GUEST COLUMNIST

Janice Jordan

In the black-and-white snapshot, I am 5 years old, sitting on the couch

with my two sisters. We’re in our pajamas, crowding around our father.

It’s Christmas Eve, and even though he and my mother are separated and

will soon be divorced, he’s here to read us “The Night Before Christmas.”

Later on, after we’re asleep, he’ll drink the milk and nibble on the

cookies we’ve left out, then tromp through the ashes from the fireplace

so we’ll know Santa was here. I don’t see my father with any regularity

after that, although eventually we become fast friends by phone. But I

never forget him reading to us on the couch.

Flash forward to Christmas Eve 1998. My father died this morning. Not in

Encino, but far away, in Reno, where he had lived a separate life for

nearly 30 years with my stepmother and half-brother. The day after

Christmas, my sisters and our spouses fly to Reno to help prepare for our

father’s funeral, the morning after next.

Against a surreal backdrop of brilliant blue skies, snow-covered

mountains and impossibly gaudy casinos decorated for the holidays, we

navigate unfamiliar streets to the funeral home to see him for the last

time.

A priest helps us pick out readings for the service. We visit his wife in

the nursing home where she’s been since her stroke, and leave unsure if

she understands who we are and that her husband, who visited her every

day, has died.

The rest is a blur. We order food, clean our father’s house, place his

obituary, then take turns calling the people whose names we find in his

incredibly unorganized address book. Our brother retrieves a shoe box

from Dad’s closet.

It contains tokens of a former life, a life as a television director

during the Golden Age of Television that he rarely spoke about with his

friends in Nevada.

We discover mementos he kept, including a gold cigarette lighter from Nat

King Cole and gold-and-ruby cuff links from Bob Hope, wishing him “A

Happy 1955.”

At the funeral, a man introduces himself to us. He’s Sen. Paul Laxalt,

the former governor of Nevada. Laxalt tells us how much he admired our

father, how pivotal he was in the gubernatorial campaign. Dad had never

mentioned it. Dad’s friends come back to the house. They’re all men,

buddies from his last Alcoholic Anonymous group.

I’m standing off to myself thinking of how I don’t even know my father’s

favorite color or his favorite song when a rough-looking ponytailed guy

walks up and says: “Your father taught me grace.” As he walks away, I’m

surprised to realize that I’m proud of my father.

My brother is a pilot, so he flies us home in a small plane. It’s just

about sunset, and we’re over Lake Tahoe. Dad had a private pilot’s

license and flew this same route often. He also swam across this lake in

a race when he was 17. I look at my sisters, then out the window, and

hear my father’s voice from so long ago: “He sprang to his sleigh, to his

team gave a whistle; And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.”

* JANICE JORDAN is a columnist for Times Community News.