Jack Sh*t 2: Wait for the Movie, It's in Color is the second installment (there will be three) in the life of my father, Jack Friedman. "Pushing 90"?that's how he described the last half of his 80s. Still in good health, he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, albeit kicking and screaming.
"He dragged me here!" he'd say, pointing to me, to those who'd ask and those who didn't.
He wasn't completely wrong.
Before, three, four times per year I'd fly to Vegas to help him find the lost icons on his desktop, change the oil in a car he should no longer be permitted to drive, organize his seven antihypertensive medicines into plastic dispensers, and occasionally find long-forgotten liquified potatoes. For all his ebullience and energy, my father was, in fact, pushing 90, and men that age have strokes and get lonely and forgetful and yell at those who, according to him, moved the roads.
He needed to be closer to me. He needed someone to drive him to Panera.
When the time came, I thought, better for him to die across town than in a nursing home in Vegas.
His dementia when he arrived in Tulsa just visited occasionally. It was parenthetical, enlightening, and often marked by brilliant non-sequiturs. In time, that would change. But during these early years in Tulsa, Jack Friedman was still very much Jack Friedman.
