My dad’s oldest brother suffered a stroke late last week.
Though Paddy and I have never been especially close, I took the news hard. My sister says sometimes these things hurt more than we think they should because with every loss or near loss, there’s an echo of every loss or tragedy experienced before them.
I agree with that. I can feel it…with compounded interest.
Maybe it’s because the first thought I had was the memory of finding my mother on her bedroom floor the morning of midterms my senior year. She’d suffered a misdiagnosed mini-stroke days before, and had apparently suffered another that night. She didn’t come back home after that.
So when I got the news about Paddy I thought of mom, and dad, and the too damn many friends I’d lost before my twenty-fifth birthday. I thought about my namesakes: my grandmother and my auntie. I thought about how lucky I am to still have the family I do and I a spent a lot of time this weekend mulling over my memories of Paddy - which are too few.
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Dad told me a story of he and Paddy as boys back in Ireland. They’d ride their bikes all over then – to see friends and run errands for their mom and to just get out of the big stale bank house they lived in. They had a favorite hill they’d climb up, to see how fast they could get going coming back down. They had fancy little bikes with hand brakes and those two boys were always very competitive.
There was a day, dad said, that he got going too fast and hit the brakes…but instead of slowing or stopping he went “ass over tea kettle” - flying over the handlebars.
Seems Paddy had switched the cables for the front and back brakes.
I always thought that was a good one, and made my father tell me the story more than once.
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Paddy came to visit us in Anchorage once – I must have been six or seven years old at the time. He drove to see us from Nebraska, all by himself in his big red truck with the camper shell. I remember two things about his visit that summer.
One is was when he pulled into our driveway, and the crunch of the earth under his tires. We must have asked a million times when he’d get to us, in that time before cell phones and handhelds and I can only imagine my parents said something like “any minute now…why don’t you go outside and wait for him?”. I believe we did.
We rarely got to see family in those days. Auntie Kay visited a few times, but she owned a travel agency and that made it easy. Charlene and the kids came once, but that was just after Tommy died and they needed to be around family.
We were just too hard to get to, and it was expensive to get in or out. These were the days of recorded tapes being sent back and forth, because long distance calling was so costly.
So Paddy came all the way up to see us, and that was huge.
The second memory is actually not a memory of his visit at all - but the ghost of his visit and the shadow it cast. At some point during his stay, he swatted Kevin. I don’t know if it was a dap to the back of his head or a more hearty swat, Kevin would have to tell you that.
What I do remember is that my father and his brother didn’t speak for years after his visit. In fact, to the best of my recollection, they didn’t speak until my father found out he was dying and chose to make amends.
I was twenty two then.
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We had a family reunion in Omaha eleven years ago. It was the 40th anniversary of our family immigrating to America. Dad wasn’t there - he’d passed a few years before - but the four of us kids and dad’s wife Suzanne represented.
I have a picture from the big dinner the first night we were there. It captures Paddy and Danny giving a speech – reading newspaper clippings documenting our arrival, standing in front of a map of Ireland and some other bits hung on the wall behind them. My brother Kevin is in the lower left corner of the picture with his hand near his mouth in what someone who doesn’t know him would think a thoughtful pose.
But I know him, and I can see the subtle way his face contorts when he has watery eyes.
We’d all forgotten how much Paddy looked like dad.
Princess Diana died the second night we were all in Omaha.
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Every couple of years now I manage to see Paddy – at a wedding or a funeral or Thanksgiving at my Uncle Danny’s in Tampa.
We kids get a kick out of Paddy’s serious but child like ways and innocent lack of fashion sense. Usually it’s just the western wear, which is nothing to mock, but with each meeting we look forward to his inevitable donning of the baby blue one piece jump suit complete with attached baby blue silver buckled belt.
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I don’t know why Paddy drives everywhere. I never asked him. I imagine, now that I’m considering it, that it has to do more with control and less about heights.
He’s been building a plane in his backyard for years now, and last year underwent elective heart surgery to repair damage he’s had all his life. This so he could pass his physical and get his pilots license.
I don’t know much about the plane he’s built, other than he tied it to a tree to test the engines and wound up yanking the thing out of the ground and scaring the crap out of his neighbors.
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Things are looking good for Paddy, now. His lovely wife got him to the hospital immediately, which is key to recovery in the case of a stroke.
My Auntie Kay relays a tale from his wife that when he woke his second day in the hospital and was asked if he was hungry, he responded with a request for eggs, a steak and a six pack of beer.
I think he’s going to be just fine.
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Snap of Paddy at Kevin’s wedding in Anchorage (which he - of course - drove to). He was a dancin’ fool and wore out most of the bridesmaids.
Somewhere around my 14th year, my father bestowed two sets of boxing gloves upon us. In an Irish family of teens and pre-teens, it’s the kind of gift that keeps on giving. Plus it lessens the chances of jacking up all the work done by oodles of loot and hours in an orthodontic chair. 
I write, you read. It's a clean and simple relationship.