Welcome, Jazz Pickles.
In Spanish it means “welcome, Jazz Pickles.” I’m visiting my family in Oklahoma this weekend, I haven’t spoken Spanish for a few days and I didn’t want to get rusty. Use it or lose it, as they say. Nobody wants to lose their pickles.
So I’m visiting my father, who is about to turn 91 on this brutal planet, and 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 politely leave at once and prefers to slowly fall apart, piece by piece.
That’s where my dad is these days. He feels trapped in an increasingly destroyed department store mannequin. The mind and body you’ve always relied on to find words to express your thoughts and movements to get you where you want to go now routinely raise a metaphorical middle finger to your desires.
He is frustrated but has not lost his sense of humor and is still able to laugh between bouts of complaint. A visit to dad these days is a bit like a Rodney Dangerfield routine.
He regularly tells me that if he believed in suicide, he would have left by now, but he insists on leaving “according to 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. I offered to put something in his drink when he wasn’t paying attention, and he looked at me sideways with a sly smile.
Yesterday I went to visit one of my favorite high school teachers, Darryl Goode. He is 88 years old and spent his life directing who knows how many high school theater productions, some of them award-winning. I was in some of them in the mid-70s.
Darryl was as creative, open-minded, and free-thinking a teacher as I had ever encountered in any other aspect of my life. He taught us to express ourselves with enthusiasm and discipline, surprising the crowd, but keeping our egos in check; No small feat with a pack of hormone-crazed teenagers.
Yesterday we had a very heartfelt visit and I told him how important he had been to my development as a creative being and that, if it hadn’t been for him, I certainly would have been a different person. I could have easily chosen a different career and ended up in a cubicle or behind a counter somewhere doing a job that kept me staring at the clock, longing to escape. (I had quite a few of those before cajoling my way into a cartoon career.)
I am convinced that if there had not been Darryl Goode in my life, there would have been no Gallantfor which you, regular readers, should also thank him.