Johnny’s Last Gift

The Leader of the Band

Dan Fogelberg

Johnny’s Last Gift

On Sunday evening, December 26, the first day of Christmas, 1965, while Billy Mumy and June Lockhart dealt with being Lost in Space, my father died in the kitchen of our home while my mother called the priest.  It was the unexpected end to a long illness and a full life.

My father’s name was John, but everyone knew him as Johnny. In a lot of ways, I didn’t know my father well. I knew him, of course, and loved him, but back in the old days, fathers and little kids were not as involved in each other’s lives as they are today.  Nor were we as close to his family as we were with my mother’s.  All those maternal aunts, uncles and cousins were a part of our every day lives.  No so my father’s.  One brother lived close, but that brother’s wife was distant, cold, unfriendly.  And they had no children.  His other brother, sister, and their families lived far away.  They had big families, lots of cousins, but the distances kept us apart.

What I do know, though, was that my father was movie-star handsome.  Pictures from his younger days, and years of comments from “the girls”, the ladies of the couples my parents socialized with, testified to the truth of that.  I knew that deep inside he would have loved to sail off to a tropical island.  And I know that he and his good friend, Jay, did almost that; they’d taken a road trip during the Great Depression because there was no work.  Rather than sit home and stagnate, they pooled their resources, loaded up an old Maxwell and set out for California.  And Mexico.  There are parts of that adventure which noone but the two of them would ever know about.  While they were on the road, though, he wrote daily to his beloved, Margaret, while Jay wrote daily to his Hester.  Not everything was shared.

I know, too, that not long after they were married, Johnny gave up his own home so he and Margaret could move back into the house where Margaret had been raised in order to care for her parents, both of whom were in the throes of terminal illnesses, passing quickly, one after the other.  Johnny and Margaret raised their family in the same house in which Ed and Molly had raised Margaret and the rest of their family a generation before.  I don’t know if that ever bothered my father; it never seemed to.  Our family was happy.

My father worked hard and was well respected for what he did.  He was as a tool designer.  I never did know just what that meant except that he seemed to have designed some pretty cool things which his company then manufactured.  He played well, too. He and my mother had a full, rich social life in our little town. For years, my father rose through the chairs of the local Elks Lodge until he finally became the Exhalted Ruler at a time when that meant something.  He and my mother traveled the country to attend conventions in far-off, exotic cities like Chicago.  As a child, I could only imagine what it must have been like to go to chicken-in-the-car-and-the-car-won’t-go-Chicago.  I got to stay with my cousins when they traveled, so it was also fun for me.

My dad liked beer.  As a child, he’d been raised on the Ballentine Farm with the Ballentine boys.  I don’t know where that was or who they were, except that they made Ballentine beer.  Purity. Body.  Flavor.  It always sounded like they’d had a great time.  My grandparents had worked for the Ballentine family until they didn’t anymore.  That’s when they moved their family to our town to work the railroad.  I suspect that the Farm was where he acquired his taste for beer, though.

Smells are powerful memory joggers. The Flatiron Bar and Grill was a crusty old place about a block away from the heart of downtown.  It was not much of a place, but it had a bar.  In Pennsylvania where we lived, there was no beer in grocery stores.  It came either from a distributor or from a bar. My dad would drive down Lehigh Avenue, a slightly seedy street which paralleled the railroad yards, park the car in front of the Flatiron, go in, and have a glass or two with buddies I never saw.  He wouldd buy a quart bottle or two of Ballentine Ale, come out, and we’d go back home.  I say ‘we’, because if all the stars were aligned, I wouldd get to go with him.  While he was inside, I would sit in the car smelling beer and cigarette smoke while he drank his glass, saw his friends, and made his purchase.  Then we would head home together.  I loved that.  To this day, passing a grimy old bar, and smelling the aroma of beer and stale smoke wafting out the door is comforting.

Every year, on October 14 – or close to it – our family would go to the Brush & Pallet restaurant to celebrate my parents’ anniversary.  It was their favorite restaurant.  Since it was not in our town, and since we had to drive quite a ways to get there, I don’t know where it was.  Whether or not the food was good, I also can’t say, but one of us always had pan-fried brook trout.  We all tasted it; it was, of course, always delicious.  One year, as the date rolled around, my mother called the Brush & Pallet to make reservations only to learn that it had closed.  A fire, I think.  It never reopened.  We settled for another place closer to home, and although the food was very good, it was not the same.  One part of their anniversary celebration remained intact, though.  My parents would dance their dance to the ‘Anniversary Song’.  When the Brush & Pallet was open, someone would play the song while we were there, and they would dance as they had on their wedding day.  After the restaurant burned, they danced their dance in the kitchen, each singing the word to the other. “Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed…”

My father liked beer, but he also smoked.  There were no health fears, no warning labels, no non-smoking sections in public places.  Ash trays were considered a thoughtful gift, and we had plenty around the house.  One of my tasks, when I was little, was to run the block or so up the street to our neighborhood grocery story.  My usual list was a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, and a pack of Camels.  Angie, the old Italian lady who owned the place, never questioned it; back then, no one ever would. For my efforts, I would get a penny to spend on anything I wanted.  It was the cigarettes which ultimately killed my father.

