Quiet Days in Cleveland

 The shortest month of the year... for most of my life it was just that, the shortest month, nothing more, and then came the Longest Day and all of that changed, this short month became something else, spilling over into the first week or so of March, it became associated, etched into this story, like a missing puzzle piece, February 13th, 2018 was just the beginning as these days would stretch out and become their own entity, an island of sorts as i began the process of easing my father toward the void that was approaching more quickly than we could have expected. This month always takes me back and sometimes i stop and think about the date, what day it would have been back when i was shuffling between the hospital, the assisted living facility, my dad's apartment and Pittsburgh. This month is the very definition of the melancholy smile, it's something i hold close, dare i say cherish and yet i know how the story ends so it is tinged with a sadness unavoidable. 

As with most things in my life it is related to music.. cleaning out my dad's closet and finding an old cassette tape carrier filled with my old tapes. I can remember laughing when i saw it, an eclectic mix of teenage me... Black Flag, Husker Du, The Clash, Bob Dylan, Bowie, Pink Floyd, Public Enemy, The Pet Shop Boys, The B-52s, Pigface. Now that case sits in the office with an ever expanding vinyl collection and the last remnants of a once massive CD library, accrued through the selling of a certain plant that gave a young Kono the ways and means to be the favorite face of a certain record store. 

It was in the second week of my stay that my dad told me to move into his room. I had been sleeping on the couch like i always did, partly because i felt strange taking over my dad's room, partly so i could fall asleep to the hum of the telly, i think there was something about the flickering light and background noise that helped settle my nerves, that helped me fall asleep. It also stemmed from being in familiar yet strange place. It wasn't like i hadn't stayed in my dad's place before, he worked nights and i'd often roll in after he'd gone to work, drunk and drugged up, i'd sleep until he got home and then we'd usually bullshit and then head to breakfast, walking down the street to the corner where his favorite restaurant was, sometimes in the cold biting wind of Lake Erie, sometimes in the bright morning sunlight that hurt his son's substance addled head. My father worried about me but also recognized that his son was a different animal, his own type of animal and that he seemed to somehow navigate this world just fine. In some ways i think he was quite amused by how i flipped off the conventions of society and did my thing. The man wasn't stupid. He knew his son wasn't the most upstanding citizen. 

So i moved into Pops' room.. but the quiet was disquieting, sure there was the sound of traffic, the noise of his hood, but still i felt unsettled, i felt like that little kid scared of the noises of the night, wondering if there was a monster in the closet, knowing i couldn't call out for my dad, funny when i considered my dad was 5'10 and i was 6'4... and so as i lay there staring at the ceiling and listening to all the scary noises i figured i had to do something if i was to get to sleep and so i did what all us living in the modern age do, i grabbed my phone. Being a technological Luddite i didn't have a ton of music on my phone, somehow i couldn't work out how to get all the shit i'd downloaded to my phone so only certain things showed up and actually played in the old iTunes account. There were two albums that ended up being the go to for sleep, the first being Kill for Love by Chromatics and the second, the one i listened to the most, Saturdays = Youth by M83, a record that was a homage to John Hughes films complete with a cover depicting those 80s kids... who didn't look all that much different from the kids of aught-teens.

Here i was, back in the city i grew up in, near the hipster neighborhood i loved, listening to a record that sounded like something the 17yr old me would have listened to... hindsight being what it is the irony is not lost on me now though it never really crossed my mind then. In a way the music was like a thread tying the story together, that bright eyed kid who loved the Smiths and pined for a girl in combat boots with an asymmetrical haircut, dyed black of course, wearing thrift store clothes and driving a beat-up Ford Pinto with band stickers plastered all over the back. It was my fucking American Dream. It was actually a song from that M83 record that got me started on this post (see below)... as the 50 something delivery boy was sitting in traffic it came on the radio and brought a smile to my face, it reminded me of those days spent in my dad's place, in the same month, thinking about what day it would have been and what i might have been doing... and there was that melancholy grin glimpsed in the rearview mirror... contemplating all the things that had happened between that point and this one, points haphazardly plotted on an ever flowing river of time, points that don't exist to anyone but the one attempting to plot those points... 

and hearing that song... i was back in my dad's place, the stray beams of a streetlight floating in the dark, playing off the wind blowing in from the lake, the sound of a wonky furnace kicking on, the occasional footsteps of the upstairs neighbor, the varying hues of grey that shaded the room as the sun rose, the feel of the carpet on my feet as i strolled out and turned on the television then made toast and coffee, the way my father's apartment got more barren week by week until the last remaining things were a few pieces of furniture and a bed, items to be donated, a week spent with no television or internet, just me and a box of tapes and his old stereo, tuning in the old stations of my youth, it was fucking magic... 

These were quiet days in Cleveland, i could have gone out every night and yet i rarely left the apartment, i worked diligently on my task, i visited my dad, i brought him his favorite pizza, on a few occasions i went down to the local boozer i used to frequent on my visits and would have a pint or two of Guinness, i rarely spoke to anyone other than my father, my sister, my mother, the staff of his new place, i'd talk to the boyos each night, there was a beautiful simplicity to my existence, as if my father was giving me  one more gift.. and of course there were the many long conversations and the time spent with him... not knowing it wouldn't be long until he was gone those 20 odd days are kept like precious gems in a worn leather pouch in my mind... i pull them out from time to time and look at them... a sigh, a smile, a laugh at times, the tears that sometimes well... and then i put them back... getting on with things just like Pops said. 

I miss my father... i miss those conversations, i miss his laugh. Disaster always says he likes when i laugh and though i haven't told him i understand just what he means. There are times when i'm sitting at the dinner table talking to the boyos and the sound of my voice, the words from my mouth, are more my father's than my own. It's interesting what the mind can do, as if he was there... but he's not... yet he is... not only in his son's voice but in the eyes of his grandsons... i keep plotting those points... and each time that shortest month rolls around i plot more... because what else do we have? The other day at the pool i was talking to a guy, the strange thing that happens when one gets into a conversation with a stranger, we tell stories. We talked about our fathers and by the time we were done he looked at me and said something i've heard time and time before, "i wish i had that type of relationship with my dad, you're a lucky guy." I smiled at him and said, "don't i fucking know it." Quiet days in Cleveland.