Origin Story, Birthday Edition

From One Incurable Romantic to Another

My siblings and I were horrified when midway through his eighties, our dad acquired a second girlfriend.

We found it sufficiently unsettling that, after his move to a retirement community, he succumbed to the dubious charms of Arlene, a chain-smoking former lawyer with Alzheimer’s and a mean streak. Not a day went by that Dad wasn’t trying to placate her. To think that he, an affable man, had fallen for a woman who was half vamp, half provoked badger stunned us, but we knew he was lonely. Then, he broke his hip.

He was relocated to the on-site nursing home and within a month, he met Dawn, who went after him like a heat-seeking missile. Wheelchair-bound after a massive stroke, Dawn was 15 years his junior. In him, she saw a softie who would buy her Tic-Tacs and trinkets at the first-floor gift shop. He was taken by her appearance, specifically her unwrinkled face (courtesy of the aforementioned stroke, which had rendered it largely paralyzed).

Of course Arlene was going to find out about Dawn, and the shit hit the fan. My dad had to make a choice. Proximity is persuasive, and Dawn won.

Then one day we got a call from the nursing home. Apparently, my father and Dawn had been caught in Dawn’s room attempting something that seemed not merely shocking but impossible for a woman in a wheelchair and a man in a wheelchair with an indwelling catheter. They couldn’t tolerate that kind of hanky-panky, and unless it stopped, the administrators said they’d have to kick my father out.

Mortified, my sister and I wasted no time sitting Dad down. He apologized and looked deeply ashamed, but as he sat there in his wheelchair, head down, somehow, my sister and I still felt it necessary to drive the point home. That part of your life is over, we told him. Done.

Enter my son Jake.

Jake understood the situation in a way my sister and I couldn’t. He stepped into the fault line to let his grandfather know that he got it. That as long as you’re alive, even when sex is out of the picture, you’ve still got Romance.

This ran counter to what I’d personally envisioned for our Dad’s last act: quiet dignity, crossword puzzles, a graying into gray. Instead, Jake showed up with it’s okay and what’s next?

When he introduced his fiancée (his now wife) Jillian, my father was entranced. She’s stunning, but beyond that, my father loved their love for each other.

“How is the Romance going?” he would ask when Jake came to visit, first thing.

At the mention of Romance they were giddy, two old friends sharing a heart-to-heart, which, come to think of it, is precisely what they were.

I tell you this because it captures Jake, whose birthday it is today. Jake, an incurable romantic, just like his grandfather. Jake, for whom I wish not only joyful fulfillment, but continued anticipation of every wonderful what’s next.