Polyester is Forever

On September 5^th of last year, I posted a facebook status in five parts. I titled it “Polyester is Forever with Grandma”:

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma: The Gummer still has the beige and green pantsuit she was wearing when she met my dad at Piccato's Tavern. He'd been in a bowling tournament (read: drinking beer) all day. Her friends let her leave w/ him. They went to a bowling alley in the basement of a hotel on St. Louis Rd.

            The Piccatos’ daughter-in-law, Amy, teaches piano to some of the kids in the hood. She is charming and gracious and wonderfully genuine and I will give a shout-out to her travel agency here if she tells me what to write. At the end of the school year, the mini-virtuosos gave a recital. We looked like this:

           

 (Yes, my “Waitress in the Sky” look was intentional. Do not ask why. “Ours is not to reason why/ you ain’t nothin’ but a waitress in the sky.”)             

When the recital was over, Amy invited The Gummer to go into the basement. There, like some kind of dream sequence transition, was the bar from Picatto’s tavern, cash register and all.

        

I filmed The Gummer talking about it, but she’s not the only one talking. This isn’t some kind of tmz, long-lens, tell-all arrangement here.

(That said… my brother was once jogging through the neighborhood. (This story suddenly seems implausible, not because of the way it ends, but because it begins with ‘My brother was once jogging”. There is no way he was jogging in an athletic or health-conscious way. He’s just not that guy. It is more likely that he was jogging as a mode of transportation because walking was taking too long. This makes much more sense when you consider what he was wearing.) He was wearing cutoff Levi’s. These shorts were SHORT. They were…I don’t know…Billy Squier meets Daisy Duke in a cloud of weed and Polo. These shorts were Ozzy and Camaros, Marlboro Reds and “I Grew This Moustache Because I Can”. (Yuck.) Anyway, as he was jogging past the Piccato’s house, he waved at them. When he looked down, he realized he wasn’t the only one waving.  (Maybe I should delete this. But then, it’s not like it’s embarrassing. It’s just like “Wow” and “Ick” at the same time. Alas, I must speak my icky truth.)

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma Pt. II: Soon after that, he invited her to a picnic. She said no--she had plans to go on a trip with her friends. Bob Heller was not used to hearing no from the ladies. "To this day, I still don't know if he took another girl to that picnic." She has kept an angry 24 yr old girlfriend with the pantsuit.

            I like to think that not attending this picnic is how she got him. I don’t mean that declining his invitation was a tactical decision designed to get him to chase her. She’s not someone who would follow “The Rules” or wear some Jonas Brothers Smothered and Covered ring.  She doesn’t give anything up easily. I’ve played cards with her. She just doesn’t like to lose. She’s not going to set herself up by chasing some boy and then end up looking like a dumbass.

                Way to pass the torch there, Mom. Way to pass the torch.

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma Pt. III: After they got married, they moved into that tan brick apt bldg on St. Louis Rd, then proceeded to spend enough money at the Horseshoe Lounge to pay for the addition to the building. When my father died, I invited some of the waitresses from the Horseshoe to his wake. They attended.

I invited his barber, too. I buried my dad with Oreo cookies, toothpicks, and a bottle of Tanqueray. We stopped going to the Horseshoe after that. It closed.

This is one of the things I would like to tell him.

That’s one of the shittiest things about death. It’s not the big emotional stuff that you should have said. Not for me, anyway. It’s the little stuff that I want to say. The news and trivia,

“They got Bin Laden.”

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma Pt. IV: I suggested we go to Piccato's and take pictures of her in her beige & green pantsuit to memorialize my dad (who died 5 yrs ago this morning). She declined. We could've gone to all their places. We could have done a lot of things. (That thought stays in my mind. Polyester.)

        It has been six years now. It doesn’t bother me like I thought it would. Perhaps my feelings are more of a poly-cotton blend. Perhaps memory has a kindness to it and files things away like bags of little bags of photographs. My memory is more like photographs strewn all over the floor. I get used to them being around and forget they are there until something catches my eye and I spend a day on the floor going through it all.

Polyester is Forever w/ Grandma Pt. 5 (Conclusion): The Gummer has suggested that I memorialize my father by cleaning the damn garage. We all grieve in our own way, Gummer. My preferred means of self-expression does not involve Pine-Sol.

             (On second thought, that story about my brother does belong here. Sometimes you just need to look away.)

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