With the month of June being named after Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage, home, and family, and also coming off of Memorial Day and celebrating Father’s Day in June, I have been thinking about my stepdad, Ron, a lot in recent days. I wanted to honor his memory by posting some thoughts…
Ronnie first came into my life when I was in Junior High. It would take me several years to see him as more than an intrusion in our lives who was taking my mother’s attention away from me and several more before I would really appreciate him for the father figure he became to both me & my son at different points in our lives.
During those first few years it was an adjustment having a stepfather in the house. Each decade had its own set of challenges for a stepfather. Then when I turned 16 Ronnie was the one who taught me how to drive. I remember telling him that I was terrified of driving on the expressway, so he would just take me all over – sometimes running errands for hours so I could get the practice in behind the wheel. Well this one time we were on River Rd. in Chicago & as we approached this curve in the road he told me to turn on my right directional & follow the curve in the road. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was an “On” ramp to the Kennedy Expressway. You see, it didn’t have an incline in the road, as most ramps tend to, so I had nowhere to go but forward.
After graduating high school, when I was trying to make it in the field of modeling, Ronnie would drive me to Downtown Chicago on his day off so that I could make the rounds passing out my composite to modeling agencies & photographers. When the Ritz Carlton Hotel first opened on Michigan Avenue he took me there for lunch several times, and we also used to go to Zweig’s Deli in Niles since we both loved the Sweet ‘n Sour Cabbage Soup and the Combo Corned Beef & Pastrami Sandwich on rye. Since we both worked retail jobs at one point, many a day was spent with one of us driving the other to work.
Then when I was in my 20’s Ronnie found out about a secret I was keeping from my mother & I got a good dose of fatherhood from him. He refused to cover for me & threatened to tell my mother if I didn’t. I was mad at the time, but he told me that his first commitment was to my mother and this wasn’t something he could keep from her. Let’s just say it made those car rides VERY uncomfortable!
In my 30’s both Ronnie & my mom were a great support to me after my first divorce & Ronnie became the male role model in my son’s life. In my 40’s, after they moved to Arizona, they took my son for the summers to give me a break in my single mom duties. More recently, since moving out here after another life transition, Ronnie & my mom once again showed me support in more ways than I can say. Having experienced many senior moments, they kept telling me that I moved out here just in time. There was one Sunday, a few weeks before we knew of his illness, that we were out to dinner at Olive Garden. We were outside, waiting for my uncle – who was still inside, when I noticed Ronnie still had the cloth napkin from the restaurant tucked into the front of his pants. We laughed so hard, & of course I saw it as a Kodak moment to post on Facebook, which was very popular with my friends.
Then a few weeks after that, he was eating a fortune cookie & realized that he ate the fortune along with the cookie!!! After those incidents he said to me, “Dawn, you’re living with old people. You moved out here just in time!” Little did we know that those two incidents were likely a manifestation of the confusion that came with the brain tumor that we did not yet know existed.
The week after his first surgery, Ronnie was singing a song that mentioned something about time being short. He said to me, “No kidding! We’re all running out of time. Would I have done anything differently in my life? Well, I would have married your mother sooner.”
The last several months of Ronnie’s life were very challenging, as the Ron we knew was now a different person due to his illness. This was Ron, the new guy, who revealed a new face on a daily basis. All one could really do was try to find the humor in it – and laugh we did! There was the time we were having a conversation in Japanese – only Ronnie was speaking real Japanese & I was winging it. Then there was the time he sent me out to “round up the guys & go buy several six-packs of beer” because “you can’t go fishing without beer!” He would not let up on the subject, so we had to just play along. My first response was that the only six-pack I was picking up was if it was part of a cute guy’s abdomen. The second was to tell him that the guys couldn’t bring back the beer because this was a dry state. “Don’t you mean county?” he asked. “No,” I told him, “state.” “The ENTIRE state is dry? Really? Well, if somebody could figure out a way to get a liquor license they could make a lot of money!”
In the movie, “Eat, Pray, Love” the character of Julia Roberts has a friend who tells her to look at each person she’s met in her life as a teacher. As a stepfather Ronnie was a great teacher. One of the things I learned from him is not to live in the past but to always be moving forward (kind of like that ramp he took me on back when I was 16) & not to let anything put off or stop you from living your life. When you can no longer move forward on this Earth, there’s nowhere to go but upward. In comparing life in Heaven to life on this Earth, one of my good friends said to me, shortly after I told him of Ronnie’s diagnosis, “Why would you want to stay by the pool in Arizona when there’s a pre-paid ticket waiting for you to go to the beaches of Fiji?!!”
And that’s the cool thing about walking with Jesus! Because for those of us who are Believers, we will, literally, be walking with Jesus when we leave this Earth. And I know that someday I will join Ronnie in Heaven. In navigating my own way from this point forward, what I can do is to remember him as a teacher in my life and what I learned from him, to remember him always with love, & until the day I am reunited with him, to get on with the business of living.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!
