DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES? YES!

My dad sat on the couch at his friend's house in northern New Jersey watching that game, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t be born for another 20 years. He watched the moon landing on my grandmother’s lap as a baby, a little younger than I was when I watched the twin towers fall, sitting with her in northern Virginia. My dad was watching smoke come up out of the Pentagon that day - not on TV, not yet, on the roof of his office.

There are a lot of miracles in here already.

A winning team, space travel, the first responders who saved lives on 9/11.

But I wanna talk about my dad.

I know him at 54, almost 55. But I’ll tell a story from before we met. When my dad was 21 he got hit in the back of the head by the mirror of a truck, and was knocked-out cold on the side of the road by a driver who didn’t stop. His friend called 911 and he survived with a bunch of stitches that you can still feel on the crown of his head. They asked him his name in the back of the ambulance and he said “Wait - I know this one”, which should’ve told them enough about his cognitive state, but then they decided they should ask him “Who invented the cotton gin?”. The only reason I know that the answer is Eli Whitney is because my dad is still alive to tell the story of how he said to the EMT “How the hell would I know that?”.

He had another concussion earlier that year and another one later that year. He says ’90 wasn’t a memorable year for him, but it probably was for everyone else.

Jumbled up memories are an ailment we all share, regardless of head trauma. For example, we like to argue about what my dad said during a game of Monopoly in the 80s; Whether or not my mom has ever seen Independence Day, and if she did was it at the midnight showing with my dad or not. We don’t have answers to any of these questions, so they’re just table topics to bring up when dinner gets too boring or we’re having a stupider argument.

We have a few things, though, on videotapes. If you bring a VHS player I can play them for you, as proof that this is the truth.

The most important ones are my parents’ wedding in ‘96 and me as a baby in ’00-’01. We have my dad’s graduation party, also. He was 22, then, because it says ’91 on the piece of tape that acts as a label for the tape.

The video was taken in August at my great grandparents house in New Jersey. The tape traveled from there many times through different states, but the last time I watched it was in Virginia. My dad was there next to me. I was 22, so he was 53. I had seen it at least 3 times and my dad had lived it only once, so I was more familiar with what happens in it. In the video, he gives a speech, thanking his parents for supporting him through college. At the time, when I watched this, I was living at my grandparents house in my last year of college.

My dad and I both struggled with our heads - I have more mental issues than I care to name plus chronic migraines and my dad had those three concussions. When I hear him talk on tape, he sounds the same - mostly - except for the way that everyone sounded different in the 90s and how everyone sounds different on video anyways. The only thing that’s different is that he’s nervous. I can tell that he’s not as confident about what to say back then in the tape.

But he’s never nervous - he’s my dad.

I’ve only ever seen him cry once (and it was at a funeral). He doesn’t cry in any videos and he has a hard time smiling in pictures (all the men on that side of the family do), so I don’t always know how he feels or how he felt.

He told me has cancer a few weeks ago at the dinner table, but he said it’s only stage 2, he’ll be fine. He’ll just have to go get surgery or radiation. He wasn’t nervous, and he was more upset that the Cowboys lost. He said that was actually the worst news he’d heard all day.

Last year, sitting in the living room, watching the videotape, I sat next to my dad and cried. This was before the whole cancer thing, so I wasn’t constantly thinking about him dying.

It’s the fact that he lived a whole life before i did, one that I’ll only know through videos

How I have the comfort of knowing him as the same person he was when he met my mom, and probably, the same person on that couch in 1980, watching the USA beat the USSR in hockey.

But I’ll never know what it’s like to see him nervous.

The way I am all the time.

I used to think that he didn’t understand me. Maybe he does. Maybe I’ll be more like him, like I wish I was.

It’s hard to tell a lot about a person from a video, especially one that could only be up to around 20 mins long, otherwise the tape stops. So,Ii’ve only known my dad for the past 23 years, not all 54, and he probably won’t see all of my years either.

I do have one more video in mind that’s on my phone, so it’s my memory and not his or anyone else’s. It’s in Savannah, Georgia, I was 19 or so. I have a few minutes of recorded conversation between me and my dad. I’m talking to him about hotels, my complaints and my ideas, how I’m mad that I’m not 21 yet, which doesn’t matter anymore because I'm 23 now. But I’m still 19 then, and my dad must’ve been 50, barely. I think it was December, so he’d just had a birthday.

I don’t know exactly what the miracle is in this.

My dad? the fact he’s still alive? the videotapes? my grandparents who let me stay at their house? or maybe the fact that I exist at all…

It’s probably every single thing that’s ever happened to any of us. That’s the miracle. We’re irreplaceable.

We don’t have video tapes of every moment we live (that would be terrifying); we’ll forget things and when our children are older they won’t know us when we’re young.

I think that’s something that I've always struggled with - the unfair fact that my mom has known me all my life, but I haven’t known her all of hers. I want to go back in time and hug my parents.

Maybe the fact that I can feel so much love and so much grief for people I can hear snoring in the other room, people I could wake up and hug. But at the same time people who are entirely gone, people I’ve never met, people I never will.

Do you believe in miracles? Yes, I do.

I just don’t have time to count them.