Letter To My Dead Dad (part I)

Hi, Pop.

Sorry it's taken me so long to write again. I've been kinda busy. Y'know, the usual. Eating, pooping, checking my email. All the mindless busywork that comes with being alive. You remember what it was like to have intestines and a Yahoo account? It hasn't been that long, has it?

So where did we leave off? I think I was telling you about Teddy, right? My nephew, your... well, your almost grandson. Although technically, I think he still is, even if you never met him. Unless you have, but as I've mentioned before, I don't really want to hear about that. I get easily spooked and knowing that your ghost might be peering over shoulders or tiptoeing down hallways... you can't hear it, but I just made a high-pitched girlish yelp. Let's do us both a favor and stick to a don't-ask-don't-tell policy, okay?

KEEP ON READIN' AND TRY TO FORGOT THAT THE GHOST OF MY DEAD DAD IS LIKELY STANDING BEHIND YOU, READING OVER YOUR SHOULDER.

I don't know what it is about that kid, Dad. Whenever I look at him, my heart hurts. I mean, not in the way that, you know... killed you. The good kinda heart hurting. Without the shortness of breath or the arm numbness. I wasn't crazy about him in the beginning, but lately he's developed an actual personality. You know how during the first six months, babies are just big globs of pink flesh? You can't fucking tell them apart, and all they do is cry and crap their pants. It's not until they're one or two years old that they start acting like somebody you'd want to hang out with. I'm telling you, if I ever have a kid, I'm leaving it at the hospital until it learns how to talk and use a toilet. Babies are booooring.

Amyway, Teddy's reached the age where everybody in the family is trying to figure out his DNA. "He has his father's this, his mother's that." And of course, because you're not around anymore and we're all such sentimental saps, there's a lot of talk about how he looks like you. And it seems to change every couple of days. First it was he has your eyes, and then he has your ears, and then your nose and your teeth. I have no clue if that last one is even possible. Don't all teeth look generally the same? Unless you had really big chompers or an overbite or maybe fangs, but I don't remember any of that being true. Fangs would've been cool, though, especially when Teddy gets old enough to ask questions.

"Well, there's a funny thing called genetics, Ted. Because of your granddad's medical history, you may have a congenital heart defect and... there's no easy way to put this... you may need to drink human blood to survive. Either way, we've already bought you a very cozy coffin."

Teddy's almost 18 months now and it's becoming pretty obvious that he has more of his mother's family in his face than any noticeable Spitznagel traits. I guess my brother and I started to panic, and one of us - I forget who - decided that he has your head. Does that make sense? The shape of his head sorta looks like the shape of your head. I'm not saying you had a big melon head or anything. It's not the kind of thing where you look at him and immediately see it and you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's totally our Dad's noggin!" You kinda have to... feel it out. We've spent hours huddled around him - me and my brother and our respective special lady friends - groping Teddy's head like blind people reading a braille novel, running our fingers over every divot and soft spot, looking for something we recognize.



Hey, have I told you about noo-noo's yet? No? Okay, here's the deal. Teddy's still breast-feeding, and he's at a point where he can ask for it by name. His mom doesn't want him saying "boobies" in public, so she's given her breasts a pet name: noo-noo's. Personally, I think this is hi-lar-ious. And it's especially funny because Teddy is such a master of comic timing.

Just a few weeks ago, we were all hanging out in their back yard and Teddy was playing in the garden, as he's want to do. He comes running over to us and hands a flower to his mom, and she says, "Awwww, is that for me? Thank you, I love you, too." He smiles back at her and his gaze sloooowly drifts down to her chest. And then he says, in a leering W.C. Fields' drawl, "Noo-noo's?"

Ahhh, the timeless art of seduction.

We laughed, but you gotta hand it to Teddy, his methods work. I'm so convinced that he's on to something that I've started referring to the Dame's breasts as noo-noo's. I've even adopted his patented catch phrase. It's not just "noo-noo's," it's "helloooooo, noo-noo's," delivered with a tone that's somewhere between flirty and formal. He's showing respect, like a politician greeting a dignitary. But at the same time, his voice has a hint of naughtiness, as if he's saying, "I've got needs and you've got teats. Let's make some magic."

The Dame isn't quite as charmed as I am by this latest addition to our relationship lexicon. "You want me to think about nursing a baby every time we have sex?" She's asked me. "That is the sickest fucking thing I've ever heard!"

She makes a convincing case. But at least in public, I've found that "noo-noo's" is a great shorthand. I can say incredibly dirty things to her and nobody is the wiser. We could be in a coffee shop and I'll lean over to her and say, "I want your noo-noo's in my mouth," and it sounds perfectly clean. Well, maybe not clean. But not nearly as filthy as what I'm really saying.

