Mementos

 I went over to my dad's today, really not to take anything, but to pick up mail. But I went in anyway. My uncle had managed to take what I thought were too dirty horizontal blinds and make them look like new. I decided I would take some more of my father's books and put them in the bookcase that my uncle gave me for the occasion. It's not like I don't have enough books of my own. I have a whole closet made into a library, but I cannot imagine tossing out my father's books. Some of them, surely, I haven't read and probably should before my end comes. But mostly, it is about the memories they evoke, such that they are among the indispensable mementos of my relationship with my father, with my own past, with even my mother, with a place that has long been gone, the old apartment building on Townsend Avenue in the Bronx. Someof these very books I passed at age 6, or 7, or 15, comfortably residing in their earliest bookcases, and they were with him still, in California, and now with me until I pass.

Today I took three large ones, volumes of Will and Ariel Durant's take on history. There is another box full of them and each will be placed in my apartment and kept wherever I might find myself in the next year or two. I have only lately gotten to the books. The very first thing I took from my father's apartment to keep near me were his pipes and the last package of tobacco that he bought at Rite Aid on the corner of Fairfax and Sunset. They were first because the night before his procedure, when he couldn't sleep, he clicked and clicked the lighter to keep the smoke going from his pipe. I watched him that whole night, go from chair to chair, to bed to chair, trying to be comfortable. I think even then the sepsis was more than nascent, a thought I have to put in abeyance for the moment, it upsets me so. He was cold. But he had been cold for months it had seemed. So I wasn't alarmed. The pipes I guess are the closest thing to him alive. I had to have them near. That, and a really ugly jacket he was wearing all the time. If I had had my way, it would have been tossed, when he was alive. But now, that jacket sits in my closet, still with a bit of his scent. Something he wore even that day at the hospital for the "procedure" that would be his last.

I kept, also, his good set of dentures, the ones he was wearing when I took him home that April 4, thinking we had dodged another bullet. When they intubated him, the teeth had to come out. It would be the first thing he'd want back, his full set of dentures.

I told my uncle that I want to keep this one really ugly pan, the one in which my father would make his most excellent eggs on a Sunday when he convinced me to come back to the house and not spend money on Jan's or IHop. My uncle said, "This?" Yup. That. I don't need it for cooking. I don't do but the most minimum of that. But that was part of our ritual, something I admit I resisted, but I now cherish, father and daughter, sitting at the little table in the dining area, putting mayo on our eggs on waffles. He would drink his mixture of orange juice and wine, or a Milwaukee's Best beer, also from Rite Aid.

The slides. The little forks that he used to use at parties with which guests ate their baked clams. The swizzle sticks from all those long gone New York bars and restaurants and several from Montreal, nine months before I was born.

There are many more such mementos that will become part of my apartment tapestry until I decide what is next for me. As I write, I just saw the crucifix that was above his casket, next to the one that was above my mother's, a last memento of each life.