Thoughts About My Dad

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Today is my father’s birthday. He would have been 77, but he passed away. It’s been almost 11 years. You can do the math on how old he was when he left.

My thoughts about my dad have covered a wide spectrum over these 11 years. At first, I didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It wasn’t that I had no feelings for him. It was that I didn’t feel anything regarding his death for a few months. And then it hit me one day and I cried. Stoic during the days of his sickness. Stoic during his funeral. Weeping months later.

I went through a strange phase once the emotions hit me. I did a lot of drinking. By myself. At home. Alone. The strange thing about that is that I did not drink in my younger days. My father enjoyed going to bars to be with his buddies and have some beers. He used to ask me to go have a beer at one of his favorite places now and then. I turned him down. It just wasn’t my thing, and I was busy being a single dad, and a lot of other reasons/excuses. So, it was quite strange that I drank heavily after he died. I remember feeling that it was a way to connect with him then. Somehow I was able to transcend life and death and connect with my dad through a bottle of wine or two.

All that passed. (My liver rejoices.) I’ve remembered a lot about my dad over the years. I’ve come to understand him better as I get older. I now understand why he felt the way he did about certain things and acted the way he acted at times. I’ve been able to connect with him in that way.

To make these thoughts about my dad on his birthday a little fuller, I’d like to direct your attention to two articles I wrote about my dad years ago.

The first is from May of 2001, long before my dad got sick. It’s an article that wonders what life would have been like for me “If My Dad had Died when I was Young.”

The second is an article I wrote three years later in 2004 when my dad was several months into chemotherapy treatment for pancreatic cancer. Please read “It’s Not Like the Movies.”

Interestingly, I did not write an article after my dad died. Given what I said about where I was emotionally back then, it makes sense. But by the end of that year, I did write some brief thoughts addressed to my dad:

I miss you. It was all too soon. Sixty-six was all too young. I wish I would have been in the habit of telling you I loved you BEFORE you got sick. Christmas is coming. I’d like to postpone it until I can find a way to get to where you are and bring you back here with the rest of us. I wish we were closer while you were still here. I wish I wasn’t so angry at you when I was young. I wish I knew how to forgive you back then. I still regret that you were not a very open or affectionate man. Most of what I would have liked to know about our roots died with you. You were the last of the generation before mine. I wish you didn’t take all of your secrets with you. I could have used some of them. But all of that is okay. Thankfully, I did learn to forgive you even before you got sick. I’m happy about that. And I always knew that you never resented my anger. Thank you. I hope that one day we will stand face to face again. Then you can tell me EVERYTHING. Most of all, I just want to hear you call me “Sammy” again.

Happy birthday, Dad. When we stand face to face again, we are definitely going for a beer.

Dino Thug

Disclaimer: I in no way endorse the attacking of police officers.

I am also not a dinosaur. I just play one on TV.

Je suis Charlie

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Remembering the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre:

Frédéric Boisseau, Franck Brinsolaro, Jean Cabut, Elsa Cayat, Stéphane Charbonnier, Philippe Honoré, Bernard Maris, Ahmed Merabet, Mustapha Ourrad, Michel Renaud, Bernard Verlhac (Tignous), Georges Wolinski.

I urge you to read Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression by Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier).

Criticizing a religion is not racist.

Criticizing religious zealots and terrorists is not racist.

Islam itself is not a problem.

People who want to silence others are the problem.

People who want to kill others in the name of a religion are the problem, be that religion Islam or Christianity or Judaism or vegetarianism.

(The above drawing is my response to an attack at an exhibit featuring cartoons of Muhammed. More information can be found at this Wikipedia page.)

The Best Laid Plans

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“The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” So said Robert Burns, apparently “to a mouse.”

“The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry… and sometimes they get absolutely crushed and the universe leaves you feeling like a turd.” So says Sam Snyder to whomever wants to listen, be he vermin or otherwise.

Such crushing happens when a migraine strikes. It makes it extremely difficult to maintain one’s plans when one feels like they can barely put one foot in front of the other. When you can’t move your feet properly, it becomes darn hard to run! This is how my running plans went awry yesterday.

With my new focus on more frequent running, I had plans to run yesterday and a pocketful of motivation to go with them. Even though I woke up at 3:30 AM with a migraine in progress, I still held onto hope that I would power through and run at lunchtime. I worked from home because I had way too much to do after being off for New Years. I thought about taking the day off and lying in bed in my misery. But that usually doesn’t help me when I have a migraine. Usually I can’t sleep. It seems better to work through my misery than to lie in it.

By the time lunch rolled around my pocketful of motivation was greatly diminished, as was my physical energy and my optimism toward life in general. It just wasn’t going to happen.

So, I planned to run at 4 PM when work was done.

At 4 PM there was a giant gaping hole in my pocket of motivation.

At that point I decided it would be torturous to run while feeling so ill. I have done it before. The first time was 3 years ago, as indicated in the picture attached to this article. That was a training run. For a long time, I knew I had to one day run with a migraine to see what happened. Nothing happened. The only difference was that, instead of being a lump of human refuse, I became a sweaty lump of human refuse. It didn’t do any harm. It didn’t do any good. I have also run two 5Ks with a migraine… because why waste my prepaid registration fees? At the first one I won first place in my age group. The other 50 year-olds must have been on crutches or something. I ran the second race because there was pizza served at the end. I would do nearly anything for pizza.

So as to not have my plans completely spoiled yesterday, I decided to walk at 5:30 PM. It was 18 degrees and felt like 4 with the wind. I figured that I felt so bad already, what big deal would it make to add frostbite to my condition? So, I walked a 5K. It didn’t do any harm. It didn’t do any good.

Having gotten a little exercise in, I ordered a pizza for myself. Like I said, I would do nearly anything for pizza, especially when I have a migraine. I don’t know what causes it but when I have a migraine I almost always end up craving pizza. It’s all I could think about on my walk. When I had 15 minutes of walking left, I called in an order for a large pie. The pizza guy said, “Give me about 15 minutes.” I said, “Perfect!” This part of the day went exactly according to plan! I ate 7 slices. No longer was I merely a lump of human refuse. I was a mound of it.

To sum up: My plans were severely altered thanks to a migraine. I did get a little exercise in. Then I promptly obliterated any benefit from said exercise by eating enough pizza for 3 1/2 people. Yes, yes, I did.

Today, I did better with my eating and ended the day with calories to spare. Plus, I ran 4 miles at lunchtime. It was a good run. My energy was a bit on the low side after the migraine. But I got out there and made a good effort of working off one of those slices of pizza.

While the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, we must remember that this is sometimes because God loves us and wants us to eat more pizza.