Y'know, it suddenly occurs to me that I may be sharing too much. I'm all for honesty between a son and his dead father, but perhaps this is a tad more information than you wanted to know. I guess it's just because I miss you and I wish we'd talked more before you took off, so I'm not really holding anything back. I wasn't in any emotional shape in my 20s to have a meaningful conversation with you. I was kinda a mouth-breathing idiot, if you recall. But when I hit 30, I was a lot less self-conscious and arrogant and up my own ass. And you weren't around anymore. So whatever, I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're not comfortable with me telling you everything - the good, the bad and the noo-noo's - I don't really care. You checked out early and gypped me of having an actual relationship with you, so you can just suck it up, old man.

Hey, have you heard that Mom's getting married again? Yeah, good times, right? That makes husband number three, if you're counting. I've had dinner with him and he seems nice enough, but I can't vouch for the guy yet. They've only been dating for six months, so he could have bodies stashed in his crawl space for all I know. You wanna guess where they met? Wait for it. Waaaaaait for it... A bereavement group! No surprises there, huh? We thought the last time was an anomaly, but apparently Mom uses bereavement groups like hairy-chested guys in the 70s used Plato's Retreat. If this latest suitor doesn't make the cut, I promise we won't let her go to another one of those things without a chaperone. 'Cause from what I can tell, there ain't a hell of a lot of bereavin' going on over there. Just games of grab ass.

There's been an awful lot of in-fighting lately about how the cottage should be decorated. It basically comes down to two schools of thought. There's my mother, your ex-wife, who wants to get rid of every trace of you. Framed pictures, photo albums, whatever. If your mug's on it, it's outta here. As she explains it, the memory of losing you is just too painful, so she'd rather just forget about you entirely. And then there's my brother, your son, who wants to cover every wall in the cottage with a collage of old photos of you, and perhaps even install a wax mannequin version of you somewhere near the entrance, dressed in the same clothing you died in.

As for me, I land somewhere in the middle. I want to find a compromise that makes everybody happy. But I'll usually take my brother's side, if only because he tends to be the most logical. Was Mom always this Orwellian about the past? Some days we feel like Proles. I really do expect her to say, "Your Dad has been vaporized by the State and is now an Unperson. We must never speak of him again." I get that our methods probably seem masochistic to her, but we're not doing it because we're gluttons for punishment. We're just terrified about forgetting you. And worse than that, we're terrified that Teddy won't care.

We've seen it happen before. There was that one guy - your father, ol' what's-his-face - he died when I was in my teens and now I couldn't even tell you his first name. I think he was a doctor or something. It's not like you or Mom or anybody in the family sat us down and said, "Who wants to hear a story about grandpa-pa Spitznagel?" Not once. Not even a story where he was a supporting player. We don't want you to become one those dead grandfathers that nobody talks about. We've seen how fast people can fade away. Drop dead today, and tomorrow you're just another strange face in yellowing photographs.



So we make a point of telling stories about you every summer. It's tough when your audience has heard the same material over and over and over again. You had a good life, but it's not like there's a lot of nuance there. It's pretty straightforward stuff. You can't really flesh it out with new details and suddenly make it seem fresh. It is what it is. But we've still managed to come up with the occasional forgotten nugget to keep it interesting. Just last summer, I remembered how much you enjoyed Phil Jackson - not for his coaching abilities but for his shoulders. "He's like a perfect triangle," you liked to tell us. You also dabbled in some of his New Age philosophies, and tried meditation for awhile. Didn't work out for you so much, did it? You'd just sit there and think about everything that'd gone wrong during the day and everybody who'd pissed you off, and your blood pressure would skyrocket. You were never the smiling, carefree Buddha. Your were Buddha's roommate, the one who paid the bills and answered the door when the cops showed up and said things like, "Just who the fuck is gonna clean up this mess anyway?"

We love stories about you losing your cool. Maybe it's because we know we shouldn't be laughing. It's gallows' humor. We'll tell stories about how you used to get so unreasonably frustrated at minor inconveniences that your face would go beet red and the veins would pop out on your neck. And then we imagine an invisible abacus hovering over your head. We'll slide another bead across the wire, like we're the Grim Reaper's accountant, and say, "That hissy fit cost him another three days of life."

Oh come on, you can joke about it now, right? It's all water near a bridge. Hey, I didn't give you the enlarged heart, Mr. Overreaction.

(To read Part Two, go here.)