My Dad had an unexpected quadruple bypass heart surgery last Friday in Iowa – our home state, if you allow us to ignore the not-so-short stops in Minnesota and Georgia. He was scheduled for what he told me was a “no big deal” angiogram on Thursday but when the doctors started their poking and prodding they found a heart that was very near quitting altogether.
Ah, there’s nothing like a little major surgery on your father that puts everything in a new light. While I haven’t been able to get there quite yet, he’s been on my mind constantly and on the other end of the phone as much as he can tolerate (“Nurse, more morphine, it’s my Nader-voting son on the line!”).
And my thoughts have returned me to the same place all weekend: I’m a lucky man to have a father like Jim Colby.
He’s never really had it easy, not from his childhood in the lower-class Des Moines neighborhoods, not when he was sixteen and had to take charge of the family when his own father killed himself, not with his (successful) battles with the bottle, and not when he gave forty years of his life to the Hormel Corporation, working himself up from mail clerk to mid-level management.
But he’s always made it look easy – at least from this son’s perspective. Because he’s almost always done it with a magnificent sense of humor and a wit that that could disarm the most arrogant bastard who dared to duel with his street-smart self. He’s not shy about his secret, either: He likes people.
In fact, he’s obsessed with people – their stories, their histories, their troubles and their triumphs. He wants it all from those he encounters – straight, no chaser, indeed. As a little guy who talked tough to survive in hardscrabble East Des Moines (yes, it existed in the 1950s), he knows better than most about the flim-flam exteriors people project and he wants nothing more than to pierce that exterior and find the inner-core that is so much more interesting.
My Dad loves books, movies, music (okay, okay, I’m willing to tolerate his Sinatra fixation) and, mostly, history. He’s always trying to connect with the “little guy.” He knows everything about the “American Indians,” fascinated by their plight and always thirsting for more information on their struggles. And he clings to his sense (more than reality –poke, poke) of being Irish, seemingly hell-bent on living and breathing the story of the ubber-underdog. Well, damn it, he’s earned it.
But my Dad’s best feature has always been his willingness to learn and to grow. He may have hit a few dead ends in his life but he sure as hell wasn’t using them as an excuse to throw in the towel. Hardly. They were all just bumps in the road – some bigger than others – that he eventually traversed with his usual aplomb. It’s the hand he was dealt and he’s going to make the best of it.
And so my thoughts are with him in his latest tangle with fate. I’m thankful that his wife, Brenda, and my older brother, Todd, are with him now and doing what they can to help navigate the glorious ship that is Jim Colby. I look forward to being there with him soon.
Yes, indeed, I’m a lucky man. I’ve got a great Dad. And while I know he’d appreciate a fine line right here that would turn us all toward a smile or a laugh (“Showtime!”), all I really want is for the universe to know what’s in my heart this morning: I love my Dad.
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