I was a junior in high school when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  He’d been driving eratically and complaining of headaches.  My mother made an appointment for him to see a doctor, and it wasn’t long after that test results found the tumor.  Surgery followed to remove it.  Recovery was grueling.  Further tests also indicated that the brain tumor was secondary to the primary cancer – in his lungs. His doctor, Dr. King, had been clear, cold, blunt.  Six months. Cobalt radiation in the meantime. Good-bye.  Soon after, but too late for my father, the Surgeon General began to warn people of the danges of smoking. 

My father approached all this with the same, measured, unperturbed attitude with which he approached everything else.  He stopped smoking, cold turkey.  There was no looking back.  After surgery to remove the growth in his brain, he suffered through weeks of miserable, burning, debilitating radiation.  Back in the day, radiation therapy was very unpleasant, to say the least.  For months, he didn’t drive, didn’t go to work; he did dishes to stay busy and did not complain.  He switched his addiction from cigarettes to butterscotch hard candies, and took longer and longer walks around the neighborhood.  As time went on, he grew stronger; not strong, but stronger.  Six months passed, then a year.  He was gaining strength and doing better all the time.  He made it to my high school graduation and saw me enter college.  He began to talk of returning to work, possibly after the holidays.

Damn that Dr. King.  Johnny’d show him what six months looked like.

My freshman semester in college went well.  I had an odd roommate; he worried about having no hair on his chest. We got along though.  I was happy to get home for Christmas, but was not looking forward to returning to school in January to face semester finals.  It was great fun to see all my old friends who were also home on break.  Different schools, different experiences, different stories.  Much to tell.

Christmas was wonderful.  There were lots of presents under the tree, but there is only one which I remember. It was my father’s gift for my mother. My father had walked downtown himself and picked out a gift for my mother, a place setting to complete her china set. She had been happy when she spotted it in the window of our local jewelry store; now she loved it all the more as it sat under the tree.  On Christmas day, dinner with lots of family was tradition and traditionally delicious.  That night, we rested.  It was Saturday.

“Are you going out tonight with your friends?” my mother asked on Sunday. My friends and I had talked about it.  Tommy’s In Crowd was the current, hot place in town to see and be seen.  Tommy, himself, was an old friend, a man I’d worked with at a restaurant during high school.  He now had a bar of his own, and it was doing pretty well.  All the college kids would get together, visit, toss a few down and support Tommy at the same time.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I might just stay home.”

“Oh, go on,” she urged. “Get out with your friends.  See some young people. You won’t get the chance much longer. We’re fine.”

I don’t know why, but I opted to stay home.  Maybe I was tired.

Dad was sitting in his usual spot.  Over the years, his chair – new, old, same or different – was always in the same place in the room.  My mother was on the couch in her same place.  I was sitting in the big wing-back across the room.  We were watching television.  It was time for Lost in Space, not one of our usual family shows, but it sounded like fun.

The program started, the situation developed, the characters were all seriously involved.  Billy Mumy and June Lockhart were saving the universe.

Commercial break.  The show started again.  Dad coughed.  Nothing special, just a loose cough.

Then he coughed again.  And again.  But now there was blood.  I looked at my mother; she back at me.  I grabbed a box of Kleenix to take to my dad.  In the second or so it took to do that, it was clear that a box of tissue was not going to help.  I ran to the kitchen to get a towel and ran back.  More blood was coming, faster.  I went for more towels and a bowl, a pot, something.  Again, seconds passed.  When I got back, my mother ran to the kitchen to call an ambulance.  She could eaily have used the phone which was in the next room, just a few feet away, but she did not want my father to hear what she was going to say.  “Come right away….  No sirens, please….  Hemorraghing fast…. I think he’s dying.  Thank you.”

I felt helpless to stop the bleeding.  I held the towels and the pot I had grabbed from the kitchen.  I had never seen that much blood pour out of one body.  I could not remember how many pints the human body holds, but I was afraid that I was seeing that much in front of me.

My father sensed the absence of my mother.  Wordlessly, he asked me where she was.  I told him, the kitchen.  He started to get up to go to where she was.  I told him not to try to move; she’d be right back.  But he continued to stand.  Once on his feet, he walked toward the kitchen, I propped him up as he went. 

I will never know how he was able to walk from the living room down the short hall into the kitchen. But he did.  Truth be told, I do know how he did it.  He willed it to happen.  He willed himself to be in the room with Margaret just as he had willed himself to survive more than six months.

Once in the kitchen, he sank down onto a little white rocking chair in the corner.  This was the rocker in which his own mother had cradled her babies to sleep.  It was the rocker which my mother had used to do the same with us.  Sitting in the rocker, his color changed as the last of his blood left his body.  Flesh pink to ashen to yellow to white. My mother was on the phone with our parish priest.  “No, meet us at the hospital.  The ambulance is on the way.”

He looked to her and she to him.  She put the phone down, came to where he was slumped in the little rocker, and took his hand.  It was the gesture of affection which they had shared for over thirty years.  It spoke volumes. A smile and a gentle squeeze.  It said, “I love you, Babe.  Shall we dance?”

It was over.  Sail away.

The ambulance came silently.  The priest met us in the ER.  My cousins had all the Christmas decorations taken down before we came back home.   There is a lot I never knew about my father, a lot we would miss together in the coming years.  In so many ways, though, he taught me more about himself that night than I had ever known before. He taught me life.

His greatest gift.

The lesson – the gift – has lasted a lifetime.