My Best Friend's Dad

I had the most amazing day yesterday. I spent the day at my best friend's dad's house cleaning it out for the last time. Maybe most people would think that is a morbid thing to have been an amazing day. But to me sometimes the most amazing days aren't necessarily about all happy things. Sometimes the hard memorable things become the amazing things as well. And we spent most of the day laughing and reminiscing and finding treasure.

Exactly 10 years ago we were in college and my best friend's dad moved down to the very edge of New Jersey. Right near the bridge into Delaware because he knew he'd need to be in and out of the Delaware Veterans Hospital pretty much for the rest of his life. We would skip math class in college to go visit her dad in the VA hospital and wait outside in the hallway riding IV stands up and down while he got angry with the nurse for waiting so long to come clean him up. He was completely mentally with it. With his internal organs on strike! Having some sort of a riot inside of him. Nothing is sadder than seeing a strong proud man suffer. And there is No Way In Hell he'd let teenage me and his daughter do the dirty work of nurses for him like my mom often did for my grandmother when she was sick.

The economy was good and we were in the middle of the housing bubble so at 240k the house was a deal, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms. A den, a living room. 2 attics, a fireplace. Been there forever lots of land around and a cute little community. Possibly somewhere for my friend to go after he's gone. And then maybe rent it and have income or just keep it for herself after he was gone. But seven years of medical bills later and an economy that crashed after he had passed away the house was underwater. As a majority of Americans houses had become.

But my best friend made good money. She has always had multiple jobs since we were 17 years old and the state would allow it. She keeps her home space a modest size since she has no kids yet. So for a year and 5 months she paid the underwater mortgage to keep her dad's house. Until one day a year ago. Ten years after we helped her dad move from Union New Jersey down to the border of New Jersey and Delaware. A tree fell on her dad's house.

I remember the day we moved him down. We had to take route 9 down past where the Birch Hill night club had just become The Birch Hill Retirement Community. The place we spent our formative years was gone and we were driving by on the same road for another reason. Some things were ending but others were beginning.

Luckily the neighbor next door was living at his mom's house because she had passed away and called my best friend right away to tell her the tree fell on the house. And he cut it up for her. She patched up the hole but there was still mold in a house not worth as much as was owed on it. So there was nothing to do but stop paying for it and let the bank take it over.

No one will live there. There is no money to fix things that are broken in this economy. There is an abandoned factory in town and warehouses. Buildings. Homes. And half full strip malls.

Our mom's and pop's shops are barely hanging on. I was 1.5 hours away from the densely populated city I live in. Still within the confines of Jersey and the country looked like a run down post apocalypse movie set.

Doesn't anyone else realize the zombie end of times trend is a metaphor? We have a society that doesn't accurately remember the mistakes of the past and that doesn't invest any time or energy into our children's futures. Some people do or would want to if we had a choice of where our tax money was spent. Most people would rather spend our hard earned dollars, paid to government for services, on infrastructure instead of military. Ruining more young boys with war.

I have a few new books and a Super Nintendo to get fixing. The History of The World War publishing date 1920. The books are slightly musty and need to be aired out. We donated most of the medical books except for the female anatomy book from 1972! Can't wait to read that!

Not mint so not worth more than the information printed within them. But special to me. We're not what we owned when we were alive. But we are what we read. What we knew. What we experienced and taught other people.

We found a VHS tape labeled Sightings...
I had to take it. I was hoping alien abductions or some other weird home movie. But it turned out to be television clips of Vietnam.

Vietnam was all over tv when it was happening and I guess whenever he taped this home video off of cable. We forget now because war is hidden on special channels geared to military minded people. But he was must have been sighting himself, his brother, and their friends. Now it is too late to ask which of the thousands of boys in the footage are him and his friends.

His brother suffers from mental illness and health complications from being a Marine and has a hard time getting the money for the help he needs. The waiting list for veterans health benefits is long. You have to prove you're a danger to yourself or others before your mental illness deserves government funding. Bullshit. They should all have access to any counseling they need for the rest o their live. War doesn't ever leave you.

My best friend's dad died of cancer caused by agent orange or one of the other many toxic deforestation chemicals used in Vietnam. So did my mom's best friend in 2010. So did my dad's best friend in 2014. Many men I know have died of lower body internal cancers that spread in the last few years. Men just barely breaching 60 years old. Mentally all there with bodies rotting from wars they fought as boys.

They didn't even have a choice back then.

We found my best friend's dad's draft card from 1969. The pocket change from other countries he traveled too like Germany and the Netherlands while he was in the service. Coins dated from the 1970's in a treasure chest with his initials on the lid with all his cufflinks and a silver dollar in a heart shaped box.

The house was also a time capsule of our teenage years together. Teen magazines in drawers from the start of the new millennium.

My best friend lived in Lavallette where my Gram is from and where I grew up when Hurricane Sandy hit. The building she lived in caved in. On her apartment. Now she will have some important treasures and history of where she came from to travel with her as she moves to the other side of the country.

Finally!

We've been talking about moving to California since we were 14 years old. One of us had to do it eventually. It was a bitter sweet day. In my opinion the best kind. The end of something old and the beginning of something new at the same time. The days you remember in life aren't the simple happy days. They are the challenging days. The days that teach you something.

Rest in eternal peace James Ryan. If you leave nothing else to this world, teaching one child unconditional love is enough. And you loved two.

I've seen love letters from their mom now and seen that sometimes traumas from our maturation come back to haunt us no matter how we run and hide and change.

No amount of preparation or knowledge can fix a broken adult sometimes. We need to start taking better care of and loving unconditionally our children. And not letting another single one go to war for our transgressions. And not letting a single one live through the mental stress of poverty.

Sometimes you can't fix people. You can only learn from their story how to keep more people from suffering. And that is enough. That is all that life is.