The old man

By Bill Kisliuk

When my sister Amy called me at my desk in the newsroom and gave me the word that I’d better get to Los Angeles, my wife, my wife’s hound and I packed in a second and sped south.

As we rolled onto surface streets near my parents home in West L.A. about six hours later, angry red brake lights met us in every direction. It was rush hour.

I tried every dodge and side street I knew to get to the house quickly, but the effort to get to dad’s side before he died ended a block short, at Olympic Boulevard and Veteran Avenue.

One damn block. The stuff of screenplays, I think sometimes.

My sister Margaret called me as we waited for the signal to change at Olympic.

I pulled the phone out of my jeans pocket.

She asked where we were, then delivered the news.

Dad was gone. But then again I’m pretty sure dad was gone before he truly breathed his last.

I had felt it about 80 miles back, looking at the forbidding mountains atop the Tejon Pass as we barreled south.

Of course, I can’t say for sure whether what I felt was him lifting off or my own self suddenly struck by the inevitable.

But I believe it was him, because it hit me just the way he, a scientist to the marrow, would have had it: No fanfare, just a matter-of-fact reversing of the earth’s magnetic fields, undoing everything at once.

Melancholy, sure, but easily explained by immutable laws and mathematical probabilities.

Was it him?

I’ll never know. But I believe we all can tap into the sixth sense, sometimes playfully (we have a ghost in our home who throws dictionaries and decorative tiles, but never in anger) and sometimes when there is a lot on the line.

Dad’s been gone less than a year. While I find I can conjure him whenever I need to, he doesn’t take it upon himself to visit much.

That’s how he was, or at least how he was with me. He’d take it all in, but he wouldn’t interfere unless he thought it was important, even if I was doing something he thought would cause me grief or — just as likely in my twenties — cost him money.

A few month’s after dad died, Uncle Roy called from Massachusetts. He called us all — me, my sisters and my brother Tom.

It was dad’s birthday, and Uncle Roy and dad always talk on their birthdays.

He was calling us, but he was also calling on his brother, my father. I’ve never loved Uncle Roy more than at that moment.

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