(I had written this original story late December 2012. which I’ve since lost somewhere. So I’m rewriting Part One of it here from memory.)
Dad and I were preparing a trip to Florida for the winter. He thought it was going to be his “Last Hurrah.” He was 86 years old and hadn’t been feeling too well as of late.
Prior to our leaving New England, I’d taken a hospice course and Dad had all his rotten teeth taken out of his head.
Dad was adamant on having his old, turtle-top, Ford conversion van down there because he didn’t want to be without a vehicle. Well, neither did I, and I intended to drive my old 2003 PT Cruiser. At almost 9 years old, that car ran great and I changed the oil religiously! There was only one thing wrong with it, I had to stop about every three hundred miles to fill it with gas. Sorry, I digress.
But the main glitch was, Dad had a hard time driving distances. His shoulders would start aching. He had bad arthritis that an orthopedic doc had said was basically “bone on bone”. So his driving himself the thirteen hundred or so miles down the eastern seaboard was out of the question. And he refused to ride all that way with me in the PT Cruiser. Although the PT had lots of leg room for me, I’m 5’9”. Dad however, was “5 feet fifteen inches”. (He was fond of telling the nurses and doctors that. It had them scrambling for their calculators, or they’d just look at him quizzically.)
The issue got solved fairly quick when we asked an old friend of the family, Ken, who had known my dad since he was fourteen, if he’d drive Dad down and we’d fly him back. Ken jumped at the chance to spend time with the “Old Man”.
Ken had lost his dad early on in his childhood at age 14, and he’d met my dad when they both were working at a restaurant in Hampton Beach NH a couple years later. Ken took a shine to Dad, and Dad took Ken under his wing. Including allowing him to come to the farm where in summer, my dad would throw a lot of parties for the restaurant workers and beach crowd on his twelve acres off the beaten path. (Truly another story for a not too distant time).
Come a sunny but cold travel day in late Nov, both Dad’s van and my PT were loaded from the floorboards to the ceiling lights. We were going to stay down there in a part of the country of no snow-shovels for about six months—or until Dad croaked. Whichever came first. He was always saying he wasn’t going to last another season, and to not go buying him any green bananas.
I was along to be his caregiver. Wait, strike that. For some reason, I thought it was my duty as the eldest and only daughter to care for him. (Years later I learned different, but hey, we are always right where we need to be at any given period in time.) Besides, I thought the time away from my current husband would make our hearts grow fonder…
A little two bedroom, two bath condo was paid up for six months by Dad’s second cousin—a wealthy benefactor—who didn’t want him living in his van this time around which had been his custom in years gone by. The local gendarmes were getting pushy lately about people who they viewed as indigent. The year before when Dad was wintering in Florida, they threatened to put him in jail and take his “home” away.
🎶On the road again…🎶
Everything was going fairly smooth the first couple days. We stopped the first night in NJ to visit my daughter and her then new boyfriend.
The second afternoon the weather was starting to get a little iffy, raining down a slush mix, so we stopped for the night at a motel in Virginia. I was only good for driving about 6 to 7 hours at a stretch anyway, so that was fine by me.
The next morning, the van got a flat. A call to Triple A, got us all back on the road after an hour and a half.
Later around noon, the old Ford was starting to have a light knocking sound coming from either the engine compartment or the under belly. I was thinking it was either going to throw a rod or the drive shaft was going to fall off.
Ken said it was loud enough to make conversation challenging. He was hard of hearing anyway, so it must have been obnoxious enough for him to say it was loud.
Dad insisted, “It t’warn’t nothin’!” and would make it to Florida just fine.
(OMG! It had to be love, the things Ken and I did and put up with for that old fart!)
The short story is, the old beast gave up the ghost in Kingsland, the southeastern most part of Georgia, just before the Florida border.
Dead in the water, on the side of I-95. We called Triple A again. This time for a tow truck.
I searched for a rental van that would haul Ken, Dad and all his belongings the rest of the way down.
Good thing I was following with Yoda. “The force” was with the Cruiser, but not with the old van.
Once it was loaded up on the trucks flatbed, Ken searched on his phone for a junk dealer who would purchase what was left of the old girl.
At the junk yard. Dad’s worldly goods. We had to disperse what wouldn’t fit into the rented caravan, into my PT Cruiser.
As the sun was sinking over the horizon, Dad signed over the title to his “home”. A sad day for the Old Man.
We still had another five plus hours to drive. This time I led point, with Ken pulling up the rear with a much newer and quieter van. We got to the condo just before midnight.
As Dad and I sat exhausted on the edge of the master bed in the room I insisted he take because it had a bathroom just feet away from his bed, he patted my knee and said,
“It’s goin’ to be ok, everything will work out, it always does.”