Baristanet wishes all our dads a Happy Father’s Day. This year, we share an essay from our own Lisa Romeo about her father, “Conversations I Can’t Talk About” published on Lunch Ticket:
In the spring of 2007, my father and I are discussing something important when the guy in the car behind us at the green light raps his horn. In the passenger seat, my father, a polite man of eighty years does not flinch, just glances in the rearview mirror and says, ‟Hold your horses, buddy. Life is short.” I want to say something to my father, but when I look again, he is gone.
Of course he is. He had been dead by then for about six months.
I did not have any telephone conversations with my father in the fall of 2006, between the time I last visited him in the hospital, 2,700 miles from my home, and the time he died there seven weeks later. I told myself it would be better not to call. Since I could not visit in person, I did not want to confuse him on the telephone with my voice. If my voice meant nothing to him, he might get upset—or more likely, I would. Or he might ask me to come. I did not want to have to remind him that I was, in fact, back at my own home in New Jersey and not still in Las Vegas, taking care of my mother in the house they had shared there for twenty-five years. Continue Reading
