If I were a rich man, ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.

We are a few days shy of the three week mark of Operation East Coast and I still feel like I am in a fog and unsure of where I slept last night. The quiet of New Jersey nights is, and will always be, as foreign to me as ketchup on a hot dog. The Cicadas chirp and the crickets sing while I lie in bed and wonder when the L.A. car alarms will whisper sweet swear words into my left ear.

There are no young drunks stumbling past our bedroom window wearing their ironic hipster best while pontificating on life’s little trials and love’s tragic tribulations. There are no trash trucks backing up to the beep that launched a thousand cries or homeless trannies fighting in the alley over who gets the striped tube top and who has to sleep on the newly rescued yoga mat that could easily double for a used pantiliner.

No, here in the land my man calls home, all is quiet on their eastern front and everyone has a big back yard that smells as good as it sounds. My parent’s house in Massachusetts, though different in set up and convenience, is about the same in calm and quietness. Nights are filled with tranquil times and intensely solid sleep and days are shady and reflective.

If this trip were a coin, one side would be as shiny as a sterling silver dollar fresh off the truck from QVC’s One-Day Commemorative Coin Extravaganza. Without a scratch or a smudge the coin would show the love I have felt during sparkling visits with my immediate family and my oldest friends and the joy I have felt reconnecting with the different branches of my funky and tangled family tree; cousins, aunts, uncles and pals all touchstones along my cobblestone street. A lake house in Wisconsin, my high school home in Massachusetts, my college BFF and her New Hampshire heaven house and a pub in White Plains, New York all witnessed the loopy love I have barfed up these last few weeks.

The other side of the coin is tarnished with the sadness and heartache of life’s fragility and death’s inevitability. Since arriving in New Jersey the trip has taken a tough turn and become a lesson in patience and gratitude and the customary cliché of putting it all in perspective. Sitting on the sidelines of a shitty, unfair playing field I have had to helplessly watch my husband stare into the vacant eyes of a father no longer there while his mother holds onto a hand no longer able and a love no longer loving.

Take a moment out of your day and appreciate your good health and the mundane moments of murky happiness. Then lean over and kiss the one closet to you, even if they are being a grade-A asshole. Then pour yourself a top-shelf, two-fingered cocktail and pray to whatever god you choose to strike you dead when your time comes, that your last moments on this ever-muddled earth will indeed be pristine, and perfectly painless.

But do not forget to hoard the expired painkillers and mini-bar nips. Just in case your god didn’t get your text.

old

• 1 having lived for a long time ; no longer young:the old man lay propped up on cushions
• made or built long ago:the old quarter of the town
• possessed or used for a long time:he gave his old clothes away
• having the characteristics or showing the signs of age:marble now so old that it has turned gray and chipped
• informal boring or tiresome, especially as a result of repetition or overfamiliarity:I wish she‘d shut up — it’s getting old
• 2 [attributive] belonging only or chiefly to the past; former or previous:valuation under the old rating system was inexact
• used to refer to the first of two or more similar things:I was going to try to get my old job back
• dating from far back; long-established or known:we greet each other like old friendsI get sick of the same old routine
• (of a form of a language) as used in former or earliest times.
• 3 [in combination] of a specified age:he was fourteen years olda seven-month-old baby
• [as nounin combination] a person or animal of the age specified:a nineteen-year-old

The last few weeks have been a major parenthesis in my writing but not my life. Soon after I jotted down the first chapter of my high school reunion weekend (the sequel is on its way) we were about to leave for my cousin’s Wisconsin wedding when Dave got a frantic call that his dad was in very bad shape. Instead of boating on a green algae-filled lake in the middle of cow country and drinking excessive amounts of local beer to beat a heat index most often used in dirty Russian bath houses and toasting a bride and her groom and singing rounds with all the women in my bossy and bodacious and magnificent family, my husband had to rush home to New Jersey and take over. His elderly father had suddenly taken a dark and cloudy turn into old age and after a week long hospitalization and a few scary days my lovely man and his amazingly strong mother were put in the unbearable position of finding a permanent nursing home for a father and a husband and a grandfather named Lee.

At the exact time, as if planned by some cosmic asshole shit stain on the underwear of life, my grandfather Edwin, who was to be the patriarch of the wedding celebrations and the center of all things lake-y and vacation-y was hospitalized within a day of my father-in-law and given much the same dismal chances. These two men, who only met once at my wedding in 1993, battled back and forth with similar relief-filled ups and crucial, throat-closing downs. Every time I called Dave he would tell me the latest update of his father’s condition and it was as if he were reading from my grandfather’s hospital chart while wearing horn-rimmed, 3-D glasses.

Old age, dementia, infection and decline are words most often found inside yogurt-stained AARP articles at your local library or highlighted in green neon font during commercial breaks from NCIS and Antiques Roadshow. But when those words are suddenly up your ass and refer to two men that you have loved to pieces and laughed with uncontrollably, it all smells a bit too real and far too stinky.

These two bastions of badass are still fighting the good fight and responding with verve some days while barely being present on others. But how can I be truly surprised by their will to live and the desire to go on? How can I even question the reasons they are both still punching their pillows and pinching the nurses into their nineties? These are two amazing men of Teflon moral fiber and cement-filled conviction, two dapper dudes who crawled and scratched and swam though extreme poverty and the Depression and the all-too-celebrated silent film era only to jump shoeless over every obstacle while never even being handed a hat or a hello.

It seems as though today’s forest doesn’t grow trees like that anymore. Our crappy saplings are too glued to their iPhones and their ADD apps to do anything other than step into a fifteen-minutes-of-fame puddle wearing nothing more than a loner pair of $600 platform Louboutins and a collagen scowl. These cookie-cut Christmas trees cannot possibly stop for one minute to wonder where the paper from their US Weekly really comes from and how many trees had to die in order to publish a Kardashian wedding edition with a Nick Lachey/Vanessa Minillo insert.

I truly hope the entitled armies of reality TV hopefuls and TMZ Wanna-Be's realize some day that without the stories of an era gone by and the dinosaur that is the book and the shade from the tallest trees and the bravest, brawniest branches there will be no place to get cool and no place for the wicked to rest.