On January 4th, my father passed away from complications due to dementia. My father was a great man. He cared about his family and would do anything for us. I have a few stories to tell.
1. My father worked for Ford. He was there for three decades and was really good at his job. He was promoted to a manager position and was making a ton of money. In the early 90's his was demoted because Ford wanted to condense roles and whatnot. This was something that he didn't like as he really liked his role at his job. There is some good news to come out of this as they didn't take away his manager pay despite him not being a manager anymore. He knew that they were going to take away this pay so he worked as much as he could. He would work nights and weekends to make as much money as he could. They never took away his pay, though but he was making a ton working all these hours. He always had time for his family, though and we got to spend a lot of time with him. If there was a baseball game that I was playing, then he would be there cheering me on.
2. My father, along with my mother, championed my love of film. He would go to the gas station that was by our house every Friday to get me copies of both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. I would read the movie reviews from both Gene Siskel (Tribune) and Roger Ebert (Sun-Times). This is why I fell in love with Siskel & Ebert. I loved their reviews and my father and I watched the show every weekend. We also went to the movies all the time. We had a deal: if there was a film he wanted to see we would go see it on Saturday night. Then, on Sunday, we would go to see whatever I wanted to see. Now, I didn't get to see everything I wanted. The man had his limits. However, I got to see a lot of the films I wanted to see. He took me to see HARD TARGET, SEVEN, ARMY OF DARKNESS, LETHAL WEAPON 3 and 4, LEPRECHAUN 2, NO ESCAPE, THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT and...
JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY
I remember going to see JASON GOES TO HELL with my father at a theater that was a decent distance from our house. You see, this was back in the day when all movie theaters didn't get every film released. You would get one theater that would get some of the films released while another theater would get the others. JASON GOES TO HELL wasn't playing at our normal theater so we had to go a bit further than we would normally go. We went into the theater thinking we were seeing a horror film, but we laughed our asses off the whole time. When we left, I asked him if he liked the film. This was something that I did after everything we saw. He asked me if it was supposed to be a comedy. I said "no". He then said that it was the funniest film he had seen in a long time.
These are just some of the memories I have of my father. I have so many others. I will miss him. He was a great man who lived a great life. In the last few years, we watched as dementia, which is the worst disease anyone can get, took him from us. When he died, he was barely my father anymore. He will be missed by everyone he ever met.
I will also be taking some time off from this site. I need time to get everything in order. I will be back though. I just don't know when.
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