Bienvenido, Pepinillos de Jazz.
That’s Spanish for “welcome, Jazz Pickles.” I’m visiting my family in Oklahoma this weekend, haven’t spoken any Spanish for a few days, and didn’t want to get rusty. Use it or lose it, as they say. Nobody wants to lose their pepinillos.
So I’m visiting my dad, who is about to complete his 91st year on this brutal planet, and up until recently, everything was going pretty well. My mom left a few months ago, and Dad says he’s more than ready to join her. But the body sometimes refuses to leave politely all at once and prefers to fall apart slowly, piece by piece.
That’s where my dad is these days. He feels trapped in an increasingly broken department-store mannequin. The mind and body he’s always trusted to come up with words to express his thoughts and movements to get him where he wants to go are now routinely raising a metaphorical middle finger to his desires.
He’s frustrated but hasn’t lost his sense of humor, and is still able to laugh in between bouts of complaining. A visit with Dad these days is a bit like a Rodney Dangerfield routine.
He regularly tells me that if he believed in suicide, he’d be gone by now, but he insists on leaving “on God’s schedule.” I warned him that with that attitude, if there is no god, he may live forever, but he remains undaunted in his determination to wait it out. I offered to slip something into his drink when he wasn’t paying attention, and he looked at me side-eyed with a wicked smile.
Yesterday, I went to visit one of my favorite teachers from high school, Darryl Goode. He’s 88 and spent his life directing who knows how many high school theater productions, some award-winning. I was in a few of them in the mid-70s.
Darryl was a creative, open-minded, free-thinking teacher the likes of which I’d never known in any other quarter of my life. He taught us how to express ourselves with both enthusiasm and discipline, wowing the crowd, but keeping our egos in check; no small accomplishment with a herd of hormone-crazed teenagers.
We had a heartfelt visit yesterday, and I told him how important he’d been to my development as a creative being, and how, had it not been for him, I’d have doubtless been a different person. I could’ve easily chosen a different career, and ended up in a cubicle or behind a counter somewhere doing a job that kept me watching the clock, yearning to escape. (I had quite a few of those before I bamboozled my way into a cartoon career.)
I’m convinced that had there been no Darryl Goode in my life, there would have been no Bizarro, so you regular readers have him to thank, too.
