The Storm

I loved Miami as a kid. This wasn’t the cool South Beach of today. This was the era of kitchenettes, canvas and rubber rafts, plastic oranges with orange drink inside, jalousie windows. This was the Miami of the 1960’s: hot and humid; land of shuffleboard and salty sea.

I loved watching natural disasters, fully trusting that they would not affect me, and maybe naively thinking they didn’t really hurt anyone/thing. My dad occasionally indulged my awe of nature’s power, including once in Miami.

“Want to watch it come in,” he asked? So I eagerly marched up towards the picture window of our motel room as Hurricane Betsy (or Alma, or..) burst into town. The seas got dark like the sky, the wind was incredible, and no, my dad wasn’t crazy, I swear. After a little while, we backed away to safer territory.

The next morning, the happy beachfront was left a disastrous scene of nature’s trash. The coke machine that I used less than a day before, was no longer dispensing that ice cold small glass bottle. Everything had been whipped by the sandy wind, including our sandblasted car.

Why am I telling you this? Tomorrow is the anniversary of my dad’s death – over 20 years now. When I went to Yosemite last week, I had a huge rush of wishing he could be with me; that we could again take our walks in nature and be quiet and listen and see the world a little differently for those moments together. I was surprised by how momentarily overwhelmed I was by the lack of his presence. Then I looked at the calendar, and remembered. As if my body has some internal clock that knows when it’s close to mid-October, and close to that day that he “fell asleep” almost on his bowl of melting ice cream, a victim of sepsis/poisoning, not the Parkinson’s he had struggled with for so many years.

So here’s to memories – the weird ones, the sad ones, the beautiful ones. I carry him with me always, and will even eat a pork chop tonight, just in memory of him.