3.21.13
It was the last weekend I spent at the Catskill home. It would
consist, as it usually did, of good food, being lazy, making fires and drinking
wine with my dad (and mom when she could be convinced; since he’s gone she
drinks a little more for all the times she missed the fun that her tea totaling
half Ukrainian side wouldn’t allow of her). It was frigid as usual, and
there was probably snow on the ground. It was the second week in February, most
likely. In this one year (if one takes the year to have the seasonal parameters
of an academic year, which one still does even when not in school) I had got
and lost a younger boyfriend, become dually involved with one who would be
there, less than 6 weeks later, sitting in the hospital waiting room while my
mother and I said good bye to my father, and met my best girl friend who was,
at the time, also dually involved with the very same person.
There was nothing unique or memorable about the
weekend. I probably headed up on an Amtrak train, so soft, and warm
and smooth, and expensive, or perhaps one of my last sojourns on the metro
north to Poughkeepsie – my father most definitely picked me up and drove me
back to the house. I was probably later than I originally said, due to
some recent late night or too many (I seemed to hit my wild streak, the first
one anyway, at 29/30). Our car rides were many and scattered across the
time, and winters, and reflections within ourselves. I always updated him
on things and my track and what I was ‘trying to do’. He wanted to help
the struggle more, and wanted me to have everything I wanted. I think and hope
he knows he gave me more than most.
Somewhere in between the meals and the talks, for some reason I
decided to watch a film, a favourite, which I had just purchased – Paris,
Texas. Wim Wenders was one of the prophets to me since high school, and
brought me to and between so many beautiful things that came into my mind, and
stayed there. I had become obsessed with the soundtrack and still remember
seeing the film for the first time about 7 years prior, in New Brunswick,
Canada. The people whose house I watched the film at had the soundtrack
on record, and played it straight through directly after we watched the
film. I also reinvigorated a love for Harry Dean Stanton, the dirty,
quiet angel, and would later commiserate via this film with my other best girl
friend. The much older man and younger, pretty Nastassja Kinski who had
to speak secretly their memories, and love to each other via a cheap plastic
phone in a Texas brothel, well, it summed up a lot for her, and later for me
too.
My dad was not an arty type; he did not go to museums or read long
novels, but most of those limitations were due to language and not interest or
thoughtfulness. He understood the more sensitive, deeper part to things
like few overtly educated people did. He learned English formally, in
Croatia and in the US, and studied to be an electrician more extensively than
many others born in this country had care to. He secretly wanted to be an
architect, but schooling and language and life prevented him. It did not
stop him from building and blueprinting four houses, and re-working and designing
another, not too far from this last house in Catskill. He used to say he
went to bed and worked out his problems in his mind while he slept, that he
normally had a million thoughts whirling and spinning between his ears. I
now understand what he was talking about. I inherited it, full
stop. Still, he loved documentaries, especially about history, and
religion, and enjoyed what he called “humanism” – to him, not a doctrine or
something anti-spirit, but a concentration of human experience usually through
culture and creativity – art, sculpture, music, opera…held in the utmost
importance just as it had been in the Croatia that he was born into and raised
within.
We ended up watching the film together…just about all of it.
It had long stretches and a lot of inner worlds struggling to peak through
eyes, and experience and some grander sense of feeling. My mom drifted in
and out of the film, and respected it all the same (oddly enough, now that she
has been alone the 6 years since he passed away, she watches every
art/foreign/dramatic/human film she can get her hands on, maybe to hark back to
those times and the higher aspects to ourselves that he always aspired to), but
it was he and I that fell into the thing. He didn’t speak much—sometimes to ask
a question if a line was too soft, or to mention how Nastassja was from an area
in Germany he once spent time living or visiting, or how he enjoyed the sound
of Mexican trumpets (he loved Ring of Fire and loved to tell the repetitive
story about how June wrote that for Johnny Cash and he added those mariachi
trumpets in after dreaming of their sounds), but never allowing the experience
of watching the story to not engage him.
After it was all done, quietly and vulnerably as it had played, my
mom mentioned something about not really getting it (she would years later to
her credit), but my dad let the credits run all the way through, and spoke with
the very quiet voice he had (when I accent my voice like his or tell people
about him, his Croatian voice to them usually is heard in a harsh, Slavic way –
a typical Eastern European article-less speech stomping its primitive wares all
over the place. It was nothing like that. He was the man that women
loved to speak to, and felt safe and treasured around, that kids liked to smile
at, that humble, hardworking people enjoyed relating to, and educated people
found inquisitive and unique. It had more of a Slavic-Italian lilt, and
though broken in parts, never raised its voice unless you Knew something was
Very Wrong. It was gentle, and thoughtful and, like his mother, spoke
when it had something of worth to really say). At that time, letting the
film wash over us, in the warm wine laden late Sunday afternoon at the last
house he would ever build, my dad simply said “yep…that’s a real story, of
things very deep, human”. I would never see him alive (really) after
leaving when that weekend was over, only in the hospital and I know that story
well. This was the last movie, and last normal afternoon we spent
together. I have geared my mind and heart and aliveness to “things very
deep, human” since then, faltering on occasion, forgetting on others, but it’s
always right there. Teaching me to get to the crux of the matter, and humming
along with those mariachis as they echo past each story in the windy skies
above.
M. Lucia
