No More Dancing on His Shoes

She stood across from me in my bedroom just 2 days before my 10th birthday.

"I have been accepted into the police academy and I am moving to Florida. You are going to live with Grandpa."

She handed me the folded twenty dollar bill she had in her hand and said, "Happy birthday."

Even at almost 10 years old, I knew $20 was an awful trade for a mother...or at least I thought so at the time.

However, I was going to live with HIM!

I usually only saw him on weekends.

He had the most amazing blue eyes that I had ever seen or seen since.

They were beautiful and always always dancing with the laughter of a secret joke.

He worked all day with a whistled song that surely was responsible for that extra spring in his step.

He was a beautiful man with a strong and steady voice which in my 17 and a half years of knowing him, he had never raised...though I had heard a story about the one time in which he had.

I was determined for there to never be a second time...at least not that could be blamed upon me.

At 12 years old I drove the car through the double garage door, barely missing the water heater and the family dog who was asleep on the garage floor.

He didn't yell.

Nor did he believe my story that the car had accidentally slipped into gear while I was playing in it. (It did not help that the neighbor told them that I had been driving the car in circles in our driveway.)

He seemed almost amused but did not leave me with the impression that I should attempt such a stunt again.

My grandmother was less than amused and I heard about that garage door until I finally moved to another state halfway across the country when I was 23. In January 2000 she forgave me. I was 27.

He had been gone almost 10 years by then.

I felt for her. She often accused me of loving him more.

It was true, no matter how much I didn't want it to be so.

I envied her.

He looked at her in a way that would make the most cynical little girl believe in fairy tales.

She was blind to this.

On Saturday nights they would dress up to go to the club and if it was that one Saturday a month when she wore a gown, she would take his breath away.

He would would be sitting quietly watching the stocks and she would rush into the room and his face would change.

This was not a woman whose beauty was lost on her husband of more than 37 years...

Even at 15 I knew that he was rare.

At 15 I knew I would never meet another man like him.

That realization alone is wonderful and awful all at once.

This man let me cook awful meals and would eat my (very burnt) first attempt at butterscotch pudding. He would even take a second serving.

He would later still try a new and not so much improved batch of butterscotch pudding.

This was love.

Even I wouldn't eat it.

He sat across from me at dinner and allowed my to set the formal dining room.

He talked to me and discussed the news.

He made me sit up straight.

"Stomach in, chest out, shoulders back. You don't want to look like you've already lost, do you?"

No. I did not.

I remember walking into the new school when my mother sent us away (yet again) and that posture was a thorn in the side of the girls there.

I was picked on and bullied and it sucked.

That posture only egged them on. They thought I was a stuck up snob. I was 11.

I would go home and pretend it was all OK...except to him.

"Don't let the little bastards grind you down," he'd say and move on to the next topic to encourage me not to over think it.

Easy for him. He was a retired colonel in the Army and had fought in WWII.

He was strong.

People liked him.

All people.

We were not the same by a long shot.

He had a way of laughing at you if you didn't agree with him that wasn't actually a laugh but made you reconsider your position. Generally, one would concede to his point.

I moved away from him and NY the summer I turned 14.

I was to live with my mother in sunny and overrated south Florida.

How was I going to be so far away from him?

Luckily, my mother quickly decided that parenthood, like south Florida to a non-driving teenager, was overrated.

I walked all the way to my grandparents' house in the Florida sun with my big brown Samsonite suitcase and the new kitten my loving mother had just given me (who scratched the hell out my arms the entire way).

They weren't home.

I "broke in" to their Florida room and awaited someone to come home.

He was the first to arrive.

I knocked on the window, dehydrated and and hot from sitting and waiting for hours.

He was startled but quickly opened the Florida room door.

"Mom's done being a parent. She made me leave." I sniffled with the tears hovering on my bottom lids as my throat tightened and my chest burned as I silently willed those hot and messy tears not to fall. (There's no crying in this family. Period.)

"You are going to live here with us now. Let's get you settled into your room. Which one do you want?"

"What about my kitten?"

"He can stay in the Florida room until we ease your grandmother into the idea of a cat."

That's how it went. Nothing was ever traumatic with him. No drama. Everything had a solution.

"Yes, you may have that. No, you may not have that other more ridiculous thing which you do not need."

"No, you are not getting a gray Jeep Wrangler with a pink top, no matter how cute or inexpensive it is. They roll over and people break into them."

