Pop’s Last Hurrah

Seven years ago this evening, it was 11 o’clock when I returned home from a City Council meeting.

Unusually, Diane was waiting for me at the top of the stairway.

Her expression eloquently told the story.

“Pop?” I said, attaching a question mark, hoping Diane would say no, a distant relative I last saw when I was 5 years old had died.

In the month that Pop would have turned 94 years old, it was a disappointment but not a shock.

Nine months after entering a nursing home, I last had seen him 2½ months earlier. He was not bad. But the last several telephone calls, he did not know who I was.

I walked into our bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and tried to figure out what I was feeling.

Not a time for words, Diane stood beside me. Without verbalizing, she said “I am here for what you want or need.”

This was three years before her terminal disease enveloped our lives. We drew our strength from each other, but it worked far heavier from her to me than the other way.

Pop lived to see great-grandchildren but not long enough for me to turn out the way he had envisioned.

I was thinking about that yesterday when I made my shaky maiden voyage into the Home Depot in Playa Vista. Pop would have been stunned into paralysis had he ever found me there. This historic moment was stolen from the whore-in-church scenario.

What do you do in a Home Depot?

Why would you ever go there?

What kind of people inhabit the store? No one I know – or have a desire to know.

Diane died last summer, and now it is time for me to leave our home and return to what will pass for my roots.

My professional and social lives never evolved the way Pop had dreamed.

But for the 10 minutes I wandered into Pop’s version of Disneyland, he would have believed he had succeeded as a father. As he did indeed, seven times over.