Sunday, June 17, 2007
Father's Day
In the original version of Superman, he couldn't fly and didn't have x-ray or heat vision. All of his powers flowed logically from the notion coming from a planet with heavier gravity. His powers were completely bounded by the full, extended version of his famous slogan:
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in single bound. And nothing less than a bursting shell can pierce his skin.The traditional Superman, you see, was not invulnerable, just very tough. His thick hide could repel bullets but a bomb would probably leave a few scars.
I think about this when I look at pictures of my Dad, who passed away two years ago. He was very tough. His skin, I remember, was very thick, tanned and caloused. It was pocked by all sorts of scars and abrasions, no doubt left by too many encounters with bursting shells.
This was quite literally true. He was a World War II veteran who had survived being on a ship torpedoed by the Nazis. Much later, in his 60s he survived a horrendous car crash that killed two other people. He was a great outdoorsman and heaven knows how many scrapes and mishaps he survived out in the bush that no one ever saw. To me, my Dad was as close to invulnerable as a human could be.
And strong! When he went fishing (he was always going fishing), he loved going on great long portages. Until his 70s, he could carry a boat motor on his shoulders for a mile through the bush. He was also a master athlete who, until middle age, had won one championship after another in curling and golf.
In the last year of his life, his health collapsed rapidly. His legendary strength seemed to drain out of him steadily, as though he were being attacked by a vampire.
As his trips to the emergency ward became scarier and scarier, it became clear that my mother wanted to keep him alive at all costs, even if it meant reducing him to a more-or-less vegetative state in a nursing home. But I didn't want to see that. Neither did my siblings and he certainly didn't want it either. He had been blithely predicting his own death for some time. "Have a good trip. I'll be dead by the time you get back," he cheerfully told one of my nephews headed off to a teaching gig in China.
I'm not sure, but I think I was the last person to talk to him. "Get a good rest," I said, just before he rolled over to get some sleep. He was in the cardiac ward and had a zillion tubes and wires sticking into and out of him. Treatment had not been going well. He never woke up again.
Well, at least he finally listened to my opinion, the stubborn old bugger.
To my Dad, a real Superman.
posted by Mentok @ 9:41 a.m.,
