So it's been a while since I wrote anything here, and part of that's because of work, but part of that's also due to the fact that Nina's dad's health took a turn for the worse over the past few weeks, and he died early on the morning of Thursday, April 3rd. With Nina's permission, I'll say a few things about that.
She didn't get much warning -- she'd been scrambling to order and arrange for the delivery of a new leather recliner that he'd asked for, and its arrival strangely coincided with him getting much sicker. The home health aides told her and her brother that it wouldn't be that much longer, so they'd been staying over there in preparation.
As it happened, I was working pretty long hours that week. We had an internal deadline we were racing to meet, and so when Nina called me at 1:30 AM to tell me he'd died, I was in the middle of working on a prototype for a game about protected freshwater pearls from theft by river frogs. By the time I got over to the apartment, they'd laid Peter out on the couch in the living room, and Nina and Michael and Peter's girlfriend and the home health aide were gathered in the kitchen while they waited for the funeral home people to pick up his body. The people showed up at three something, dressed eerily crisply and acting extremely polite (although they addressed us as "youse"), and after giving the family some time to say their goodbyes, they hoisted him onto a gurney and zipped him into a bag. And then they left, and we were alone. At 4:00 AM, some birds in the courtyard started chirping loudly, even though it was still quite dark and cold.
I took the next day off from work and got a haircut and did some shopping for the apartment. That evening, Nina's cousin Michael N. and his girlfriend Jillian showed up from Philadelphia. Right before they showed up, though, we noticed a group of young people in the playground downstairs having a mass, variously choreographed sword fight, using the latest generation of light-up light sabers. You could tell these people were well-practiced -- they were prancing and twirling around -- but all you could really see were their glowing toys. We ushered Michael and Jillian into the guest bedroom, where we were watching from the window. Eventually the combatants finished their game and turned off the lights on their swords, and they noticed the six of us watching them from above. "Hi, window people!" one of them called out. We waved and left the window.
The wake was scheduled for Sunday. We spent Saturday night and that morning going through boxes of family photos trying to put together a slide show that the funeral home could play during the proceedings. In doing so we found a bunch of completely adorable pictures of Nina and her brother looking fierce and inquisitive and unbearably cute. A triptych of photos of 8-year-old Nina in a homebrew rabbit costume, white greasepaint whiskers streaked on, holding a real carrot with a bright spray of greens still attached: One shot in the morning, feisty and pert; one in the afternoon; and one towards end of the escapade, the carrot greens wilted, Nina herself captured on the verge of exhausted tears. Sadly, it wasn't relevant. I fully plan to go back and make copies.
The whole production came off without a hitch, despite iMovie's best efforts to sabotage the final product with an insufferable, maudlin DVD menu and soundtrack. The only thing missing, it turned out, was a printout of a list of buildings in New York that Peter had worked on during his career as an electrician with Local 3. The funeral home didn't have a printer we could use, so I volunteered to lug the family laptop to a copy place to get the file printed. The closest place was a Kinko's on 4th Ave., taking me past the fenced-off greenery of Gramercy Park. I explained my situation to the guy at the desk. "You can use the LapNet station," he said. He took me back to a small cubicle near the bathrooms -- where a guy in a leather coat was passed out drunk. "Hey, wake up," the Kinko's guy said. "You can't sleep here. There's a guy who needs to use the desk."
"Oh, yeah, sure," said the drunk, staggering to his feet. He was really a mess, stringy blonde hair plastered to his face with sweat, out-of-focus eyes set in a weatherbeaten face. "I gotta get goin' anyway." He looked like one of the New York Dolls.
"And wipe your face, man," said the Kinko's guy. "You got some chocolate on your nose."
Oh no, I thought. It's never chocolate. But sure enough, I looked down at the drunk's hands, and he was holding several packages of Ring-Dings -- he'd taken a nap in his cupcakes. Wiping his face, he started lurching towards the exit, but paused about half way across the floor, as if he'd forgotten something. He turned on his heel and walked right back to one of the cubicles and sat down again, tearing open his cupcakes and scarfing them down greedily. For my part, I stood around feeling stiff in my funeral suit while I printed the stuff.
The funeral was on Tuesday morning. The service at the funeral home was a lot like the wake, except this time people went up to the lectern and said things. Most of the speakers were Local 3 people, and they veered, often in the same anecdote, between jocosity and fierce grief. After that was over, the funeral people drove us out to Evergreen Cemetery for the graveside service. We all got flowers to place on the coffin while Nina's uncle Isao played a bagpipe rendition of "Amazing Grace" on his Blackberry. The whole thing was over very quickly: We got back in the cars as they were lowering the coffin into the ground.
Evergreen kind of straddles the border between Brooklyn and Queens -- it's not super clear what neighborhood it's in. To deflect suggestions that they may have laid him to rest in, say, Middle Village, Nina did some creative Google Mapsing and pronounced that her father is buried "North of Broadway Junction."
After that, the whole funeral party went out to lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant. And then it was over. I went back to work. My friend Tim asked if I'd been at a job interview, on account of the suit. "Yeah, I figured it was either a job interview or that," he said, when I told him.
There's no good segue here, so I won't try.
On Tuesday Nina and I went with Aanie and her girlfriend Brooke to go see Gossip play Webster Hall. Beth Ditto really does have a pretty amazing voice. At one point during the between-song banter, Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" came up and she started doing Eddie Vedder's distinctive "Hoo! Hoo!" noise, perfectly on-point. And that was just, you know, a parlor trick. The songs themselves were hooky and fun, but I didn't know any of the songs besides "Standing In The Way Of Control," so I didn't go up front and get really wild and crazy. Plus, I didn't want to accidentally spoil the good time of the front-row crowd, with whom Beth had established an embarrassingly earnest rapport -- they finished out their encore with some admonishments about being positive about your body and not letting the Democratic party get divided and conquered, followed by a rising chant: "We... are... important! We... mean... something!" I don't know how I feel about that. I mean, I guess I agree, in principle. What else is there?
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