Carolina

As strange as this may be, it's not fiction. A song triggered a memory.

After the old man had his emergency open heart surgery, the cold winter of New York was made worse by the lack of heat in the basement apartment he was renting on 107th Street in Ozone Park. He was suffering but refused to leave New York. I headed to Florida to set up down there so he could come down to the warmer climate; I knew the new scars he had would always ache in the cold. He didn't want to be a bother. I couldn't fix it. I could prepare. A 1985 Cadillac Eldorado got me from New York to Orlando. Time passed. A woman flittered through my life. Friends were revisited. Life moved on.

It was the winter of 1996. I'd been working for the Central Florida Blood Bank for almost a year after having gotten out of the Navy. I'd traded in that old ugly Eldorado when the transmission went for a 1995 Dodge Dakota, getting screwed at 18.6% interest but needing to get to work more than I didn't want a car payment. I was on a blood drive for the Blood Bank when the phone on the bus rang, telling me that my father was found not breathing in his apartment by his girlfriend. Paramedics were there. They patched me through, I spoke to them briefly. No one knew how long he hadn't been breathing.