Three Celts in a Car With Kazoos

CHAPTER ONE

It wasn’t raining on the day that I died. I was a little disappointed at that. Instead of a soaking rain, I ran through a cool October morning, a thin fog hanging over the quaint Pennsylvania college town where my wife and I had spent the last twenty years of our lives together. You’ll understand what it’s like to love someone that much, I’m sure. It may take you a while. Anyway, I don’t want to tell you a love story. Instead, I want to tell you a story about how my three boys grew up and became men.

I don’t have much time here, now. I keep looking around this strange world I’m in. I hear and sometimes see the ocean I ride on, but I always feel it, even when I’m reliving events from my life. This is a great gift I’m given, the chance to tell my stories. And though time shouldn’t matter here, I get the sense that it does. I don’t want to waste this gift, so get comfortable and get ready to listen. This story isn’t so much about me. It’s about three boys who were adults in the eyes of the world but needed their old man to get out of the way so they could see it themselves.

I died in my favorite chair in my study. It’s a comfortable chair, and if I had to pick something to die in, I’d rather it be that chair than in a bed. People say it’s better to die on your feet, and I can see the allure, but I like dying in a comfy chair. When I had the heart attack while jogging, I turned around and went home, crawled into my house, and got into my chair.

You might wonder why I didn’t ask my wife, Amy, to come to give me one last kiss. The answer is two-fold. The most-important reason is that she would try to save my life. I’m a professor at a college and, I think, rather brilliant, and the risk of brain damage, paralysis, or losing bowel and bladder control terrifies me. I had complete control of my mind and body, so if I was going to die, the ability to choose the time and manner of my demise had a certain appeal. I didn’t want to see her cry as my last memory of this world and this good life I had, so it was an easy choice to finish out my days here in this chair without calling her cell phone as she was out shopping with friends.

The other reason was that my wife, as much as she loves me, wouldn’t allow me to have that last glass of whiskey. She would argue – dying or not – that it was too early for whiskey. If I was about to die, I wanted that taste on my lips.

All that, and I had to leave three messages.

Intense pain is hard to push through, but I – after a couple of shaky drinks – called my sons and knew the phones would go straight to voicemail. They were all working or in some other setting where phones would be silenced. I left three messages that I think they all saved in some fashion or another.

I’ll start with my middle son, Riley. He might be more important to you than the others. Riley is a psychologist and a pretty successful one. I was an English professor who married a woman with a brilliant mathematical and scientific mind; my children each inherited our gifts to varying degrees. They also managed to get some of our looks and meld them together into an obvious familial resemblance, but each uniquely his own. Do all parents say that? I wonder. Ask your parents for me when you can.

When my youngest son, Sean, called Riley, Riley sat in his office having just finished with a patient – sorry, he’ll tell you that they’re called clients, not patients – and looking out through the window as the sun streamed through the orange and red trees that lined the thin patch of lawn between his office building and the parking lot.

Riley believed in trying to keep a semi-professional look for his patients – uh, clients – so he tended to wear jeans to work with button-down shirts, nice suit jackets, and dress shoes. Of all my kids, he was the only one who got straight, auburn hair that he kept cut neatly. All of our kids got my blue eyes and the bad vision that went with them – though I hope that’s a plague you avoided – and Riley wore glasses instead of contacts like Sean or Lasik surgery like Patrick, my oldest son.

When Sean called, the caller ID picture tag was a picture of him half in a gorilla suit and hanging upside down at a Halloween party where, I’m sure, a few adult beverages had been consumed.

Riley, Sean said. Pop’s dead. Just now – dead…

What? Riley asked.

Heart. He didn’t…

Where’s Mom? Riley asked.

Uh, she’s here, at the house. Aunt Mary came over, others…Pastor Potluck – I mean, Pastor Williams – is here, too. He’s dead…he’s just…

I’ll be there. Did Mom find him?

No, Sean said. I got his message on my phone and tried to call him back. I called 911 and got there as soon as I could. Ambulance beat me there and they worked on him, but couldn’t save him.

Okay, Riley said. Call Patrick. I’m on my way there.

Just come home, Sean said.

Riley hung up, canceled his appointments for the rest of the day, but didn’t get right out of his chair. He turned his chair away from his office and stared at the trees as they laughed with the kisses of the wind. A couple of red leaves broke their moorings and began a twisting dance toward the ground.

His eyes watered, but his cleanly-shaven jaw set itself as he picked up his phone and dialed his wife.

