how much closer this event was to the Teddy Roosevelt Presidency than to today, my editor sent me to cover a passenger train wreck.
These days, I think those only occur at Disneyland.
Oozing fearlessness, I did not even blink when I was eventually sent to the home of the engineer to interview his widow.
Young and brash, I blurted out a question to her about how it felt to be a widow. Unfortunately, the widow was not aware of her newly imposed status.
I apologized and clumsily explained what had happened — this was almost before telephones had been invented, much less cellphones.
It was the most horrible moment of my life, probably only because I had not yet met anyone who would join my team of rival ex-wives.
He may not be able to remember what he ate for lunch an hour ago, but Pop had perfect recall about every strand of detail of this black afternoon in my budding career.
Now, he said, he understood why I was reticent about pressing my sister for unpleasant information.
Knowing our family, we probably will discuss this subject very openly 25 or 30 years from now, and not a moment before.
The March Toward 100
At 93 years old, Pop remains mentally alert even if he isn’t mobile enough to cross the room comfortably or to care for himself when he is out of bed.
Last week his best friend, blind, nearly deaf and fighting an amputation, died, which reminded Pop how the institutional meals are growing increasingly unpalatable.
My stepmother, who has been flirting with Alzheimer’s for several years, is going steady with the plague these days. Still, she stops by to see Pop several times a week.
Pop and I closed out our uncommonly long conversation this morning the same way we usually do.
“When are you coming to see me?”
“Probably next month.”
