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RIP S.K. Harihareswara
My father died on Thursday night of a massive heart attack. He'd just had dinner and was washing his hands when he slumped against the wall. He died very quickly in my mother's arms. He was 74.
I'm in India now, alternately engaging with and hiding from the constant flow of people and food and emotion. I saw his corpse yesterday. Tomorrow we'll start going to orphanages and retirement homes to feed people in memory of my dad. That's what he wanted in lieu of the standard prayer rituals.
In the coming weeks and months I expect I'll write a lot about my family. Right now I just wanted to tell you what's up. Your condolences are welcome in comments, emails, or instant messages. But I especially encourage you to comment with happy memories of your own family -- or, if you have none of those or none that you want to share, happy memories of any sort.
(cross-posted from my blog)
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Random happy family memory: when V came on TV (the original one in the '80s), my older brother convinced my younger brother & I that we had to dress up to disguise ourselves from the aliens (that would apparently see us if we had them on our TV screen?). So I remember shoving pillows up my shirt & putting weird things on my face & other random things so that the aliens wouldn't get us. Hahahaha.
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I usually say that my favorite childhood memories with my dad involve taking apart and reassembling smoke bombs around the Fourth of July- but honestly those are kind of fuzzy and run together. A clear one that comes to mind was when he greeted my best friend and I in the parking lot of my summer camp with ice-cold root beers and the car's air conditioning going full blast. After a week of herding kids with no pop or A/C, it was the perfect treat. He's a little awkward, usually, but sometimes he's really good at stuff like that.
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My dad and I were AV geeks together. I ran the wires through the attics, and then we worked together to connect them to whatever new speaker/tuner/stereo had been added to the system. Then we sat down and watched big loud movies to "test the sound". When we first started doing this, it was "Top Gun" on VHS. There was a year it was on laser disc. As soon as DVDs came out, we started using "Hunt for Red October". If you have the 5.1 rear speakers properly configured, you can hear the subs moving behind you, and the rumble of the engines under the couch.
When we started doing this, he taught me to strip wires. The last thing we bought, I helped him configure his wireless minispeaker plug in so the computer could stream podcasts to the kitchen.
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Random happy family memory, inspired by the fact that we're coming up on Ramadan: when most of my family still lived in the same city, we would go to my grandparents' house during Ramadan for iftar with my parents, and all of my maternal aunts and uncles would be there. The food would be spread across two tables, and the house would be full of laughter and talking, with people eating at every available seat or seated on every bit of free space on the ground. I'd be looking after my little cousin Edris, still a baby then, and the TV would be on with something like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune playing. Those nights are an enduring memory of safety and comfort and happiness for me.
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My dad has been dead since 1984. He loved me completely, unequivocally, and exactly as I was from the day I was born until the day he died. My happy memories of him are usually of him either laughing, or telling a joke. To this day, I miss him the most when I hear the kind of joke he liked (usually a Jewish joke) and I can't call him and share it with him.
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When I was 12, my mother had one of her infrequent but radiantly beautiful bouts of English eccentricity, and announced that we were all going hot air ballooning. It was a perfect weekend. The farmhouse was charming, the pilot was delightful and the great silk canopy floating over the plains at dawn was nothing short of electrifying. We were introduced to hives of bees and learned that honey from different flowers has different flavours.
Of course we went back. It was on our second trip, I think, that I was lying in the back of the Holden Kingswood station wagon Jemima. (I had three siblings, who took up the whole back seat, and this was in the early eighties, long before mandatory car seats or safety or strategic arms limitation treaties or cellphones or satnav or GIS.) I was gazing at the stars, and I noticed that Orion, which had been on our left as we drove down the highway, was now on our right. Orion was always easy to spot because of his belt with the nebula buckle, although he's upside down in the southern hemisphere.
"Dad, you took a wrong turn. We've turned around," I said.
He still brags about his 13 year old and her celestial navigation skills. But it was Dad who taught me about celestial navigation, and Orion, and nebulas. It was Dad who took me to the Sydney Observatory and showed me the moons of Jupiter. It was all Dad.
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i don't - i just remember food. and gold.