Me, Myself and Mom - Ongoing

Story 1

In junior high school, my friend and I used to lock her younger brother in the basement with us and relentlessly sing along to her dad's Harry Belafonte records. This might have been fine, maybe even cool in 1950, but in 1989, it just registered as pure torture for the boy. Coconut Woman became our favorite song and we used to play it over and over again, teasing Timmy that he was, indeed, the coconut woman Harry was crooning about:

Coconut woman is calling out and everyday you can hear her shout

Get your coconut water, four for five!

Man, it's good for your daughter, four for five!

Coco got a lotta iron, four for five!

Make you strong like a lion, four for five!

Even after we would set him free, a simple four for five! muttered under our breath at the dinner table would usually render him into a sniveling ball of nine year old mess, which, of course, brought us unbridled satisfaction. Perhaps that's the reason he chose to become a tank gunner in the US Army, rolling through the war torn deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, proving to us and the world that he was no Coconut Woman.

For me, the song stuck. Its catchy chorus became my personal anthem, my preferred method of distraction during the crap moments in life, a melody I kept handy when most all felt wrong. In eighth grade it beat out Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, the more obvious choice for a young teen getting dumped for the very first time (four for five!) and it was ringing through my head on the god awful day of my father's funeral during graduation year.

In absolutely no way whatsoever did four for five! actually make me feel any better about kissing my dad's forehead, which smelled like a nauseating mix of formaldehyde and my grandmother's talcum powder bought at a Queens five and dime over forty years prior. Nor did it make me feel better about squeezing his frozen hands for the very last time, his fingers threatening to break off like sharp winter icicles dangling from the leaf ridden gutter on my family's suburban house.

Alive and warm, those were the hands that had built me my dream dollhouse with the white stucco walls and the lights that turned on and off; the hands that had clapped enthusiastically after being subjected to yet another roller skating performance on our back patio or dance recital in some school auditorium; they were the hands that had rowed our canoe safely back to shore after the strong current on a small Florida canal had threatened to dump the two of us into the wide open Atlantic at dusk; they were the hands that had carried me, time and time again, from car seat to bed, without so much as the slightest disturbance to my toddler slumber.

He wasn't even in the ground yet and I already missed everything about him. It would take me years to reconstruct memories of my father as he was - alive and healthy; years to override the images of his cancer days, which in the early 90's were particularly greuling as the chemo side effect quelling pharmaceuticals hadn't quite hit the market yet. And years to blur the image of him - my dad - tucked neatly into his coffin. Not with the peaceful smile that the mortician had i'm sure intended, but rather, looking more like a grade school biology experiment gone wrong. A withered man set against a backdrop of cheap Torchiere lights, valanced curtains, folding chairs, an outdated raspberry carpet and the Muzak soundtrack of Beethoven's Greatest Hits. It was as if a team of audio-visual ninjas had swooped into his funeral and massacred anything that might have sounded or looked remotely nice just to remind us how fucking terrible the whole situation actually was.

Since I couldn't walk around all day with my eyes closed and ears plugged like I had wanted, I chose instead, to divert my attention away from the Muzak, away from the chorus of awkward sobs and sniffles and into one continuous loop of four for five!