Tag: NJ

My Father’s Wallet

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My father died April 13, 2009.
Since that day, I have kept his wallet inside a white ceramic vase on a square table next to my bed.

To hold another person’s wallet, without their consent, even when they are dead, seems a violation.

And what possession is more personal than a wallet?

Like the expired man, his wallet contains expired credit cards.

I read the business cards stuffed into the wallet pockets.

One card is The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ where I saw him on the morning of October 14, 2006 after I flew into Newark on a red eye from LA. He had suffered some sort of a small stroke. And I cried at his bedside.

A Department of Veterans Affairs ID, created only a few months before he died.

A card from a Speech Pathologist who would help him pronounce words at age 75 that he once could say without practice.

He was a painter and took art lessons at The Ridgewood Art Institute. A green paper card, frayed at the edges, was valid through August 31, 2007.

AARP, Medicare, Costco, American Express, AAA, Master Card and Visa: the cards of a modern living American male. Pieces of plastic to insure, to protect, to provide, to make credit for any activity on Earth.

In his last week of life, I remember he was breathing with difficulty as he sat on a bar stool bench, at the kitchen counter in his apartment, going over his taxes, which were due in mid-April.

He was fatally and incurably ill and knew he would die from this inexplicable illness called Multi-System Atrophy.

But he was no different than any of us in his belief that he would continue to live.

My father’s wallet still seems to belong to a living person. And no amount of time or loss can diminish it.

Another Date on the Calendar

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Dad in hospital., originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

Three years ago, October 13, 2006, I was on a plane traveling from Los Angeles to New Jersey to see my father and mother.

My father, at that time, was battling a neurological illness that was slowly robbing him of his ability to speak and walk.

There was, and is, no cure. And it eventually killed him.

But that October, back east, there was a slight glimmer of pharmaceutical hope: some drug that was given to Parkinson’s patients seemed to help my father. He was on it for a few weeks, progressing. And then he was not. One morning, he suddenly went into a stroke like condition and then into the hospital.

I took the red-eye the night of October 12th, and before I boarded the plane at LAX, my brother Rick sent me a text and said that his wife, my sister-in-law Pri, was giving birth. She went into labor that same night, the night I was on the plane traveling back east, back in time, back to Ridgewood and Woodcliff Lake and all those towns in Bergen County where my parents had lived since 1979.

When I landed around 6am at Newark, a car picked me up and took me directly to Valley Hospital in Ridgewood. I found my mother sitting next to my father, who was awake and resting in a room, in a bed, next to a north-facing window.

I broke down and cried and I think all of us were crying. I was so tired, and so happy to see my father alive, even as I was ripped up about his weakened condition.

I had just bought my first camera, a Nikon D70. I picked it up and shot a second of my father’s life in that weak and delicate sunlight that barely illuminated the room.

That he left this hospital within a few days was miraculous. Back at home, he had the after effects of the episode, and at times his hands would tremble like a post-earthquake after shock. Yet he would look down at his shaking with dispassionate objectivity and a faint smile.

In Los Angeles, my nephew Ravi entered the world and there was joy and new life on the other coast. But that October is indelibly marked on my calendar as a season of impending grief and the realization that an epoch and life and existence would end quite soon.

One Sunday, we took a car ride with my father, who could not walk, but used the walker and a portable wheel-chair. We drove across the Tappan Zee to Armonk and stopped for lunch in a town filled with pumpkins, white houses and children on bicycles.

Then we drove up some wooded road, lined with stone-walls, passing horse farms and parkland preserves. We were heading up to see where Bill and Hillary Clinton lived, in Westchester County, just as we once had stalked Nixon in Saddle River, NJ.

I apologize to Los Angeles, where I now make my home, but despite the efforts of “Mad Men” to create a fictional pathology of life in the suburbs on New York, there is still a sublime and natural beauty there, historic and meaningful towns and an un-crowdedness that soothes souls in pain. When you are sad back there, you can take a drive in the country past reservoirs, farms and fields. And that is just what we did that Sunday afternoon.

Those days, spent in autumn with my late father, were among the most meaningful of my life. I meant something to him and I will never ever have the time to spend with a living father again.

Sunset on Woodcliff Lake.

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Even now, just days after I helped my parents pack up their home of almost 30 years, it is still painful to contemplate the loss of the house and the community.

I shot the photograph on this page, one evening, as we drove across the lake. The reservoir sits there peacefully, a calming body of water in an increasingly frenetic world.

Just along the eastern side, the Pascack Valley train blows its whistle as it enters the station, a place where I once disembarked in the days when I commuted from here to New York City.

Somehow something immeasurable and profound seems to have been stolen. A quiet place with reassuring routines, those days that one spent reading under the large trees or watching the rain from the front porch. Gone for eternity.

Two old movies come to mind when I think of losing Woodcliff Lake. One is “Mildred Pierce” when little Kay dies of pneumonia and Mildred busies herself by working hard to open the restaurant. Another is “An Affair to Remember” when vacationing Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, cruise ship in port, visit his grandmother in her small French port town. After a day of togetherness with the old lady, they hear the ship’s whistle blow, a low groan that stands for separation, loss and dwindling time.

So the real places, those towns of brick and wood, with four seasons and good food, farms and open lawns, and that enormous city built on bedrock with the beacon of liberty in its harbor, these locales now are airy memories.

Los Angeles, you welcome us! Here we come, crippled, exhausted and sad….

The future of happiness is a lie built on a promise that is built in a digital edit bay, on a seismically shaky phoenix whose very existence is a sham. But we smile, as we must, because tomorrow is a sunny day, and life must go on, and a thousand other cliches to recite ad nauseum, but deep down we know what our heart tells us is true.

What car can we lease?

Anticipation.

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Lillies., originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

Every summer, the lilies pop up in this part of the country, and bring their bright colors to a mostly shaded background of dappled woods and stone walls.

This was the high point for me, the most glorious moment in the short summer. A few weeks after they bloomed, the lilies would fade, and then we would be in August, anticipating autumn, and school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, winter.

That is why living in Southern California is so very strange. The guideposts of American life, the seasonal markers, are missing. Life and spring, with their promise of renewal and rebirth, go on month after month. The roses bloom in December, the leaves drop in February and reappear in March. Nature is marinated in formaldehyde, and the living things, humans and plants, are retouched, as if by digital process, to stay in bloom year around.

I don’t think this is natural. The “depressing” months, back East, if one chooses to think that way, when the leaves and temperatures drop and the ice and snow and slush surround us, are a breather for the planet. We need cold weather, yes we do. It is unnatural and unhealthy to live in heat and sun all the time.

That’s why I relish every thunderstorm this summer in New Jersey. Because when I return to Los Angeles in August, I will leave the rain and the short lived lilies behind in New Jersey.