♪ fa la la la la, and Kalamazoo

So last night we decorated our tree, with my Jonathan Gilbert on Skype on my laptop, having gone to dinner to raise a glass in the memory of my boy's other grandfather, whose first name happened to be: Gilbert. Life is funny sometimes.

   I went to bed happy as a lark, tree lights twinkling in my spirit. 

   Jonathan called me this morning, around 8:30 a.m. and via Skype I got to see him drape golden tinsel on a tiny tree, in his apartment in Kuwait. :-) He was pretty happy with himself! I was sleepily overjoyed to see my boy celebrating the Season in a tangible way!  We signed off, both needing coffee and food, at different ends of the same day, and I checked my e-mail and Facebook before having a shower and calling him back before he went to bed. Then I learned that today was The Day.

   My younger half-sister, Daniella, had apparently left a message for me at 7 a.m. which I did not get, having been asleep and then awakened to the sight of a tiny Kuwaiti "tannenbaum".

    " Just got a call from the hospital to come right away"... Oh no. This is it.  My long estranged and now suffering from dementia father had a leg removed two weeks ago today, and had been battling blood poisoning since. 

    I had to recharge my cell phone twice in the course of the day, in between calls to Daniella and my half-sister Kfirah, having to talk to my dad's second wife for only the second time in 14 years ( the last being when my Aunt Yvonne died, and my illustrious father had been placed in an Israeli detention/detox for a drunken rampage,  unable to receive the news until he finally sobered up), breaking the sad news to my father's only surviving sister, and then calling my cousins, and the rest of my family who are in varying stages of grief, and then calling Jonathan's mom after sniffling through an end of the day call with him, to debrief. 

   See, when after your parents get divorced and your dad moves to Israel with his second wife and then disowns you and your siblings for ten years while in the meantime he has a whole other family, it gets a little convoluted. Even after 30 years, after you have you made peace and move forward as adults and allow grace to enter in and heal over tender scar tissue, it gets a little twinge-y... simply due to lost years, lost life, lost love. 

  As I write this, it is morning in Israel, and the second set of Bailor kids, minus one or two, are making preparations to attend the burial of their sometimes manic, once-upon- a-time marvelous father. Daddy plowed hard through life, whether in a mad rush to score a basketball goal, deliver an exam that gave people migraines but never let them forget the subject matter, disciplining a recalcitrant child with a knuckle thump on the head or taking one to lunch or for ice cream-- with a drink in his hand, and either a joke on his lips or an angry scowl on his brow. Nothing in between.

   On this day that we have all been dreading for years, The Day We Get The Call About Dad, I'm wistfully sad. 

    Tonight is not any different in my life than any other day... Daddy has been absent from my life for the better part of 27 years, 10 of them being disowned by him and his family. (I broke the ice on my 30th birthday, calling to talk to him as if Nothing Bad had ever happened, and didn't lose track of him for very long at a time in the fifteen years hence.)

    My heart is not sad because he died, as I am relieved that he is with my grandparents and aunt and uncles and reunited with his best friend, Uncle Jerry, Aunt Donna's husband who has been gone for 40 years. 'Bout time those two caught up. 

   My heart is not sad for me, or my kids that didn't know my dad save for one Christmas vacation five years ago, when we were all together for four days. 

   My heart is full. Full of relief that he can be with Uncle Jerry and the rest of our loved ones that have gone ahead, full of wistfulness that he missed so many years wandering the streets in a drunken stupor, full of questions of why he jumped the track of a successful youth leader and college professor to lead the life of an Israeli emigré at age 43, full of happy memories of me and my dad, my dad and us kids, especially at Christmas when he would get fairly silly and make us giggle a lot when he was not knuckle thumping us, in church, to get us to stop giggling. HA. 

   How he loved Christmas! Loved the seasonal sweets, and the holiday spirits, the faculty parties, the church parties, and the lights on the houses and the celebration of the Christ Child being born in a messy manger. He loved the beginning of the Story, because back then he ascribed to the End of it, where the Christ Child returned in full glory to redeem those who knelt at the cross where He ended his human tenure. Daddy loved the Candlelight service, and the Christmas hymns and silly Christmas songs of his childhood, equally. Just as my brother and sister would sing, 'to save us all from Santa Claus when he was on his sleigh' instead of  'to save us all from Satan's power when we were gone astray', LOL, Daddy would putter through the house, singing "Deck us all with Boston Charlie fa la la la la and Kalamazoo..." He loved to put the Christmas lights up on the house, not primly along the roof line like everyone else, but in a Star of David to celebrate Jesus' Hebrew lineage. We should have known... :-)

   My heart is full. It’s two hours into the day that my dad will be buried, in Israel. We cannot be there, and yet we are there. There are traces of us American-borns in the faces of the Israeli-born, and on their children, too.  (My son Craig has strong personality tendencies of his grandpa's, and they spent all of four days together.)   

  There are traces of him in each of us, strong-willed, bright-minded, resolute, passionate.

  My heart is full of the wonder of God, for allowing grace and time to put together the pieces of broken lives and make something new out of them.

   Like my brother eloquently stated this morning, Dad is Home for Christmas. My heart is full.