3/5/21 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Third Grade getting ready for their day!

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family:

I was visiting with my father at OSU Hospital on Wednesday evening where he is under observation for health issues yet undiagnosed. He will be 89 years old at the end of the year and is a cancer survivor among other aches and ailments that befall people of an advanced age.

In a way this visit along with my time with him last week in the emergency room while waiting for a bed was nice. Since the pandemic began last March our face to face visits have been regulated and timed. On Wednesday I got there shortly after 4 and could hang out until visiting hours were over at 7.

Although my Dad struggles a bit with short term memory, like a lot of people of advanced age his long term memory and recollection of the past can be quite perceptive and accurate. And like myself, a senior citizen only 24 years from his age, we old people like talking about the past. We tend to focus on the good old days, forgetting things which may at the time seemed like a big horrendous deal but now are simply flickers of memory that get snuffed out by all the good in our past lives.

As the topics of his memory and mine shifted from era to era and place to place names of all of those people that he has known in his 88 years came alive for a bit. Most of the people mentioned are gone. What struck me is that all of them had an impact on his life. The older one gets the more people there are. 

As a Korean War veteran my Dad mentions his Top Sargeant a lot who tried hard to have him make a career out of the Army. Childhood friends, a few who are still alive in Baltimore, are frequently brought up. Relatives of course. His parents and grandparents, his aunts and uncles and cousins. Dad came from a big family in Baltimore, Maryland.

For a time when I was younger we lived in the small town of Northport, Long Island. This was an idyllic time for me, grades 2-6 and a prime time for my father establishing his career in the steel business, raising a family of five and then six children, partying with my Mom a la sixties style at the beach, the tennis club and cocktail parties at friends homes and back yards.

After moving to Columbus by Dad got into the restaurant business where he stayed for almost 20 years. The cast of characters who came and went through the doors of Deibels in German Village is large and colorful and when each name was mentioned an image clear as if it were yesterday came into my mind as we reminisced. As I worked many of those years with him through high school and college and into my teaching career we could tell stories for days about all of these people, and the stories would be mostly stories of their good qualities and how we miss them.

We talked about his friends from his neighborhood in Upper Arlington and his many many friends from Our Lady of Victory Parish.

The annual trip to Fenwick Island Delaware with extended family, relatives and friends for 40 some years brings to mind many other names and faces, many of his generation who are gone.

Dad had careers post Deibels days. He ran the Mid-Ohio Race Track for a time. He coached at Bishops Hartley and Watterson where he also did substitute teaching. I worked for him for years at Deibels and then he came to work for me at those schools. In schools, of course, one encounters hundreds of people each year, many of whom stand out with fresh and warm memories.

Every conversation that I have with my father eventually comes around to one person, his wife, my mother, Janet. She has been gone for the better part of five years ago. Tom and Janet met in Ocean City, Maryland. They married quickly before he went off to war and stayed together for the better part of sixty years. My Dad misses my Mom with an intensity that is a wonder to behold.

As the time for departing came it seemed as if all those people we had been talking about were in the hospital room with us and I said, “You know, one day you’ll have a big reunion.” We joked that my Mom would not only meet him at the gates to heaven but by this time is probably already in charge of the welcoming committee that greets newcomers there. This made him smile and the best part of that was maskless in his hospital room I could see that large broad smile that I have known all these years.

Jim Silcott