About ten weeks after my dad died, the great comedian Robert Schimmel died, too. This was a big deal to me, and not just because I loved his work. Schimmel was something my dad and I shared for years. Once I met him and asked him to sign an autograph for my dad. I didn't even want one for myself. I just wanted to give it to my dad, who loved having it. It still sits on a bookshelf in his den.
Then on Christmas, Miami radio legend Neil Rogers died. Again, a big deal to me, because I remember spending whole days with my dad where we'd listen to "Uncle Neil" for hours in the car.
We are a long way away from the world with three TV stations and the Saturday Evening Post, and since there are so many choices and variations, each person can experience the world a little differently from everyone else. Each person creates his own universe of culture (in as much as the two poop-joke purveyors named above constitute culture), friends, food, stories, memories, etc. And when a person dies, the universe of experiences and preferences he or she spun may remain intact for a while, but it too, must disappear little by little as life rolls on. That is what hit me about Schimmel and Rogers dying.
More and more of the way my dad experienced the world will surely change or slip away soon. Not just through celebrities dying, but through stories slipping from memory, worn out jokes being worn the rest of the way out, restaurants closing, streets I may never have occasion to visit again, through losing touch with some friends and associates who were really his and not ours, and through a thousand other small changes that simply happen everyday in the world.
This post meandered a long way away from what I intended to write after I decided on that clever title. I was going to pay tribute to my dad's personal universe by describing some of the more colorful people he knew. He knew a lot of eccentrics, and may have been one himself. It's a pattern I don't mind finding myself repeating in my adult life. Maybe you will hear about the "I'm sure gonna miss you guys" guy and the, "They asked what college I had went to" guy in a future post.
When we think about lost loved ones, we're not just remembering the person or our time together. Inherent in our memories is the way they experienced the world. For my dad, it boiled down to some combination of music, machines, and memorable people. Staying connected to that version of the world, even as it changes, helps us feel close to the ones we miss.
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