Day 1, and thinking of my dad

Today is the day I load up the rental, and drive north east from Waco TX to Boston MA. It’s a three day drive, and though not a single person when I told them thought that it was a good idea, I am excited.

I love road trips. I love cars. I love driving. I love the United States and I love seeing it from behind glass on wheels. I wouldn’t say I’m a great driver as I am not one of these guys will barrel through the night, but I’ll drive until 7 or 8, I’m sure, at least.

The route I’m taking will take me through Memphis which is where my mom and dad live. My father has advanced Parkinson’s. He’s very stiff, and is in a deteriorated mental state. So I think I’ll drive there today and spend the night.

Mom texted us earlier this week and said he’s gone on hospice. She asked me and my brother to work on writing his obituary, and she’s going this weekend to Baldwin Mississippi, where he grew up and where my extended family lives, to buy a casket and talk to a funeral home.

That said—she also seemed to be emotionally and psychologically transitioning herself as opposed to my father’s death being truly imminent. She doesn’t know and the doctors haven’t indicated that. But mom spoke like she recognized the signs. He will sometimes not wake up for 24 hours, for instance, which was the event that was the proximate cause of this decision. He will lay still awake but unable or unwilling to open his eyes. It’s these caregiver details, in other words, that she sees that I suspect I would only understand or recognize if I was with him 24/7.

Now that he’s on hospice, some healthcare decisions change though. One of them is that on hospice, her ability to purchase one particular medication is no longer possible. I will need her to explain it to me later tonight as I didn’t understand her when she told me this week, but the short answer is hospice won’t purchase it. His doctor said without it, he would not live long. She has one bottle of it left so she’s focused on trying to find alternatives. I get the sense there might be, but this is a new phase so we’ll see.

It has not been easy for my mom. The thing that I noticed was that he has been dying in a way that is long but which left her without full access to him but which required a lot of physical care giving. The help you hire border on gig economy for low end nursing staff, and she’s had checks stolen and had to change her accounts. A local box at the bank had important information for that, which caused more headaches invoking locksmiths when she was unable find the key that dad had been given to open it.

But all that said, we are now moving into a new phase. And me and my brother will be in charge of writing the obituary so I will be studying that genre of writing, and probably my brother will be in charge of finding as much relevant details of his life as he can find. My brother knows the most about our family than anyone, I think.

Dad grew up Baldwin Mississippi. He was extremely athletic and excellent at it. His dad owned a local grocery store called Cunningham’s groceries if I remember correctly. And dad’s two older brothers took it over while dad was still young.

But dad chose not to go into that family business. Instead he chose to go to college. He attended Mississippi State University, majored in math, and became a teacher. He and my mom met in Alabama, got married, and soon started a family. My brother and sister were born not too far apart.

Mom explained to me how dad’s career went but I’ll need her to explain again as I’ve never fully understand precisely what the jobs were. But the short version is that dad was working in Indiana, doing something or other, and there was either an advertisement or someone came to the office explaining that a firm would teach people to program computers. This was probably 1967-1969 if I had to guess. So dad signed up and that’s when his career as a computer programmer started.

He would move back to Mississippi, to Jackson (the states capital), after a short time doing that to take a job as a programmer there. Dad didn’t work directly for IBM as I understand it, but somehow did work for them. I think maybe it was contract work with this company in Jackson. Dad wrote in legacy programming languages. The ones I remember him telling me on a few occasions were Fortran, Cobol, RPG and assembly language. He was good at it and when Y2K happened, dad was in high demand to work on fixing the bug.

At some point dad had a chance to buy a company and he did. It was called Data Systems—maybe Data Systems Incorporated but I can’t recall—and it was in a small town of (now) 11,000 called Brookhaven, and about an hour south of Jackson. He did a variety of computing work for businesses in the county and the state. Bidding for government contracts was a big part of it. He had to write some program that would enable him to do payrolls. They’d also annually print these massive ledgers of information, using a gigantic printer the size of a room. I remember as a kid helping on the days when dad was approaching deadline. Mom basically ran the assembly line of getting those books prints and glued together.

I was born in 1975, the youngest of three. My brother once said me and dad were exactly alike. But I wonder if I misheard him because I can’t see how exactly except we are both more academically inclined, love reading, and probably have some shared anxieties, maybe some other things. I wasn’t athletic like dad, nor am I a genius like dad. But I did find myself interested in similar things as him—like literature, computers and economics. But I was more interested in them as part of a larger constellation of rebelliousness that I have never had the imagination to see my dad as.

I wouldn’t say I am the black sheep because under my mother’s influence in the culture of our family, there are no black sheeps. None. Not in our family, and hardly in the worlds itself. I do think I take a lot of my temperament from her. But that being said, I was prone to depression and self doubt and I do think that’s a draw from dad’s genetics moreso than moms.

When the personal computer was invented, the writing was on the wall. It was obou a few short years after we got an IBM PS2 Model 30 that Data Systems closed its doors. Say a lot about dad, he was a fighter. I do not think dad would say that about himself but I see it clear as day as I have aged. He couldn’t stop the personal computer and other economic factors from closing his company. And for a minute there, I remember overhearing him telling my sister we didn’t have any income coming in. He was clearly stressed. He was worried about the family and all of our well being not surprisingly.

