He’s been gone eleven years today.
It’s incredible to think I’ve been without him for a quarter of my life.
And yet so much of what I’m about, my creativity, my love of music, of reading, of fairness can only be attributed to him. One thing that can not however, is my love of wine. You see, my dad, the late, great, Richard E. Cohen was a tea-totaler.
Yes, he had his occasional Gimlet but that was very rare and certainly not something he enjoyed regularly. And I seem to remember we had a liquor cabinet but its contents were reserved for their friends who drank. Wine was nowhere to be found. In fact, one of the last times I saw him was at my engagement party, thrown perhaps prophetically by my wife’s best friend, whose future husband (not even in the picture at the time) would become one of my partners in the wine business.
The theme for our party was to help start our wine collection as we embarked on a life together. My parents had flown out from Florida and it turned out to be quite the perfect LA day, with family and friends, a chance for the parents and in laws to meet for the first time (I think), one of those days that sets you off for the rest of your life.
And five months later it was over.
What I suppose I didn’t know then was that my dad’s cancer had returned and I can look back now and recall him moving a bit slower, but in the midst of a celebration for you and your future wife, it’s hard to see imperfection anywhere.
I did get to see him one more time the following month, at my brother’s wedding, and I’m grateful that my last memory of him is outside on a driveway before I headed to the airport, standing with me and one of my oldest friends, just shooting the shit like we’d all be doing it again real soon…
I try not to think about the things we’ve missed together, though that’s obviously impossible, how much he’d enjoy being with my boys and they laughing with him. Those discussions on many topics that I’m sure we used to have, now faded after a decade of neglect in thinking about them.
But most of all, I’m sorry he never got to experience all the great things in my life that revolve around wine. Being up in Napa, glass in hand, taking in the scenery. Something tells me that in his retirement years, I’d have gotten him into the joys of Pinot or Cabernet or Riesling. That he and my mom would end up visiting Bordeaux or Barossa without me, relishing their carefree empty nest lives.
If only.
Tonight, I’ll raise a glass to him with the other men in my life, in the hopes that one day I’ll share these things with them and they in turn will pass them along to their children. And so it goes…
