1st memoir piece umpteenth revision

Resurrection

“Dad’s atomic clock is dying,” I cried as I ran out into the living room.
Sighing, my husband Drew put aside the newspaper, glanced at the clock and went out to the freezer for AA batteries. Slowly, the clock pulsated back to life, but the date blinked 1/1, and the time wavered between :58 and 12:30.
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Dad was always a difficult person to buy for—so self-effacing that he never seemed to want or need anything.
“You kids just keep your money to buy yourselves something,” he replied when we asked what he wanted for Christmas or his birthday.
So, we kids plied him with Old Spice products; soap on a rope, talcum powder, cologne and deodorant; or button-down shirts, white when he was still working, soft blue checks once he retired; or sometimes more adventurous choices like blue jeans or Pittsburgh Steelers slippers.
No matter what the box contained, Dad grinned crookedly and exclaimed, “This is what I always wanted!”
But I think he meant it when he opened the atomic clock.
I bought the clock at Tuesday Morning when I was searching for something for Dad’s birthday. My once indomitable Dad was struggling more and more to bathe, dress and walk by himself, so Old Spice soap, a button-down shirt or slippers seemed like cruel reminders of what he was losing.
“It’s that Parkinson’s,” he explained as if the illness was just a thoughtless guest that had long overstayed his welcome. “I’m just fine,” he declared, “but that Parkinson’s is the problem.”
The atomic clock seemed just perfect—for Dad and his Parkinson’s with its oversized display of the time, date, day, moon phase and temperature.
“Oh, this is great,” Dad exclaimed when he unwrapped the present.
“But, it can’t be a true atomic clock. Must be a cheaper commercial one that uses radio frequency to get high-quality atomic-derived time. So if we put it in a place where it has a pretty unobstructed atmospheric path to the transmitter, I bet it will keep really accurate time and temperature.”

Dad was pretty measured himself--someone who tenaciously clung to calculable standards in an often-random world—a world he reinvented for us in our bedtime stories.
”Al, you’re going to get those girls are worked up,” Mom called up the stairs every night.
Dad hunkered in even closer for “the good part.”
“And then Punky Polovitch pooped green for a week after we found the dead man hanging in the woods behind our house on Midland Ave,” he chuckled.
“Dead man,” I screamed! This was even better than Punky and Dewey helping Dad rescue his younger brother Henry from the swollen creek when he fell off the bridge into a washtub floating by, and HE COULDN”T EVEN SWIM.”
“What did your Mom say when you told her?” I demanded.
“Oh, I didn’t tell her,” he shrugged. “After my Dad died in the mill accident when I was nine, Mom was busy with the ironing she took in and worrying about paying the rent, so I was in charge of my younger brothers.”
I gaped at my sisters—we were in charge of our younger brothers but we didn’t drag them into the woods, find dead men and jump into creeks to save people. Mom would find out, and she would kill us.
“That’s why I want you girls to really try in Mr. Ross’s swim lesson tomorrow,” Dad wound up, punctuating his personal Grimm fairy tale with a moral. “Swimming can come in handy.” And that was that—another life lesson fashioned from his hardscrabble childhood.
Then he would stretch out on floor between our beds to wait until we fell asleep. Dad would soon be snoring so loudly that the bedroom floor would be reverberating, and Mom would have to come up to wake him.
Dad could fall asleep anywhere, anytime. He said it drove his B-24 crew members crazy that the night before a mission, he could just lie down and “start sawing logs” while they lay awake waiting for the 3AM wake-up call.
“Doesn’t do any good worrying about something you can’t change,” Dad said whenever I told him that I was afraid of an upcoming test or recital.
“Just do your best; just do your best,” he added.
And Dad always did his best—for all of us.
He was the constant meridian in our chaotic household of six children, two grandparents, one wife and numerous pets.
.
When Dad moved into an assisted living residence, his atomic clock moved with him and sat on his bedside table near the window. I would arrive for a visit and find Dad with the Weather Channel blaring and an oversized WWII airplane book splayed in his lap while he nodded in his recliner dreaming of his bombing missions.
“Hi Dad,” I said as I bent to kiss his cheek.
“Oh hi, Teri dear,” he whispered as he woke up.
On a good day, he glanced at the Atomic Clock and said, “It’s only 4PM, and it looks like it’s a nice sunny day and about 70 degrees, so why don’t we go out on the porch until supper.”
“Sure Dad, “ I’d replied as I steadied his arm while he slowly pushed his walker out to the porch.
The night Dad died, my family and I crowded into his small bedroom at the Household of Angels as he struggled to breathe. For the previous week, we had kept a vigil in round-the-clock shifts by his bedside as he lay unconscious and we talked, laughed, cried, ate, drank and slept with Dad, for the last time.
“Let go, Dad. Let go,” we whispered but he clung on for eight days.
The essence of Dad was all that was left—a distilled spirit captive in a shrunken, emaciated and almost unrecognizable body. Despite the indignity of sharing the last twenty years of his life with “that Parkinson’s,” Dad left on his own terms and at his own time. As I watched him stop struggling and his spirit sprung free, I glanced over at the Atomic Clock: 10:40 PM 5/19/06 FRI 72 degrees. “Perfect timing, Dad,” I whispered. “It looks like there’s an unobstructed path to the Transmitter.”

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I grabbed the newly revived clock from Drew and raced outside to put it in the sun. Miraculously the display began to re-emerge: 10:23 9/7/07 FRI 87.8 degrees. I cradled the clock as I walked back inside and propped it in the window above my desk where it has safeguarded me for the last fifteen months. I think a GPS would position my desk window as southeast but I know that my atomic clock is facing north—true north on a barely visible prime meridian.