Author: Paul

Handel’s “Il Pastor Fido: Incidental Music” was playing on the radio station that my father found on the hospital tv last night. The sound was coming out of the tiny speaker in the telephone-sized hospital remote that was sitting on his bed. This device not only changes the channel it cranks the bed up and allows you to page the nurse. The music was just perfect. Dreamy and moving at the same time. My dad was sleeping but surely absorbing it on some level.

I took this photo last night. My brother in law, Howie, arranged to have Bob, my father’s regular barber, pay a house call to the hospital. We had been up there all day but my father was encouraging us to stick around so we could meet Bob. Bob refurbishes pool tables on the side and keeps some in his barber shop on Monroe Avenue. Bob knew “the Deacon,” the local pool legend, Irving Crane. “He’s got some great stories and some of them are true” is how my father introduced Bob.

Leo is beginning to let his engineering side go. The first few days up here were an onslaught of doctors and to make sense of it all my dad constructed a flow chart on his iPad so he could keep the players straight.

Above a solid line he drew ovals for the three doctors responsible for his health before he entered the hospital. Below that line he drew the team he thought was running the show here. The Palliative Care doctor, nurse practitioner and intern were placed in these spots. Their role has been so outsized that my dad put them above his so called “chief hospital doctor.” I gently corrected him and he scrubbed the names out, placed the head doctor up top and put the palliative team on the next tier along side the oncologist, physical therapist, occupational therapist and social worker.

The way it was explained to us this crew was to collect their data and report back to the head doctor who would then inform us of the game plan. The thing is, my dad had it right the first time. At some point the Palliative Care team were the only ones that mattered. the only sane ones.

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From my dad’s position, propped up in bed on the fourth floor of Highland Hospital, he can just see the top of the new library going up across South Avenue. A team of construction workers started scurrying about at 8AM. My dad figures the guy with the white hat is the foreman and the blue hats are the carpenters and the green are the plumbers. The red hard hats are the electricians. In better days this would be the formative stage of a painting.

Leo was adjusting to the idea of hospice. A prescription would be ordered soon and we were discussing the location. The prognosis was a longer window than the qualifications for the Leo Center allowed. The appropriately named Palliative Care Center in the St Ann’s complex, near my parent’s apartment, is considered the Cadillac of hospice facilities. Fred Lipp, the painting teacher my dad and I had for twenty years, spent his last days there earlier this year. Fred was lucid til the end and telling me in his last days, “Your father is a trip.”

My dad was talking about the Chinese burial items that we had seen in a case at the Metropolitan when we went down to the Van Gogh show. He was working on some paintings of them. I found some pictures of those items on my iPad and he thumbed through them. He has an insatiable art appetite, something he passed onto me.

I remember arriving early at that Met show. We took the train in from Montclair with my brother, Mark. We studied the Van Goghs, ate lunch in the cafeteria and returned to the show for more. We took a break for dinner in the dining room and went back up to the show until closing. Somewhere along the line we saw the Chinese burial objects. Holy Sepulchre’s green burial, which has already been arranged, probably precludes artifacts in the grave.

My dad didn’t care for the lunch that was delivered and the nurse said we could call down and order whatever he wants. He was thinking about a peanut butter sandwich so I placed the order. Light on the jelly and whole wheat bread, preferably without the crust. The person on the other end said she couldn’t do that at this hour so I explained that it was all my dad wanted. She thought for a bit and said, “OK but you’re gonna have to cut the crust off yourself.” I described the route that Jack Nicholson took in “Five Easy Pieces” to successfully order toast. And that produced a hearty laugh from my father.

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I took this photo of my dad a few weeks ago. We were out at a doctor’s appointment and I noticed he had his camera, tape measurer and a pile of paperwork with him. I asked if he wanted to stop somewhere on the way home and he said he’d like to go to the barn.

I’d been to the barn on Westfall Road with him before. It’s falling apart and my dad is pushing the town to restore it. In fact he is drawing architectural renderings of what the restored barn could look like. I helped him take some measurements and he took some photos.

We visited the barn today but this time my dad was having a hard time walking. The doctor had told him he should be “putting his things in order.” I drove through the field and right up to the barn door. I supported him as we slowly walked to the center of the barn. We laughed at some spray-painted graffiti that read “Kill Your Friends.”

Something was off in his computer model and he was looking for the error so we retook some measurements. He sheepishly said “I probably shouldn’t be out here” but he was clearly loving it.

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We stopped down to the garden and picked a big batch of cilantro and some spinach. A bounty for mid December in Rochester! The temperature was near seventy and Jared’s goldfish had come out of hibernation. They were hungry and scurried to the side of the pond when they heard us.

Peggi put the freshly picked cilantro into a plastic bag and I set it down on a burner that had just been turned off. The bag melted immediately and stunk to high heaven. I threw the bag out and then opened the doors to clear out the stink.

