I'll Have Another

One year ago today, my dad, Charlie Skinner, passed away.

It was Saturday, the 5th of May, 2012.  Cinco de Mayo and the Kentucky Derby.  And, the name of the winning horse was "I'll Have Another."  For anyone who knew my father, there is no need to explain the appropriateness of these events marking the last day of his life.

He did not, however, go out in a hat-wearing fiesta of glory.  He left us after a long month in the ICU, mainly in a coma, mainly on a breathing tube, mainly uncomfortable, but (hopefully) mainly unaware of all of this.  

Despite the difficulty of those final days and the way they have haunted me this year, there was something peaceful and special about his very last day.  It was deeply sad and hard, but it was profound and strangely serene.  

I was hoping to do something special to mark the anniversary of The Chuckster's death, but my circumstances have not easily allow me engage in a worthy ritual.  Along with my physical location on the other side of the world from the metro-D, I feel emotionally a world away from the girl who was sitting in a hospital room, staring at a blood pressure monitor in between reading aloud pieces by Rilke to my dying father.  Still, I want to feel connected to that difficult but profound moment in time.  And, more than anything, I want to feel connected to my dad.  

So, that is what this blog entry is all about -- an exercise in exercising my dad's spirit. 

There is so much I could say about my dad, so much I could say about how I experienced his last day on earth, so much I could say about my grieving over the last year.  In fact, there is too much to say.  So, for now I will let someone else do some of the saying for me.  My Uncle Len wrote a brilliant essay about Charlie last year which I have pasted below.  If you have a moment today, please read it along with a cocktail (preferably a stiff rum and coke), and drink it in honor of my dad.

 

  

My brother-in-law, Charlie Skinner, always said that if he could pick a time in which to live it would have been during the Roaring Twenties. He’d have driven a Duesenberg, worn a fedora and hung with the cats in the jazz clubs of downtown Detroit. Prohibition? I know exactly what Charlie would have said about the prospect of making bathtub gin at home in the basement, “I’d a been right there, baby.”

He was, after all, the son of a bar tender who became a bartender himself, working the likes of the Bull Market in Detroit’s financial district and the Soup Kitchen Saloon in its warehouse district, before opening his own watering hole, the Silverdust Saloon, where he made a killing off the iron workers who stormed the joint during their lunch time breaks while erecting the infrastructure for GM’s controversial Poletown Plant during the early ’80s. “Shoot ‘em up, Charlie,” one of the regulars used to say. And so he did.

The Chuckster loved a good story, and, hoo boy, could he ever tell one. With color and imagery and gusto and more damn sincerity than just about anyone I ever knew. Which is why he was able to go on to become one of AAA’s top-producing life insurance salesmen before his liver started showing signs of wear and tear a few years ago. Charlie never “sold” a policy. He explained “why you need to do this for your family.”

Speaking of stories, everybody has one about ol’ Charlie: How the nuns at St. Al’s met with his parents to suggest that their son would probably do better at Fordson, the public school down the street. How he broke his leg the first time he tried parachuting out of an airplane. Or how he adventured around the globe by himself before settling down (well, sort of) with my sister Betty and raising two fabulous kids who embody all the ideals he espoused and who exhibit the drive and the discipline that he found difficult to muster.

Our boy Charlie wasn’t much for rules. He abhorred convention. And he often bristled at the hypocrisy he perceived in those who attended church on Sunday yet discriminated against people of color every other day of the week or failed to share in the wealth they accumulated. And he practiced what he preached. He would always pull money out of his pocket for the panhandlers he encountered in the Motor City he loved to explore, and I would say to him, “Charlie, the guy’s a hustler—he’s scammin’ you, man.” And he would inevitably say to me, “Aw, you never know, Leonard. What’s a couple of bucks? The guy might really need it.” He even took in a homeless person once for three days.

That was Charlie Skinner. He fed the hungry. He clothed the poor.

Charlie was an only child who loved the concept of family more than anything else. That’s why, after his mother and father died, he so embraced mine. The best times I ever spent with him were on the extended family vacations 18 or 20 of us—my Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters, my kids and all the cousins—took to such places as the sprawling Frank-Lloyd-Wright-type mansion that Domino’s Pizza magnate Tom Monaghan built on Drummond Island (Charlie’s idea because he thought we should “go big”) or the collection of modest little cottages we rented on the shore of Lake Huron in Harrisville.

We lost my Dad, the star of those shows, a few years back. Then we lost my Mom, our leading lady, a couple of years later. Yesterday, we lost one of the greatest character actors of all time, the one and only Charlie Skinner.