I got the call from the Santa Barbara Police Department.
“Is this Josh? Your dad is lost and doesn’t know how to get home,” the officer said. “He doesn’t have his ID. Can you come pick him up?”
It takes a lot to disrupt me from my routine, but I rushed out and picked him up on Garden Street. He had taken a taxi to pay his rent at the property management company. It was raining that day, and they said he became lost and disoriented.
That moment was earlier this year, and it signaled a dramatic change in my life.
I was going to have to help take care of him.
How do you go from being a boy watching your father be the toughest man on the street to someone who needs your help to survive? That’s where I am. I do his shopping. I pay his rent. I spend more time with him at his studio apartment.
It’s a surreal place to be, because it feels like not so long ago, the relationship was reversed.
I am buying his meals. I am driving him around town. I am thinking about his future. Where did time go? Where did life go?
When I am shuffling quickly up and down the aisles of the grocery store buying him yogurt, bread, cereal and other soft foods, in my head, I am daydreaming, lost in good and bad memories of childhood, when he was buying me food and making sure I was fed for the day.
And now he’s 83. I am still his son, but I am also a father of two children. I am stuck in the middle of multiple generations, and some days the world feels upside down.
My dad and I didn’t have a stereotypical father-son relationship. He never took me to a Dodgers game. He never signed me up for Little League or AYSO. I don’t think we ever saw a movie together in the theater. We never took a vacation or rode on a plane together. No camping. He never taught me how to ride a bike. (My friend Marty taught me when I was 30 years old.)
My father was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. as a baby. He dropped out of La Cumbre Junior High School in eighth grade and worked every day after that, sometimes multiple jobs. He had kids with a wife before he met my late mother.
He wasn’t able to help me much with my homework, and we never talked about SAT scores at the dinner table. I can’t say we ever ate all together at the dinner table.
I did learn how to play poker as a child at Alameda Park and Pershing Park with his street and homeless friends. My dad had a rough life. He lived at times on the streets or in his car. He was so comfortable outside, we walked and wandered everywhere, all over Santa Barbara.
I spent a lot of time observing him and his friends and hanging out in their garages as they watched closed-circuit TV boxing matches, while smoking, drinking and cheering.
My dad had a love for Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley. Ali was his hero, for what he did in and out of the ring. I know every Elvis song, even the country and gospel stuff, by heart, and “Jailhouse Rock” is still one of my favorite movies of all time. Some of the music triggers bad memories too, but much of it is nostalgic.
He was obsessed with working out and lifting weights, and he spent a lot of time teaching me proper form. “You have to feel the burn of the muscle if you want it grow,” he would say. We watched Western movies, and his favorite TV shows like “The Fall Guy” and “Hawaii Five-0.”
Every time I cruise the deli to shop for him, I recall the many times when he would stop at Hi Time Stop & Shop liquor store on El Sueno Road and he’d buy me a hot dog and he’d dress it with pickle relish and ketchup. One of those memories that sticks with you.
My father wasn’t big on experiences, but more on being around.
There were also many downsides. I wasn’t ever really allowed to leave the house unless it was with him. I was shown love through food. I never did a sleepover or a playdate with friends. I saw my first movie in a theater with a friend when I was about 16 years old, a junior in high school. It was “Stand and Deliver,” with my friend Marcus. My mom was around, but pre-occupied with work and their own issues.
You don’t realize the flaws of your parents when growing up. You don’t really judge them in the moment. But when I became a husband and a father, I knew that my wife Dina and I would do many things differently. We pushed our son into everything, full-force, 200%.
He played every sport, and I coached him. He acted. He danced. He excelled in school, and we had goals for him. Everything that I didn’t have, I wanted him to have. He got into UC Berkeley. I am not sure I even knew UC Berkeley existed when I graduated high school.
Same goes for our 10-year-old daughter Megan; she excels in everything and has all the opportunities I didn’t because of me and her mother Dina. She qualified for the Math Super Bowl, Battle of the Books, danced, performed, plays sports, piano, violin, the whole thing.
My brain is full of thoughts of the present, the past and future. I am simultaneously a kid myself, a father, and an adult son. When these worlds and memories collide in my head it can be overwhelming.
So, as I am trying to be the best dad I can be, I am also still trying to be a decent son. I don’t really have a choice. Dina and I are really all my father has. A few years ago, we navigated the paperwork to get him a Section 8 voucher. He lives on Social Security and a pension from working for years at the Devereux Foundation as a maintenance man.
I am squeezing in time with him around my other two jobs and life. The whole situation is forcing me to relive my childhood, which is difficult, because I have spent most of my adulthood trying to forget my childhood and focus on making life for my kids better than I had it.
But I guess there’s a certain reckoning that is facing me. I don’t know how much time my dad has left at 83. And there’s so much that I learned from him that directly or indirectly I pass on to my kids.
He worked hard, I worked hard. He put food on the table, I help put food on the table. And every time I watch the Los Angeles Rams, there’s a boy in me hearing my dad cheer for Vince Ferragamo to win the Super Bowl.
And although we never had a lot of books around the house growing up, we had newspapers. The Santa Barbara News-Press and the Los Angeles Times, mostly. He always used to tell me, “Everything you need to know you can read in the newspaper. And you learn pretty much the whole story in the first paragraph.”
That certainly stuck with me. I can stare at and read a newspaper article over and over again and still enjoy it.
He took care of me, along with my mother Rose who is deceased, for better or worse, and I must do my best now to take care of him. Being a father to my kids, and a father to my father, is just the stage of life I am in right now. I am not sure how much I want to let the past matter, anymore. The present, even if it feels upside down, seems a lot more important.
