This coming Sunday is Father's Day, and for me it will be the first on which I have no father for whom to buy a gift. My father died last September at age 91.
I had a decidedly two-edged relationship with my old man; we spent as much time not communicating as we did attempting to, not always with a lot of success.
Oh, there were a few things we agreed on. I could count them on the fingers of one hand: 1. Fishing is a good way to spend an afternoon. 2. Baseball is the best game in the world. 3. Businessmen who happen to be old fools with no acting ability should not do their own TV spots. 4. Home-grown tomatoes are better than store-bought.
5. Good scotch is one of life's best pleasures.
Now I'm not here to post an on-line advertisement for Chivas Regal. As it happens, it is not even my favorite scotch. I like Chivas, but it's not my favorite. (That would be Glenlivet, if anyone cares.) I just happened to like that picture, and besides, Chivas figures specifically in the little tale I'm about to tell.
My father and I grew up mostly locking horns. Yes, we grew up together, because he remained essentially about nine years old, emotionally anyway, until the day he died. But this posting is in honor of Father's Day, so I'm not going to highlight his shortcomings. There were quite a few things he excelled at, in fact: gardening for one. He was a very good gardener. He could also touch-type, (back when that still mattered) something I never learned to do. Somewhere along the line he even picked up shorthand, another dead art. To a point, he could fix his own car, and when I was a small child he used to amaze me with his ability to whittle a real-looking pistol out of a piece of wood (I don't think I want to know where he picked up this skill.) He spoke fluent Spanish, and Canuck French, the latter of which he learned in his childhood. He could noodle a little at the piano and knew a few guitar chords. He could play the harmonica. He could whistle so loudly that you could hear him at the end of the block. (Something else I never mastered.) He made great pancakes.
And once, as I was getting ready to go overseas and would be gone for a couple of years, he taught me to sing a French Canadian drinking song.
We were house-sitting for my uncle, who had gone to Europe with his family. It was October, 1985. I had just turned 30; Dad was 71. My Uncle Pete had left us not only the keys to the house, the keys to the car, and orders to eat and drink all the food and liquor on the property, but had also left us in charge of his wide-screen satellite TV. The World Series was just about to begin, and there we were alone on a hilltop in Arroyo Grande, California with a wide-screen TV and a couple of gallons of scotch.
It was shaping up to be a good week.
One night I poured a shot for both of us, and Dad taught me this song:
"Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable,
Prend un petit coup, c'est doux.
Prend un petit coup, c'est rend les gents malade;
Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable.
Prend un petit coup, c'est doux."
Loosely translated, "Take a little drink, it's nice. Take a little drink, it's true, take a little drink, it might make you all sick, but take a little drink anyway."
In the years that followed, this became Dad's and my drinking song. Every time I came back from overseas on home leave or on R&R, as soon as I had stored my bags in the front bedroom of the house and settled in for my visit, there would be the obligatory rendering, usually in the kitchen, of our "Prend un petit coup" song as we clinked glasses with the first drink of the evening.
Now, as I said, I'm not here to do a commercial for Chivas. In fact I hate advertising almost uniformly. But whenever Father's Day approaches, I always remember the one, single advertisement I ever saw that I found touching, perhaps even moving. Whoever dreamed this ad up really knew how to tug the public's heart strings. Or mine, anyway.
As I recall, it appeared in the pages of The New Yorker magazine, and yes, it was an ad for Chivas Regal scotch. A Father's Day-related ad. Its premise was absurdly simple: it showed only a scattered pile of canceled checks. But they were photographed in such a way that you could read every one. As you read them, you quickly got the idea that they parsed, roughly, the first 20 years or so of someone's life, from cradle to college. Each was made out and signed in the same handwriting, with the same man's name. There was a check made out to a diaper service, then one to a pre-school, one to a bicycle shop for a new bike, one to a summer camp, one to an orthodontist for braces, and so on and so on until you got to the big one, made out to a college for tuition. At the bottom of the page, the caption read simply, "You can never thank your father enough. But you can give him Chivas Regal."
Great ad. How great? I wept. Honestly. And I hate ads.
My father began sinking into dementia during the last year of his life. One ability after another went by the wayside, in short order. He lost interest in reading because he could no longer follow the continuity of a book from one chapter to the next. Then he couldn't even read the newspaper anymore. He was writing checks and not entering them in his checkbook. My sister suggested that I should take over paying the bills, so I did. Eventually he could hardly even write anything down. One day, reminded that it was my 49th birthday, he left a couple of $20 bills on my nightstand as a present, and tried to leave me a note saying "Happy Birthday," but he could not even get those words down on paper. In a shaky, wavering hand, (his handwriting had once been elegant -- his was the last generation to learn penmanship in school) the note read, "Happy Juupy Juup Juup Juup Day Day Day!--Dad." That absolutely broke my heart. I still have that note.
From there things just got worse. He started failing to recognize people. He mistook my fiance for my sister. He lost his ability to tell time by looking at the clock, so he was never sure if it was morning or evening.
During his last hospitalization, he could no longer remember whether he and I, and my surviving sister, were father and children or siblings. "Now, you, and Carla and I," he said when I was visiting him in the hospital, "we're brothers and sisters, right?"
"No, Dad," I replied. "Carla is your daughter and I'm your son. You're our father."
"Oh, then that makes me Joey's grandfather!" he said. (Joey was Carla's kid, my father's namesake, and by the way his favorite. But now he couldn't even keep it straight that Joey was his grandson.)
"That's right, Dad. Carla and I are your children, not your brother and sister, and Joey's your grandson," I said.
Soon after that, back home, he started calling me "Bill," (I think one of his brothers was named Bill.) And about that same time, incontinence began. He was wetting his bed almost every night. And he could no longer get himself to bed in the evening or up in the morning. He had to be dressed, undressed, and diapered. Nurses were coming twice a week to give him epogen and to help him take a bath. My older sister told her youngest, my nephew Ricky, to move in with us, presumably to help me take care of Dad.
One night about a month before Dad died, Ricky and I were getting him into his pajamas and putting him to bed for the night. As we were arranging his pillow and pulling the blankets up over him, he began to sing, "Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable, Prend un petit coup, c'est doux..."
We had no drinks, but I sang along with him. I figured it might be the last time we would ever sing that song together.
As it turned out, I was right.
This week, as Father's Day approaches, we are as usual getting bombarded with advertisements to buy this or that for Dad, and as usual it's little except annoying, only now I tend more than ever to tune it out, since everything having to do with fatherhood and fathers is now behind me. I have no children of my own, and with my dad gone, Father's Day, like my parents' respective birthdays, and their anniversary, (my mother died six years ago) has been recycled as nothing more than a date on the calendar.
But that long-ago Chivas ad still reverberates in my memory, as does that little French song, and I suppose they both will for as long as I remember my dad, which means for as long as I last on this old earth myself.
To all of you out there who still have living fathers, let me offer this bit of advice:
Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable. Buy your dad a drink, or if he doesn't drink, the equivalent. Chances are you and your dad have a song you used to sing too, and you never know when you might be singing it for the last time.
