Signs you are getting older

- You have to pick your little sister up from the bar at 1 a.m. on the day before Thanksgiving because all you're doing is sitting at home watching Barbara Walters interview Barack Obama with your mother since all your friends from high school are either married or tending to their children.




Sigh.

Day 8: Ghosts are Good Company

Returning home to New Jersey, as I imagine is the case just about anywhere you call "home," is a stark reminder of just how little progress I've made growing into a new person in my adult life. It doesn't matter that, let's say, I've abandoned attempts at trying to be fashionable or buying the newest Billabong clothes over the past eight years, skewing closer instead to a sort of anti-style of whatever discount thrift store clothing is available, because when I walk around Toms River, I still feel like the 16 year old me walking down the hallways of South in the morning and getting mocked by the friends of Charlie Frazier for wearing the same sweater he had on that day. Nor does it matter that I won several journalism awards or was interviewed on Fox News a dozen times in the past year, because in Jersey I still can't feel cool, because I still run into the same salty Jersey surf guys in Seaside who have little respect for anyone who doesn't have a super-thick wetsuit and spend most of the winter months in mylar booties chasing the waves off Casino Pier.

And Jersey doesn't care that I got contact lenses to replace my glasses since I left, because my terminal case of red-eyed, sneezy, sniffly allergies return pretty much as soon as I cross the Jersey border and start breathing that coniferous air again.

It's weird, this cognitive distance, the feeling of being a tourist in your own past, walking through familiar sights and sounds with a different perspective. Some parts of my past, however, I was certain could not still be following me. Oh New Jersey, why must you prove me so wrong?

Follow me back, won't you, to those carefree days in the summer of 2001, when I worked at the boardwalk, terrorism was but a distant threat, and W was but a harmless Gerald Ford in training. That summer, I kept a running tally of how many people asked me to buy/find drugs vs. how many people tried to pitch some religion to me. I don't know why Seaside attracts both kinds of people, but it certainly does, and both tallies were large, but the drug requests were much higher (rimshot!). I have the paper somewhere still I think, but it must have been at least 15 times throughout the summer.

Now granted, this was a bit of dark period in my life, when Phish CDs were a little too common in the disc rotation and I had a slight bit of this kind of look:

So it can be understood why the clueless benny might confuse me for the neighborhood apothecary. I usually directed each inquirer to the nearest police officer, the person I felt was most likely able to answer their question.

But then I went back to school, started listening to God Speed You Black Emperor! and had the rest of any fondness for 24-minute jam session tracks systematically beaten out of my by Barry Schwartz (and for this, I'm grateful). Then I trimmed up the beard to a respectable chin strap and even cut the hair down from Ben and Jerry's employee length to the moderately less stereotyped season 1 Jim Halpert mop top. Like so:

It's amazing how much differently people look at you or speak to you once your hair length is shortened (and perhaps shampooed a little more often). But even as hair length changes, Jersey stays the same.

Cut to yesterday afternoon, walking out of the Ocean County Mall on the Applebees side to inspect what was the first attempt at construction since the old theater closed down like 10 years ago. It looked like a PF Changs, which would be a huge upgrade for the OC.

I saw a girl walking my direction out of the corner of my eye.

"Hi, hello there?" she said, though I didn't realize she was talking to me at first. "Hello? Excuse me?"

Ah here it comes, I thought. Conversations like this never begin well, particularly outside the mall in the waiting-for-mom-to-pick-me-up area. She had the acne-scarred face, oversized winter jacket and white sneakers that somehow became the uniform for white trash girls in Jersey, and looked maybe between 18-21.

"Do you know where to get any marijuana?"

Sigh. I appreciated her directness, at least. "Nope. No I don't." Then I walked away quickly, searching my brain for what it was that caused this girl to approach me out of everyone at the mall. I had gotten my hair cut that very morning, so that couldn't be it. Was it the American Apparel track jacket? The tight jeans? The beat up old chucks? The glasses? Or just that I was the only young person at a mall on a school day afternoon? Am I even all that young anymore? Why is a possibly high-school aged girl approaching a 27 year old guy for drugs?

