Mom and Dad in the 1940s Santa Monica CA.
Saint Patrick’s Day 2013.
My siblings and I headed down to the local Pickwick Irish pub for a great traditional meal of corned beef and cabbage. We drank until the well was closed to us. Then we all went home. I think dad would have appreciated this. He told me that often at funerals people always talk so ceremoniously about the deceased. They usually always would lie about how great a person was instead of how they really were, the real stories about how they really really were. So, this day at the pub was how my dad would have celebrated or grieved a dead friend or family member, by getting fucking drunk with his friends. As we sure Do-Wah Diddy did.
A bittersweet time.
The year 1942 Greer Garson was 31 when she hit it as an actress, a very mature time for a woman to make it big . I enjoy watching her films. I enjoy her strength, femininity, and intuitive strategic nature. Watching Classic films is so comforting. The films are the same year after year but somehow change with time. It is a matter of perspective; a film viewed at 5 is understood differently at 55. It is movie magic and in times of grief and sorrow films bring comfort and friendship.
Today is such a day where the line –up of films accentuates the durability of eternal grief, the motifs and archetypes of life and films.
A long night of seeming madness and then with a couple of button pushes the classic films begin at late morning and without even eyeglasses or coffee. Three Coins in the Fountain, Notorious and Dial M for Murder will embrace me today. Now an awake child of the cosmos I find my eyeglasses, coffee and make cabbage salad with bacon, red peppers, avocado, jalapeño, and dill-rye bread.
Unfortunately, the real focus of this little dilly-dally of a transforming short story is about three things.
Two songs, my dad and death. He died on Saint Patrick’s Day.
It was a week ago today that he passed. A nurse from hospice, three siblings, and myself attended as classical music played in the background. Intense and with a call to my heart. I asked my brother to change the CD,
“Put on that CD you got for Dad a few years back for his birthday or was it Christmas!?”
It was the best of Frank Sinatra. We watched Dad move into the eternal and listened with a pleasant release and sad joy. In a moment of time between the song The Young at Heart and Three Coins in a Fountain, dad left us. I imaged him dancing away with the spirit of our deceased mother or maybe Greer Garson.
In her youth mother looked similar to Greer Garson.