Carrie? he said, as if someone else would have answered her phone. My dad’s dead.

What? When?

He recounted everything he had heard from Sean.

What do you need? Do you need me to come get you?

Just go to Mom’s, Riley said. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.

What do you need?

At that moment, Riley’s phone alerted him to my message. He heard the beep and looked at the phone for a second and saw that he had a new voicemail. He frowned at it and a tear broke from the dam of his eyes and worked down his cheek. He cleared his throat before answering Carrie.

I’m fine. I’ll see you at…Mom’s, Riley said. Bye. Love you.

He dialed in and got his message. I’m afraid my last words to him in that life were too much for him to keep back the tears. I tried to teach my boys that it’s okay to cry, but the world has a way of breaking men and storing up their tears so they can only escape as anger. And then the world tells them that they can’t be angry because people don’t like that, leaving men powerless. When tears finally do come to men who are used to damming them up, they have a way of gathering friends and pouring out as a flood. Society should probably change that, but I can’t do anything about it now.

And sorry about the rambly analysis of how the world treats people. Being dead gives one a certain perspective on life, the universe, and everything.

Back to the story. It took Riley a long time to get back under control enough to pack up his briefcase, leave some directions in an email to his practice’s scheduler, and then go out into the carefree wind and leaves as they mocked his pain.

Riley turned on his car and quickly switched off the radio as aggressive music clashed with his mood. I sat beside him in his car as he drove to my house. He cried more, but not as intensely as before.

Even in the seat of his car, I felt the pitch and roll of the sea I ride on. Faintly, I hear the waves and distant seagulls calling. I think the biggest surprise for me was that I’m not afraid. The worst part is watching the pain as it ran through my son on his drive to my house. I tried to touch him, but he jumped at my touch like I shocked him. I spoke to him, but he didn’t acknowledge me. Instead, I sat and watched as, layer by layer, Riley built up his defenses. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hands and his jaw worked a few times and his lip trembled a bit before, finally, the last of his armor was in place.

This is the way of things, he said to no one – maybe God, I don’t know. Life coldly lowers the hammer on one generation and then moves its unfeeling cylinder to the next. This is how life goes.

He turned down the street where I had lived my life. The house was a modest Cape Cod with a fair amount of lawn – which I tried to kill in constant warfare every year – and a two-car garage that I had expanded when we moved in two decades before. In defiance of time and reality, Amy and I had left the old tire swing and tree house up in the ancient, noble tree in the back.

Too many cars, Riley muttered as he turned into my driveway and found an empty spot. Mom won’t like this.

That’s true. Amy didn’t like crowds and preferred the quiet life. In a time of grief like this, solitude would be her preference instead of the constant stream of well-meaning friends and relations. Too bad that good people were experts at the Golden Rule and never really consider how a person might actually want to be treated.

Riley parked and took a few breaths before saying, Paint your face blue, Riley Sloan.

I smiled at that. I had always said that to my boys when they needed to be brave for something. His eyes looked through his glasses and up the red brick sidewalk to the front door of my house.

‘Come home,’ he said, Riley continued to that shapeless companion he talked to. Isn’t it funny how ‘home’ becomes a fluid concept when you grow up, but yet you almost always think of where you grew up when you say it?

He got out of the car, leaving me to contemplate that statement. Riley and Carrie had their own modest home closer to Riley’s office and the city in which he worked. He had wanted to get out of this college town where, he said, everyone lived in a perpetual purgatory between being adults and being children – even the old people.

That idea of home rattled around in the ectoplasmic space that I think I’ll still call my brain. Riley squared his shoulders as he walked away from me and I felt like there was a bit of armor that was always in place with my middle son, allowing him to build up this current, nearly impenetrable suit on a solid, perpetual foundation.

Clearly, there was something I still had to do for my son.

I didn’t expect being dead to be so much work.

CHAPTER TWO

I’ll take a break from Riley and his armor for a moment and pick up with my oldest son, Patrick.

Patrick is the only Sloan boy who got a recessive gene for baldness. He compensated by working out and shaving his head completely bald. He once told me that all those Bruce Willis movies we watched together made him feel better about being bald. He wanted to be a badass, and, I’ll admit – probably with fatherly pride – that he looked the part. Without any tattoos, of course, because his mother would have thrashed him for it and, no matter how badass you are to the rest of the world, your mother will always be your Kryptonite.