But most likely she had caught site of the long trailer of history I was pulling behind me that's somehow becomes visible every time I return here, following me around like a spectral line marching to the bathroom like we used to do at Beachwood Elementary. There she saw it, full of the ghosts I can't seem to shake of long-haired, barefooted, but ultimately nerdy and frightened Tim Donnellys from dusty, ancient years trapped in New Jersey.

Update: Here's a link to the Bishop Allen song, as to which titular duties of this post are derived from.

A Year Without Dad

Today marks the one year anniversary of the day my Dad died. It's also the day that fundamental family architecture we come to rely on to provide firm footing as we bounce around wildly into the early stages of the adult world finally crumbled, or, at least, lost a load-bearing pillar.

When I got home last summer to be there for the last few days, he was mostly already adrift in a sea of semi-consciousness, hounded by the reality of the leukemia only when the hospice nurse arrived to change the sheets or rub lotion onto his flaky skin. "These people are vultures, Tim," he'd say, floating to the surface of coherence for the brief moments as he was forced over onto his side while the nurse ripped a sheet from under him in what he portrayed as an extraordinarily painful and unnecessary manner.

At night, after mom and Lauren had gone to bed, I'd sit up for a few more hours reading next to his bed, its ugly metal railings and the whirr of its hospital-height adjuster crammed awkwardly between bookshelf and computer desk into the small room that was once the dining room, before becoming my father's personal study or lounge or something after his retirement. His head rolled sleeplessly on the boiled white pillows, not far from the window, the same spot where on Thanksgiving nights he'd sit at the head of our nut-brown dining room table, the extensions put in for this rare occasion of company and celebration at 920 Cable Ave.

At night, my Mom left a small TV in the corner turned on so Dad has some company, always tuned to Turner Classic Movies and the volume of the cowboy pistols and noir taxi-cab engines kept just above a whisper. In healthier times, Dad loved those movies -- the men who always dressed sharp in fedoras and tall coats; the women who always primmed to the expectation of some great social outing, high heel shoes of impeccable polish walking across gray city streets. And everyone had a cigarette in their hand, he'd note, when smoking still was a mark of sophistication and not the poison my mother made it out to be by forcing him and his Parliaments onto the front porch many years ago.

He was mostly a ghost already, brittle skin stretched across a tired and defeated body, his gray hair sharp and short, the faint echo of a goatee left to roam on his chin, the army-green Playboy bunny tattoo looking on with wrinkled ears and sad eyes.

The last thing Dad said to me, actually, the only real coherent thing he said during this week, was a few days after I got home, when he shifted in the bed to look at me and momentarily broke free of the dark fog of cancerous decay, a candle of his personality still burning somewhere deep. He said "hi" to me in his fatherly casual tone and looked glad, maybe even surprised, that I was there. Then he thanked me for the electric blanket I had sent to the house after my last visit home after his return from the hospital, when he drifted slowly from room to room searching for some unknown solace, always in want of a warmer blanket or thicker robe. "That was really thoughtful," he said. Of course, Dad, I replied. That night I sat by the bed, some Spencer Tracy picture mumbling in the corner, me deep into the pages of Andy's copy of "Into the Wild," hoping my company was noticed as he stirred, occasionally deploying a tiny bit of muscle strength to shift a pillow or wipe his dry lips.

As Thursday approached, his eyes became milky white slits discerning only shades of light and his speech shriveled to a low, soft groan. When the girls got back to the house, I stepped out for some air for a little while, and got the call from Mom that the moment we'd been awaiting with compassionate anxiety had finally come, and he had died.

I was at the boardwalk at the time, awash in its circus of neon pizza and the tinny metal smack of the pinball machine, the barker's pitch, the screams from 80 feet above as the freefall slammed back to earth, forcing a great rush of air up into the bennies' hair and through the planks of my memory. There inside the pane of a carefully preserved moment still brighter than its fading photographic version, Dad and I threw ourselves down the hard plastic bumps of the Fun Slide for the hundredth time, the burlap sacs wrapped around us suddenly ruffled by a new blast of air.