We wanted to use the burner tonight so I turned on the overhead exhaust fan, put the burner on high and left the room. The melting plastic odor filled the house. I opened the doors again and lit some pine incense. In hindsight I suspect Jared, a former Kodak chemist, would have had a better solution for removing the plastic from the burner.

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Saint Ann’s had a great turnout for the afternoon Holiday Bingo event. The lights in the Oak Room were up bright and most of the residents were wearing green or red. Refreshments were on the tables and the moderator was calling out numbers and letters. It sounded like a party and I wished my parents were in there but age has gotten the best of them. And Bingo was never their scene anyway.

I was picking up my dad up for an another appointment and driving his car this time. I had snagged up a City newspaper at the Margaret Explosion gig last night and had already skimmed through it. They feature one city house in each issue, a regular column sponsored by the Landmark Society, and this week’s house was 107 Burlington Avenue on the west side, the house my dad grew up in. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I handed the paper to my dad and he laughed so hard he cried.

The radio was tuned to his station, Jazz 90.5, and they were doing a 24 hour Frank Sinatra marathon to celebrate one hundred years since the Chairman’s birth. Non-stop melancholy songs like “Last Night When We Were Young” and “Moon River.” Johnny Mercer is my father’s all time favorite.

We parked next to the Ford Thunderbird, above, and I finally discovered the secret to opening the trunk on my father’s Honda Accord. I had had such bad luck before, pressing the buttons on his key fob over and over before the damn thing popped, that I would just hand it to him and let him pop it so I could get his walker in or out. It’s actually my mom’s walker but he has taken to it lately.

We were visiting his primary care doctor for the last time and as we got out of the car I asked, “Why is it that this trunk opener works for you and I can’t get it to work?” He demonstrated his technique and explained that he just holds the button down until it opens. The time factor! I am still learning from my father. He has given me so much by his example.

The good doctor pretty much handed my dad’s care off to a Palliative Care specialist and he shook his hand, a final gentlemanly goodbye. On the way home I said, “I wish you and mom could trade places.” My mom wants to die. My dad is eternally young and in the middle of so many projects. And there are always the birds to watch.

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I don’t know if it is the dark side of me that finds this extremely limited, grey/brown, late Fall palette so appealing or the minimalist side. It doesn’t much matter. I am attracted to it and I trust my instincts. I feel like I’m living in an austere Bergman movie as of late.

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Ossia’s program on Friday was especially good. They do four or five performances a year, programs that include five or six compositions by contemporary composers, and there are always one or two exceptional pieces. Friday’s program was all killer, no filler.

It included an out of body piece that reminded us of Gearld Busby’s score to Robert Altman’s “3 Women” and a couple of Morton Feldman-like works by the Japanese composer, Jo Kondo. The one that really knocked us out though was by the Icelandic composer, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir. It is called “Ró.” We were sitting in the front row of Kilbourn Hall and our row gave it a standing ovation. Thorvaldsdóttir says her piece of sustained sound materials “reflects my sense of imaginative listening landscapes and nature.” It certainly did that for these woods walkers. We often stop and stare and listen and this is the experience.

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I dropped Peggi and my parents off at the funeral home in Penn Yan where my aunt was laid out. The Menonnite family in this buggy had just paid their respects to my uncle and cousins. My aunt and uncle, solid Catholics, lived on a farm near Dundee for sixty years and the land around them was slowly bought up by Menonnites. They became quite close and shared more values then you might imagine. A Menonnite family eventually bought their farm and rented their 200 year old house back to my aunt and uncle.

I had to leave the funeral home as soon as we arrived because I had forgotten to buy a flower arrangement, something my father had asked me to do yesterday. I spaced it out. I found a florist on Google, a few miles out of town, called the “Garden of Life.” There was a sign in front of an old farm house but no flower shop. I pulled in their driveway to lookup a Plan B and I saw woman with her dog and a small shop behind the house. I told the woman that I was going to calling hours at the funeral home in town and she interjected, “Helen? She told me she had already paid her respects and said, “Come on in and I’ll get you something.” She picked out a coral colored Poinsettia and added some other oddball touches. It was perfect.

A man came in the shop and asked about microphones for an event he was planning. The woman told him to go to Musician’s Friend and get a Sennheiser, but not a cheap one, a good one. When he left I said, “that was some good advice you gave that guy.” She asked if I was in a band and I said I was. She said she and her husband played in a band and, as if on cue, her husband, a drummer, walked in the door.

He introduced himself as Richard and said he left school when he was seventeen. He studied at Berkelee when it was still in its original location and his teacher was Louie Bellson. He went out on the road with a big band right after school. He played with the Temptations for six months, the only white guy in the band. They played the same set every night in the same order. He couldn’t take it anymore and quit. His band, “Soul Congress,” backed a long list of soul and gospel groups. They were opening for James Brown on the night that Martin Luther King was shot. Mr. Brown played a long set and wore out his drummer so he asked this guy to sit in. He said, “I’d go out on the road right now. I loved being on the road.”

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