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  Literary Itinerary's "It Lit"

 New Voices in Writing     

Literary Itinerary, the Guide for Readers and Writers

by Carole Flynn

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THERE

by Elizabeth Roth

     My father finally died at 4:30pm on Wednesday, March 5, 2008 in Boca Raton, Florida. He was born on November 18, 1914 in New York City, and he had a strong heart. It was so strong that, despite a series of strokes over twenty years that reduced him to complete incapacitation, it kept ticking. We wondered, my mother and two sisters and I, when and how this would end, marveling at the same time that he kept at life, a bedridden life, but life all the same; a life in bed, a gentle Jamaican aide feeding him, changing him and calling him ‘honey bunch’ as he calmly stared out from blind eyes, hearing little, but still responding to his nurse’s voice and her firm touch.

     It had been so long since my father was normal; a fully functioning adult male with a sense of humor, habits and preferences. His first stroke came at seventy-four. Before that, he was attractive, eccentric and artistic; he had evolved into a maturity and a settling that was long overdue.  It was a brief interlude.  With the stroke, he lost his ability to paint watercolors and tell jokes. He put little effort into his own recovery. Because of his strong heart and generally good health, despite the stroke, he recovered to some degree, but the settling and mellowing was interrupted. He was no longer aging like fine wine. Now he was a stroke survivor with a diminished personality. He wasn’t interested in us anymore; he wasn’t curious about the world; he didn’t laugh and he didn’t dance. After twenty years, all one could say was that he was there.

     He was there. There was being alive:  not reading anymore, not watching television or movies, not conversing. There was also babbling in the middle of the night, complaining about the light, the cold, or making no sense at all. There was sleeping, very still, like a waxen figure, like a sculptured figure in ancient churches or Renaissance paintings. There was slumped in a wheelchair under a canopy by the community pool, the aide’s son, sitting by, wearing headphones. There was breathing. There was eyes open, blinking.

     Even when his body lay in a simple pine box balanced over a rectangular cemetery plot he was there in a way. He could be addressed or he could be referred to, which we did, in the way we remembered him many years before. 

    “He wore a long raccoon coat and played the ukulele,” my uncle said.

    “He had the first desktop computer,” my sister recalled. “He was an early adapter.” He took home movies in 1930. He shot video in 1975. He always had cameras and he always had a car. If he had remained healthy he would have had the first cell phone, iPod and iPhone.

     “He loved to dance,” someone remembered. “The cha-cha, the foxtrot.”

     He made crazy sculptures out of scrap metal he found around the old barn. 

     He read all the Great Books. 

     He started a foreign film festival. He liked the movies of Satyajit Ray, and Kurosawa. He knew what it meant when a situation could be described from many points of view, like Rashomon.

     He grew a few marijuana plants in the backyard in 1973 just to see if he could. And then he dried and smoked it.

     He grew tomatoes and strawberries.

     He made grape jelly and black raspberry jam and poured paraffin over the top with a cotton string inserted for later removal.

     He brought to work big bunches of peonies that my mother grew in the backyard.

     He mowed the lawn, first with a gasoline push mower, then with a riding mower. Once he was adding gas and the mower shot out a pebble into his leg. He went to the hospital to get the pebble extracted and then stayed home with his crutches until he healed.

     He rode the train to New York City every day to operate a floor to ceiling camera and shot individual cels of cartoon drawings for animated commercials. The lights from the camera eventually caused cataracts to form on his eyes.

     He smoked cigars: Garcia y Vega.

     He drank vodka and tonic. He bought the cheapest vodka because “it’s all the same.”

     He played “The Man I Love” on the piano, changing the lyrics to “The Girl I Love” but keeping in the line “she’ll be big and strong, the girl I love.”

     Here is his favorite joke:

               A guy, let’s call him Schwartz, became a father to two children born to two different  women on the same day on opposite sides of town.

             “Mr. Schwartz,” his neighbors asked, “This is a miracle. How is this possible?”

             “I used a bicycle,” replied Mr. Schwartz.

     Whenever anyone asked my father how he did something, he always, without fail, responded, “I used a bicycle.”

     The cemetery is across the road from the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge which my parents used to visit when my father could still walk.  Alligators bake in the hot sun and waterfowl swim lazily in the waterways here on the edge of the Everglades. Some of the birds, grackles, egrets and red-winged blackbirds, visited the cemetery during the brief ceremony and observed our ritual from neighboring palm trees. We each reached into a packet of dirt that was gathered from a field in Jerusalem and threw a few grains on the coffin. Then, with an efficiency no one was prepared for, the coffin started to descend and as we walked away, the bulldozer moved toward the gravesite.

     Then, he was no longer there. He was now strictly the sum of our memories. The old man lying in bed: he had faded away; the one who, when dying, cried, “Abe, Abe,” calling for his favorite brother-in-law who had died forty years before, and then, “Mom, Mom.” In his mind, they were, miraculously, back, the people he had lost long ago! He called out to them. They held out their arms. Let’s dance! He dropped the needle on the record. Ah, Sinatra. Mama could still move, though eighty years old with her silky white hair in a handsome French twist. And Abe, silly Abe, sashaying around the room.

     “Here I come. Here I come,” he said.

In Memory of Milton Roth    November 18, 1914 – March 5, 2008

Elizabeth Roth was raised in Danbury, Connecticut and graduated from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She lived in Seattle, Washington for twenty-eight years where she co-founded the Seattle Mime Theatre which toured in the U.S. and internationally. After twelve years with the company, as actor and writer, Liz turned her focus to the business of arts management.  She promoted nationally acclaimed contemporary dance companies to university and community performing arts centers. Since her 2005 relocation to Connecticut, Liz has managed Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, the fiddle and guitar duo with whom she occasionally tours the world. She also returned to her passion: writing.  She is a graduate student at Wesleyan University where she hones her writing craft with acclaimed authors and highly esteemed writing professors. She has worked with Anne Greene, Dan Hofstadter, Elizabeth Bobrick and Rachel Basch, has done extensive analysis of Joyce’s Ulysses with Daniel Burt, and has explored the complexity of Faulkner’s writing with Sean McCann.  She is currently at work on a novel about the performing arts industry. Her favorite writers, in no particular order (and subject to change depending on the day), include Alice Mattison, Seamus Heaney, Penelope Fitzgerald, John McGahern, Denis Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

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