Our good friend--and best man at our wedding--said, "John is a fascinating guy. He just told me the story about being hit by a train once." My eyebrows raised 3 inches off my face because I did not know this story. Turns out to be true. The man was hit by a train, pulled out of the crumpled bits of metal that would never again resemble a vehicle. He didn't remember what happened until the next afternoon, he walked into a bar, and a man bought him a beer. He asked why, and the man told him he was the one who pulled him out of the car after the train hit him.
John was my stepfather for 22 years. He and my mother were married nearly as long as she and my father were married. I was in my 20s when they married, so he was more like a friend at first, but became a second father to me over the years. He could be opinionated, but if he valued one's opinion, he listened and was able to concede he might be wrong. That's how I know he respected me. He listened to me, even if we didn't always see eye-to-eye on an issue.
He passed away three months ago, on January 29th. We honored his final wishes over the weekend by spreading his ashes in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Cedar Key, FL where he and mother have lived for many years. Mother Nature must have taken a liking to John because the skies were an amazing blue and the water eerily calm on Saturday. We took turns spreading his ashes over the side of the boat, and I whispered my goodbyes as I let a handful slip into the water.
On the flight home, I grabbed Joan Didion's The White Album from my backpack. She wrote an essay in 1975 about an incident that happened on one of her flights to Honolulu in which a man began screaming at a woman. Didion was bothered by this "because it had the aspect of a short story." She didn't want to see life broken down into small pieces or vignettes. She "was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do." Reading this made me think of John's "train" story. Alone, it makes for an intriguing short story in which we see just a snippet of his life, but fortunately, John had many such stories, and his life is more than a novel.
Swim forever, John Parker. Just stay away from the old Cedar Key railroad trestle.