Time is a relative concept right now for me. The sea – oh, I wish I could smell it! – drives me forward to somewhere I can’t imagine. Yet, during the voyage, I can ride the currents to see things that happened before and right after my death. I think the ability to ride on it, back and forth in the universe and time to see what we were and what we could have been is both a blessing and a curse. I wonder where this ship is taking me, but that’s something I’ll find out soon and an eternity from now.

You see, I went back and watched my life from day one till now and, I have to admit, that the love story of my younger days was probably the best part. Most of my life was spent somewhere between uneasiness and sheer terror. It occurred to me – as I watched my oldest son adjust his blue tie in his bright white shirt and light gray suit – that my boys might be living that same way beneath their varying façades.

All his life, Patrick was the neatest (meaning tidiest) of my sons, despite his toughness. I think that I might have been a little more uptight with him, harder because I didn’t know how to handle being a father. By the time Riley came two years later, I had it figured out a bit better. When Sean showed up as an o-my-god-we’re-pregnant moment four years after Riley, I was pretty laid back about parenting. I think each of those approaches might have unintentionally damaged the adult personalities of my children.

Then again, this could all be a load of crock, like half of the parenting advice I read in books and magazines when Patrick was born. Doctors can’t make up their minds on which way babies should sleep. Put them on their stomachs, they die of SIDS. Put them on their backs, they aspirate on their own vomit. Let them cry it out when they’re first home from the hospital. Wait until they’re four-months old before letting them cry. Never let them cry and always hold them. Spank them. Don’t spank them. Make them be well-behaved. Let them be children. The endless contradictions that face good parents nowadays probably explains the sheer number of parents who think, Screw it! and do whatever feels right at the time.

Sorry, I got on another tangent there. At the moment, let’s return to Patrick adjusting his blue tie. Most people would probably say that Patrick is the most-successful of my children. He got his mother’s genius for numbers to the same skewed strength that Sean got my language skills. Sean writes novels that sit unpublished because someone hasn’t given him the chance to get off the slush pile. He sees whole worlds in his head and translates them into stories. Patrick sees numbers in his head and can translate them to almost any pattern. He has chosen to use that skill for investment banking. He worked his way up the ladder at his bank so quickly that he didn’t have time to make enemies. Patrick actually predicted the stock-market tumble and recession in 2008 and somehow made money while others lost.

His office at the regional headquarters of a major bank is in an old building that has been renovated so completely inside that it’s a brick-and-mortar contradiction. The outside retains the neo-gothic architecture of the nineteenth century when the building was constructed, but the inside has glass offices and soul-sucking cubicles.

Patrick’s office is a study in balance. The office has glass walls on two sides – windows masquerading as walls, really – and one of the real walls has a big window overlooking the city. The one wall with no glass and something hanging on it has his degrees and a couple of family photos hanging in perfect balance. His glass desk sits in the exact center of the room with his computer screen in the exact center of the desk.

A knock at Patrick’s door made him look up. A young woman peeked her head in. Her hair was so tightly pulled into a bun that it appeared to age her by ten years.

Mr. Sloan?

Yeah? Patrick asked. And I think I told you to call me Patrick. Mr. Sloan is my father.

I smiled at the irony. It’s actually Dr. Sloan or Professor Sloan. No one has called me Mr. Sloan since I stopped teaching high schoolers during the early days of the Clinton Administration. Actually, though, the real irony is that my boys are the only Misters Sloan from our noble family available to the world at the moment.

Yes, sir, the woman said as she stepped into the room with a binder clutched to her chest. She wore a tweed dress – and I thought I had the corner on tweed! I have that information you requested, but I still don’t understand why you couldn’t just look at the numbers on your computer.

Patrick cleared a spot on his desk and motioned her over. Because I can’t see the pattern on my computer screen. I need to feel the paper, too. It makes me feel connected to the numbers.

It would be more economical to use the computer, the woman said as if he hadn’t spoken. She put a binder on the desk.

Patrick smiled. Even seated, his posture was ramrod straight. Thank you. That will be all.

She bristled at being dismissed like that. As she checked her anger and walked stiffly out the office, I noticed a couple of things. She was probably only one rung of the ladder below Patrick and had a small crush on him, but he was never going to notice her as long as she had her hair up like that and wore tweed.

His cell phone was on his desk and it vibrated. He looked down at a picture of Sean with a bucket on his head.

Ah, what does the only Sloan who doesn’t have a master’s degree want now? Patrick said.

He’s working on it, I said, but Patrick didn’t hear me as he brought