My Dad and his Granddaughter
Maybe David Letterman is following the comedic party line by deferring all praise but his farewell only fuels my suspicion that he has no idea how much he means to us out here. The laughter a given, its delivery amounts to an incalculable debt that I wish I could pay in full to ease the self-doubt and diminish the burden he seems to carry.
Circling back to the late 70’s and the ever present contract
negations between Johnny Carson and NBC, the conversation was never far from
who would replace the American icon. The first time I saw Dave on the Tonight
Show, the question was immediately answered.
I began in the morning, continued in the summer of ’82 and haven’t
wavered since. The calls home to Mom, viewer mail and the guy under the stage,
Late Night gave us something to shoot for as class clowns, when hitting on girls and
– I don’t know – deadening the pain at a funeral.
He was our guy, the Johnny of our generation, and he led us
in doing all we could to outdo our peers in the most original way possible. The
comedy, though, did leave our elders behind.
Me and my father have always had a similar sense of humor.
We bonded watching Barney Miller, MASH and the Rockford Files. He once he
reasoned to my mom that it was an important part of my development to see the “R”
rated Dirty Harry at age 12. “If there’s any nudity, I’ll throw a coat over his
head,” he won the argument.
So it seemed a natural fit that he join me when I dialed up Late
Night in my college years. But disappointingly,
I could never enlist him.
He’d hear my laughing, and there was always this look saying,
“your generation not mine.” Unfortunately, it took tragedy to make him come
around. Suffering a stroke in 1997, he
was mostly relegated to watching TV.
As it were, my dad always had this philosophy that you work
hard, maybe you suffer and your reward comes at the end of the day. You give
yourself a little relaxation in the knowledge that you’ve survived another day
and cash it in with a good night’s sleep. This clearly applied here and David
Letterman filled the relaxation part.
Me, and mostly my mother, also earned the merits of a good
day worked in taking care of him. However, it was emotional relief that I
required. Yes, it was terrible to see my very active father relegated to a
semi-ambulatory state, but the hardest part was his loss of speech – save yes
and no.
My father was truly a focal point of which communication
flowed. At home and family functions, his facilitation always made things work,
and this proved an incredible loss for all of us.
On a smaller scale, one on one could no longer really be two
way conversations. You could certainly
make him laugh but witty comebacks or inspired wisdom now had to be contained
within the tone of his yes or no or movement of his hands or face.
Nonetheless, watching The Late Show with my dad became a
ritual that I did my best not to miss.
In part, because I felt it was a small gift that I had given him – even though
it was his decision to start tuning in. (My dad may have lost some capabilities
but he still commanded the home and the airwaves).
Of course, we laughed and laughed and laughed. His reaction has
always been to lean forward in his chair and then look at me as if say, “where
does Dave come up with this stuff.”
More importantly, the punchlines we shared for 18 years,
which resoundingly confirmed our similar sense of humor, became the two way
conversation we had lost and neither of us had to say a word.
Easing our burden, I hope this means something for his, and
substitutes as a partial payment that can never be fully be repaid.
No comments:
Post a Comment