Sonny was my dad’s best friend; he also worked for my dad at his company from sometime in the 1980s until my dad’s death in 2003. He is 69-years-old and has had prostate cancer for a couple of years now. I have been visiting him as often as I possibly can, as much as for when my free time allows me to do so, since August 2017, and those days are the absolute most favorite days of mine in my life.
I have always considered Sonny a second dad to me, and I think a lot of the reasoning behind placing him in such an echelon is because whenever I go visit him, I feel closer to my dad. Sonny is the one person remaining on this earth who reminds me so much of my dad, even though they are (were) two seperate people with their own distinctive personalities. Sonny is an extrovert while my dad was an introvert who became an extrovert around those he felt comfortable around.
One of the last few memories I have of my dad was back in September 2003. You see, my dad was a die-hard Miami Dolphins fan while Sonny, being from the Maryland/Washington D.C. area, is a huge Washington Redskins fan. At this time, my maternal grandmother was having a surgery related to her heart about two hours away, so my mom had taken her and was away, and so my dad was responsible for getting me to school during that brief time period. One morning during that time, my dad woke me up early before school so that we could swing by Hardee’s and eat breakfast with Sonny before he took me to school and they went to work. They playfully shit talked each other over their respective favorite NFL teams and it was just so fun to listen to their banter. Sonny cannot stand the Dallas Cowboys, but he was a big fan of the coach Bill Parcells, who was in his first year as the head coach of the Cowboys, and he was touting him as the man that was going to breathe live into the ‘Boys after their recent streak of low quality seasons, while my dad was downplaying Parcells and giving Sonny shit for being a Redskins fan who was talking him up. Such a simple memory that I will forever hold dear to my heart, given my dad’s death three months later from liver and kidney failure.
Sonny lives alone in a 100+ year old home where I damn near hit my head on the ceiling while inside every time I go to visit. His long-time (30+ years) domestic partner (since they never married one another) Dianne died in 2016 from a blood clot. He’s had multiple hip replacements and can’t get around very well these days. He’s living on a fixed income (social security, I suppose?) and only really gets out of the house a couple of times each month where he isn’t as mobile as he’d like to be. I know I’m just throwing his dirt out there on the internet, in which I truly do apologize for, but I just want to write about the man I know, look up to and love as an awesome father-esque figure.
I will go and visit him from 7-8 p.m. in the evenings when I get a chance to go, and I always end up staying over, just shooting the shit about life, until 2-3 a.m.
I don’t expect or want anything from him other than his company, and I appreciate that he allows me to come over, even if I do get the feeling that I keep him up way too late regardless of his insistence that he can’t fall sleep until 3-4 a.m. on most nights due to nagging leg pain.
This is one of the priceless joys in life that I will never take for granted. Dianne was cremated and her ashes sit in a box that is perched on a coffee table in the living room where Sonny and I sit in converse. In past visits, he has told me stories that would possibly be embarrassing to Dianne, in which he will ‘talk’ to her and apologize for what he’s said. That doesn’t take away from the hilarity of the things he tells me, from stories about my dad to his life to other random shit. He may be 69-years-old but he has the mind of someone in their 20s or 30s, and I believe it is due to his lifelong love for learning and the acceptance of the change that is around all of us.
He has an old, beat-up laptop, and he describes his use of it as merely, “getting on Facebook for a few minutes every day, watching some porn to see what kind of new shit they got out even though I can’t get the damn thing up any more and Googling what the fuck ever.” I paraphrased a bit, but that is a near carbon copy of what he says verbatim.
I don’t know how far his prostate cancer has progressed, other than what he has told me. Prostate may be slow growing, but it is what his dad died of. As mentioned, Sonny is 69-years-old; his dad was 69 in 1991 when he died of prostate cancer. He said that he wanted to outlive his dad, in which he has so far by three months. Selfishly, I want Sonny to be around forever, but I know one day, he — just like all of us — will exit this earthly form.
I say that visiting him is one of the priceless joys in life because it is exactly that. I won’t be able to do so forever, and so I cherish each visit that spans hours of conversation, because they all mean so much to me.
V-Neck Gangster 