As the family journalist, I wrote the obit for the Asbury Park Press. The composition of it received a startling amount of praise and applause from family members and friends, which I shrugged off as inconsequential, having encapsulated the lives of reams of faceless strangers in short inches over my career. I was pleased by the catharsis found in exercising this Journalism 100 assignment to mete out emotions over our own loss.

Here is the what I wrote for the funeral, labeled the extended version of the obit. All I can think of to do today is to post this here.

I miss you Dad. More than I ever thought was possible.

Paul Donnelly, 59, of Beachwood, died Aug. 30 in his home after a yearlong battle with leukemia.

He was born in New York and moved shortly after to New Jersey. But he was never far removed from the city, returning often later in life to go to Yankees games, see shows or get dinner. He once brought his children sightseeing and recorded all the day’s expenses in a tiny notebook. He didn’t understand all the hoopla surrounding those elaborate Broadway productions but did, years ago, take his son to a live version of the Muppet Babies and bought him a T-shirt he wore to bed every night until the seams threatened to give out.

He graduated from Keyport High School in 1967 and enlisted in the Army that summer.

He never liked talking about his time in the war, except for a few entertaining stories. His discharge papers say he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Army Commendation Medal, among other honors. He said he also received a Purple Heart, though the medal itself was left at some ex-girlfriend’s house and never seen again.

His stories from the Army were weightless, like the time his unit attached a bush where they thought an enemy was hiding, only to find their knives had sunk into a fat Vietnamese pig. Once a jeep ran over his foot -- not during combat. Another time he broke his arm, forcing him to learn to light matches for his cigarettes with one hand. This trick he later passed on to his son, who would use it to impress girls in bars and nearly light his dorm room on fire freshman year.

He later told his 23-year-old son his friends and family thought he was crazy for reenlisting so many times during the war.

“You don’t understand, Tim,“ he said. “The Army was different then. The way I looked at it was, if I was enlisted, that’s one less person they had to get to go over there.”

His children knew he was injured in the right ear during the war, which forced them to always walk on his left side at the mall so he could hear them talk. He finally broke down and got a hearing aid a few years ago.

In the end, he never wore the hearing aid anyway and his family again had to speak loud and slow beside his bed so he could hear.

With an eye for men’s fashion, he spent nearly three decades in the men’s clothing business, working for various companies until retiring from the Men’s Wearhouse three years ago. While working in stores under the bright lights of Atlantic City casinos, he crossed paths with the rich and famous who passed through the casinos, including Joe DiMaggio, who he said was a jerk in real life. Before work in the mornings, he would sometimes dip peanut butter covered rye toast into his morning coffee while working on the crossword puzzle.

He married in 1978. Twenty-eight years later, he would be told by doctors he had myleofibrosis, a disease no one could easily pronounce and did not really understand at first. Then it was upgraded to leukemia, easier to pronounce and more well known.

He had two children, Tim and Lauren. He was a coach on their little league teams, though neither was terribly gifted on the field. He helped his son lobby successfully for a puppy in eighth grade.

He rarely wore socks outside of work and sported a tattoo of the Playboy bunny on his left arm. He went through three rounds of chemotherapy. This summer, when the leukemia seized control of his body and continued its steady march from heart to head, he became thin and weak and his tattoo became a shriveled ink blot on his flaky skin.

He loved a good steak dinner and never really quite understood what it meant when his son became a vegetarian in college. Even at a fancy Italian restaurant, he would sometimes order spaghetti and meatballs to the frustration of his family, but always say “Well, I bet they do a damn good spaghetti and meatballs.”

He tried unsuccessfully to quit smoking several times, but he was too stubborn to ever really give it up. Earlier this year, he bought his first convertible, a sporty, fast little car with satellite radio and leather seats. He drove it a spare handful of times before going into the hospital again.