Period. No arguments and all presented with a sound argument as to why he was right. You could attempt to argue but even I as a hormonal and emotional teenager could see his logic, whether I liked it or not.

To pout was to be simply selfish.

Never one to be lazy, he did not enjoy retirement much and when my mother found herself in financial trouble, he got a job to help her instead of taking it from his and my grandmother's savings.

This was to appease my grandmother.

He loved the job.

He worked for the city and did landscaping.

He always came home with a smile while whistling a happy tune.

One day he awoke with a scratchy throat.

It got worse and we all assumed he had Laryngitis.

They went on a trip and when they returned, his voice was still gone.

He decided to see a doctor.

He didn't have Laryngitis.

He was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease).

It's terminal.

I was 16.

I drove him to work before school and picked him up after work every day.

We sang Bobby McFerrin songs and he criticized my driving but let me turn the radio up loud.

This could not be happening.

The doctors decided that he had contracted it from breathing in the chemicals in the fertilizer while landscaping, since it seemed to be affecting him in reverse of the most common cases.

His throat was slowly becoming paralyzed.

This would eventually work it's way down his body, but they did not expect it to get there since his breathing organs would be hit first.

I drove him to work on his last day there.

I watched him walk out of the building with his head held high.

Stomach in. Chest out. Shoulders back.

It was then that I understood.

That moment.

I never heard him whistle again.

Nor did I hear his words.

He could barely whisper.

He carried note pads and wrote notes.

He perfected the art of the written argument.

I saw him cry.

It was the first time in my life.

He got up from the dinner table and went into a hallway bathroom and locked the door.

The sobs were enough to cave the strongest of walls.

He went to a liquid diet.

He struggled with his intake as the invisible snake wound itself tighter and tighter around his throat and made him shed pounds and inches in the blink of an eye.

My tall and strong everything suddenly resembled a tiny baby bird.

She wouldn't eat with him.

It was messy.

She wouldn't look at him.

He always looked. He always saw.

He fought hard for a year and a half.

My mother who lived close by in a condo owned by him never came to visit him.

They attacked his dignity.

I became jaded and lost in my own world for 6 long and horrible months.

He flew to NY to have surgery to have a feeding tube inserted so that he could be fed.

I picked up the phone that Friday afternoon and was told that the surgery had gone well 2 days prior. He had even gained 2 pounds.

When I hung up, I knew.

I could not shake the feeling that something was not right.

I had a friend book me a flight to NY immediately.

I called from Kennedy and told them that I was on my way home.

When I arrived, he looked at me and instead of making the sign with his fingers letting me know that I shouldn't be spending money like this, he hugged me.

He was sitting in the plant room and looked peaceful.

I knew.

He went to a follow-up visit the next day and we could hear the bones in his feet breaking as he walked.

Still, he climbed the staircase to the front door of the house he was so proud of.

Tuesday morning, he was struggling.

He tried to write notes to explain all that needed to be said, but his hands weren't working.

His mind, sharp and unaffected, was trapped in a body that simply would not function.

It must have been like being buried alive.

His eyes dug deep into me willing me to understand.

I ran downstairs and screamed and cried and threw myself on the floor and begged God to take him and to make it stop.

Maria came home and saw this.

We sat for hours talking about him and laughing about all the amazing things he did and was.

At dinner time, I went to check on him. He had not rung his bell in a while, but The A-Team was on the channel he was watching and I hated that show and didn't think he (or anyone) needed to see that.

As I entered the room and was about to ask him if he wanted a channel change, I noticed that he was just drifting off to sleep.

I didn't interrupt him. I quietly left.

I returned downstairs and told Lisa, who went to check on him as she had just come home from work.

I heard her screams.

I felt myself get very cold.

He was gone.

There would be no more dancing into my bedroom to lower my stereo a notch.

There would be no more singing in the car.

There would be no more road trips.

No more shelling peanuts while I drove around with him.

No more hiding from him while he searched for me calling out, "Fee Fi Fo Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishmon!"

No more dancing on the tops of his shoes.

No more performing every single dance routine, every cheerleading routine and cheer, every drill team routine over and over and over again with him as my very captive audience.

No one would sit in the stands and cheer me on while others were too busy to attend.

No one to walk me down the isle.

No one to make me believe.

19 years ago today...

And as I am now a mommy who didn't find it overrated to love my children and have stood for many a year with my chest (both with and without boobies) stuck out with my shoulders back and my back straight, I know that he will never really be gone.