I have vague memories of that last year as things began winding down. I remember going to Lake Erie, PA to see dad and going to an amusement park with him, for instance. He was working there in a short term thing, for an extended period of time, and mom was at home with me. My brother and sister were by this time in their own careers, so this was the start of the second chapter of my life in which I was more like an only child.

Dad soon then got a job at International Paper in Memphis and me, him and my mom moved to a suburb just outside the city called Cordova. I think it’s fair to say that the two largest shadows that have followed me my entire life, even to this very moment, have been the beauty of my childhood in Brookhaven, filled with happiness and friendships, and the fairly hard times of being extremely alone in Cordova. That first year was absolutely brutal, and mom and dad felt awful over how hard it was for me. It’s funny how you can grow up with so many friends and not realize when it’s all taken from you how profoundly scared you are around strangers. Anyway, that’s for another day.

Interestingly, dad moved us from Brookhaven to a suburb of Memphis called Cordova when he was 49. And that’s how old I am. I turn 50 in November. I do think I’m like dad in that I do think I am resilient. The ways that I sense I am like dad is that I carry trauma inside me, I’m high functioning given those endowments, I love my family, and I scrape anything and everything together to take care financially of my family.

One of the things we took with us to Memphis was dad’s PC. It had a 2400 baud modem and its VGA graphics card, 20 meg hard drive and I think 640k RAM. I may have those specs wrong. And for some reason I think it wasn’t exactly a VGA graphics card. It was some card IBM made like Super VGA which meant every now and then a game wouldn’t render. But putting that aside, dad gave me that PC when we moved to Memphis, and that was genuinely my lifeline.

It wasn’t just games though I did love Sierra games and played those a lot. It was mainly meeting people online. This was 1989-1990, and so the main way I met people was through bulletin boards (BBSs). I was very much into hacking, but mainly phreaking if I’m being honest. I loved getting my hands on half cracked long distance dialing codes and setting my computer to dial through other combinations of the missing digits all night over the modem. After a week, I’d usually have a couple more long distance dialing codes that worked. And I would use them to call people around the country, as well as go to BBSs. As well as bend this open shareware software called Fido Net to create a postal service that would collect mail from different BBSs in my “hackers group” called “The Elite Corp” (TEC) and distribute that mail, using those codes, all over the country. I was very proud of myself for figuring that out.

I was not particularly good at that hacking subculture stuff and thankfully never got into so much lasting trouble. But I do remember dad picking me up from a police car one early morning because I was out late at night trying to get into sewers because I thought they had ways to get into some kind of AT&T system using this big red phone I had stolen out of an AT&T van from a workers stuff. Dad was furious. I absolutely hated making him mad like that, and at that time in my life, I was starting to become rebellious so it was happening with some frequency.

A few years ago, though, dad said something at the dinner table that really struck me. He said that that time in my life, when I was doing all that hacking stuff, and scaring the absolute crap out of my mom, he saw it differently. He said he saw me responding to the challenges of the move from Brookhaven to Memphis by trying to find a creative outlet and to find friends. Which was true—I just had never heard dad say that, and I was frankly surprised dad saw it too.

I figure dad, though, could see that stuff because dad understood at a deeper level that kind of thing himself.

I appreciated then and still do now that he had that willingness to see what I was doing in that way, because I was finally starting to turn a corner and so badly needed friends.

Anyway, dad was sensitive but he also had a lot of anxiety I think and it tended to get masked. He would always call me “Scotty” or “Buddy”. I think I’ve heard him call me just Scott almost never. He was very sweet to me, very kind, very respectful, my whole life to be honest. He has really never talked down to me before. Which I think that even naming that now, that’s my first time to do so. But he has always been like that. When he would be angry at me, it was because of high school mischief and even then, I think dad was sympathetic because he saw how badly I was hurting, and as I think dad also carried hurt inside him, seeing me struggling was hard.

I’ll say only one more thing. I didn’t get any of the interest in sports from my dad. Not once did I ever go to a game willingly. I played church basketball, which if you don’t know, really is not a high bar of athleticism. And I played little league and soccer. But once I got to Memphis, that all stopped. Dad on the other hand played tennis, basketball, and ran my entire life .So none of those interests passed down to me.

What I did inherit from dad though was a love of movies and books, and particularly, movies and books about the American mafia. Dad and I would talk about that a lot growing up. And that was actually one of the things that made me gravitate towards Gary Becker—because I absolutely loved crime. But I was more interested in the market forms of crime, like gangs, and various types of criminal workers as opposed to just disorganized crime. And I think I got that from dad because he and I loved movies and books about the mafia. One of the memories I still cherish is when after we had opened Christmas presents, we drove to the local theater—me, him and mom—and watched the new Warren Beatty movie, Bugsy, about Bugsy Siegel.

So wish me safe travels. I’ll be heading out momentarily probably getting to Memphis around early evening. I’m sure mom will insist on a huge breakfast tomorrow.