He was notoriously private and tight-lipped about personal issues, until the end, when his dependence on medicines and doctors and the comfort of others caused him to open up. He came from a generation of men that were proud and self-reliant and never wore hats indoors. In the end, the look on his hollow face betrayed the fact that he absolutely hated being a sick person that needed to be taken care of. He was appalled by the rudeness of the disease.

He was preceded in death by his sister Elizabeth of Atlantic Highlands, father Hugh, and mother, Elizabeth, who once gave a baby outfit to Tim that his mother and father found so atrocious, they dumped apple juice on the boy in the car and immediately changed him when entering Paul’s mother’s house. They blamed the accident on the child’s clumsy juice-handling skills.

He is survived by a brother, Patrick, whom hasn’t spoken to in years; wife Debbie, who took care of him in the end, handled his medicines, changed his sheets, yelled at doctors and lay with him in the creaky hospice bed when he said he was scared; his daughter, Lauren, and son Tim, who both made it up from South Carolina in time to say goodbye to their father.

During his life, he enjoyed telling dirty jokes with punch lines that often involved parts of the human anatomy, bodily functions or blondes.

By the end, he said very little, except to ask for a cigarette and say, “look at my wife. Isn’t she spectacular?”

He was 59.

Siggnificant Other

Tap water and I have always had a pretty strong relationship. Perhaps this was foolish, as I grew up in the Toms River area where, during the mid-90s, more and more children started developing the cancer, something quickly linked to the water supply. This gave birth to the term "cancer clusters," referring to the parts of town where cancer-inducing chemicals had leeched into the water supply (not to be confused with Clusters of Cancer, the worst selling cereal of all time).

Yet all throughout high school, even as my Bio class got extra credit for going to speak at the hearings about the water supply, I continued to drink tap water. Perhaps subconsciously I assumed that if the water hadn't already killed me, it might imbue me with some form of superpowered toxin fighting powers, a sort of Adamantium esophagus that could handle even the dirtiest the Jersey water supply had to offer.

Until I left for college, I was unaware that many people considered tap water a foul liquid unworthy of crossing their lips. To them, drinking from the tap was the equivalent of asking the entire homeless population of DC to piss into their open mouths, chased by a big swig from the storm drain under Larry Craig's K Street condo.

This is how I learned about this phenomenon known as the Brita filter. If you didn't have this product in your fridge, your guests would stop looking for other amenities because they had made the conclusion you also ate dinner with sharp sticks and did your bathroom business in an empty dresser drawer. This is probably why I had such trouble making friends at GW, and why my closet always had a bad stink to it.

The Brita seems to make a lot more sense than bottled water, however, considering the multiple reports (and the growing opposition movement) that have come out over the past year or so saying bottled water is little more than glorified, expensive tap water.

I was always tempted to buy one of those Nalgene bottles, though I was never a fan of the plastic that gave the water all the lovely taste of 10-year-old Play-Doh. I also didn't want to buy 13 Grateful Dead stickers to put on the bottle. Plus, there's the news that Nalgene bottles leech BPA chemicals into the water. More cancer.

So finally, I broke down last weekend and bought a Sigg metal water bottle that has the sleekness of an Apple product yet the authority of a piece of World War I artillery. The metal doesn't affect the taste of the water and keeps it cold, not to mention this thing looks like it could knock a few teeth out in a fight with some bottled water pansy. It calls itself "indestructible."

Then I put the bottle in the freezer the other night and it cracked right open. Oops, not quite indestructible, I suppose. I took it back to the store and got another one.

I went home to Jersey a few years ago to find that my parents had installed a small water cooler on a kitchen counter, like the kind that serves as a gathering spot to talk about last night's Dancing With the Stars in your office. We just couldn't take the water here any more, my Mom said, pointing to the same faucet she had fed us from for years.

For me, I'm still happy filling this new water bottle from the tap. Until they discover in a few years that the metal in Sigg gives you nine types of cancer and two forms of whooping cough, that is.