on the 9th day of Christmas

on the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

nein! dancing ladies

yesterday my yin and i went to visit her father for the first time since she returned from India. he only lives an hour away, but schedules and inclinations are a funny thing. it never ceases to amaze me what a big difference a little distance can make –

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my future father-in-law, in the words of Paramahansa Yogananda, is "one of those long-winded fellows whose conversational powers ignore time and embrace eternity." his capacity as a storyteller is without compare, and yesterday he told a tale that clocked in at 32 uninterrupted minutes. i'm sure it was actually longer than this, but i didn't even think to look at the clock until he really got going.

the whole episode dealt with his recent go-round with the Miami-Dade Police Department, starting with his wife's auto accident and then spiraling outwards to include a police report, the insurance companies, a second police report, one duty sergeant, a non-responsive lieutenant, one community relations officer, petty corruption, Channel 5 News, and an investigative journalist that he refers to as "the Weasel."

my future father-in-law has a long history with the Weasel, dating back to his exposés on shady dining establishments in South Florida. apparently the Weasel used the state food inspection board to get his "tips," and my future father-in-law believed (correctly, in my opinion) that this was a poor excuse for investigative journalism. so, he wrote to this guy some years back and told him that he oughta write about a real restaurant – someplace he would actually expect to be clean – rather than the strip mall delicatessens and Chinese take-out joints that he featured each week. apparently, not long after this exchange, the Weasel brought down a fancy place somewhere on Key Biscayne.

the Weasel is beside the point.

the point is that my future father-in-law actually tells stories in this way, bobbing and weaving from one topic to the next without ever losing sight of where he's heading. he is the Cassius Clay of kitchen table conversation:

"Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer."

these side stories aren't really tangents because they always add a little bit of flavor, a little bit of texture to the matter at hand. what emerges from these conversations is not a portrait, but a mural, and i never leave without learning something new. like, for example, that the "bad beat" is up over a half million dollars right now at the Seminole Casino. this, of course, requires an explanation of what a bad beat is, along with the casino's formula for upping the ante ($1/hand dealt). devoted gamblers will send their friends and girlfriends (and presumably boyfriends) to the limit tables with a hundred dollars because everybody gets paid if you're sitting at a bad beat table.

the bad beat is beside the point.

the point is that my future father-in-law worked his way up the chain of command rather than going to the State's Attorney's office (which his wife suggested). eventually he found a captain that was willing to stand up, take responsibility, and admit to the doctored police report. after all this rigmarole and headache, my future father-in-law received some wise counsel from his best friend, a retired member of the very police department he had spent the past six weeks harassing:

"don't ever get pulled in Miami-Dade County."

this wasn't the end of the story, though.

after all this, the server finally arrived with our check, and my future father-in-law said the most poetic thing i've heard in ages; possibly the most unpretentiously poetic thing i've ever heard in my life.

this is the point:

every Christmas Eve, my future father-in-law watches the original 1935 Scrooge, a film which i have never seen:

this tradition traces back to his childhood in Brooklyn, when he used to see the film each year with his father, who died long ago. my future father-in-law still carries on, though, and told us that every year he feels like his father is with him as he watches this black and white, silent film on his giant flat screen television.

i took pause.

stunned

by the image:

this
gruff Brooklynite
cum Florida transplant,
whose heart was so big that it broke,
sits in his living room at 2 a.m. with his father's ghost;
the ghost of the Father holds court
with the ghost of Christmas past,
the technological medium that
allows us to span time
but not death.

thus concluded the ninth day of Christmas.