My dad, Lee A. Goodin, passed away into other realms on Sunday. He’d been fighting so many illnesses for several years, and yet I hadn’t seen the cardiac arrest coming. Somehow, I thought I’d have warning. Yet he had given me warning.

Earlier this summer, he told me he’d decided to stop aggressive care for the infections that riddled his body from wounds that would not heal. I wrote about that decision, as well as our history of separation and reacquaintance, for Catapult in “The Blind Feeding the Lame: Growing Disabled with Dad.”

I wanted to show that essay to him, to show my love and that he would live on in my imagination, in my writing, and of course, in my heart forever, but I was a chicken. I was afraid he wouldn’t like how personal, how intimate, it was, and so I never sent him the link. I will never know if I made the right decision.

The fact remains that I have written about my dad and will continue to do so.

He once told me that he thought there was a great American novel in our family somewhere. He liked that I was a writer, but did not particularly care for the kind of writing I did. He loved his bestselling Kellermans, and I have not yet brought myself to read one of those. I will now though.

If there is a great American novel in our family, then there is no one else to write it but myself, because our family, at least for a couple generations, has dwindled down to me. He has cousins, who I’ve met through the wonders of Facebook, but my father was an only child and so am I. My parents were divorced when I was very young and my dad remarried, but did not have other kids. My family, my next of kin on my dad’s side, is now gone. And I, being childless, will provide no more.

My dad’s mother, Leona Goodin, née Beynon, and her husband Alcidos Goodin, née Godin, likely would have had lots of kids, but Alcidos, a construction worker who helped build the Golden Gate as well as the Bay Bridge, fell off the Rincon Annex, the old main post office in Downtown San Francisco, and died four days before my father, his son, was born. Between that and the fact that the first few years of my dad’s life were lived in wartime, there was something tragic about his early stars, as testified to by the wartime photo of my dad with chickens in the wilds of San Francisco.

However, he grew up as the darling only child, and would enjoy a wonderful life, traveling the world, skiing, drinking, eating, trekking around seven continents.

A man doesn’t need religion or spirituality to be loving and generous

A couple years back, he and my stepmother Terry celebrated their 35^th wedding anniversary in their North Beach home next door with their extended Fior d’Italia family that includes the owners, the wait staff, and the revolving musicians of the jazz band that plays there every Wednesday and Sunday. The bandleader asked, “What’s the secret to your successful marriage?”

My dad, sitting in his wheelchair, Beefeater in hand, said, “world travel, fabulous adventures, and great sex!”

My dad was an irreverent and irreligious man. If I write that novel of our family, at the heart of it would be the atheism gene that I inherited from him. He had no religion, and in fact was rather anti-religion. One of his favorite movies, or at least one that he liked to talk about a lot, was Spotlight, about the Catholic Church’s cover-up of priests’ who couldn’t keep their robes down. Even that sentence sounds like something he would say.

But a man doesn’t need religion or spirituality (which he also scoffed at) to be loving and generous.

Once, at Fior, I asked my partner Alabaster to give some money to one of the waiters to buy a bottle of wine for the table. I think it was Gil, who, when he saw Alabaster’s intent, put his hands up and backed away as if he were looking at a gun rather than a couple twenties, saying, “Oh no, not Lee’s table.” In other words, if my dad was there, he was buying.

I now live in Denver, so there’s not much I can do in this strange limbo time before the services–which will be held on Labor Day weekend–but think and write about my dad, and celebrate who he was as a living being, and what he means as a spirit in me.

When my dad went into the hospital for one last short trip, I happened to be reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for perhaps the fourth or fifth time in my life. Yesterday I came to the end and the afterword, where Pirsig drops the bomb about how his son Chris, who made the trip cross country in the book’s narrative, had been stabbed outside the Zen Center in San Francisco just five years after the book had been published. The part where Pirsig wrestles with the question of where his son Chris went took on new meaning for me. My dad, like me, believed in only this one life, but perhaps he could get behind Pirsig’s idea of the pattern of a person:

What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Now Chris’s body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn’t find anything. That’s probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to center itself upon.

I think my writing this as well as all future generations of writings about my dad, attempt to continue the pattern that is and will always be my dad, Lee Goodin.

Peruvian gold

It was the spring of 2017 when Alabaster and I visited and my dad, not yet imminently dying, but also aware that he was not going to have a long time to live, asked if there was anything I wanted. Terry and he had been collecting wonderful objects from around the world for years, but he was, I understood, referring to the things he’d inherited from uncle Art, his mother’s younger brother, who’d been like a father to him, who had been an engineer in the gold mines of Peru.

Remembering the glimmering little figurines that I’d so often seen at Uncle Art’s that sat in a lighted display box of a gold bird and a gold man, I mentioned those. I’m blind now, and hadn’t seen them for many years, and I’d never touched them. My dad directed Alabaster to take them down from the shelf. They were in plastic domes, and we pulled them out. I almost crushed the little man when I tried to pick him up because I never realized they were hollow. They had seemed so solid when I was a child. I’d never suspected they were made of very delicate hammered gold.

It was a strange time to be bequeathed something so valuable. Alabaster and I were basically homeless. We’d left New York and were moving around, staying with friends and family, deciding where to settle next. For almost a year, I lugged these priceless weightless and bulky heirlooms from California to Colorado to New York and back around again, with my dad periodically asking if I’d found a safe place for them.

And, being a researcher at heart, I wanted to know about these things, so I started shooting off emails to museums and appraisers, and getting either no response or non-committal ones that sent me somewhere else.

Finally, we found a Pre-Columbian art appraiser in England, and sent off about twenty photos of the little bird to her.

Two days later, we received the valuation and its notes. ” These animal and mostly bird sculptures came out of a workshop in Lima which was active between the 1950s to late 1960s run by an Italian expatriate,” and was worth about $10-$20.

That was in April, and we went for our last visit in June. I’d alluded to what I’d finally found about the statues, or what had become of them, over the phone, and told him I’d tell him all about it when I saw him in person.

He wasted no time in asking. On our first lunch in our usual table at Fior d’Italia. He said, “So what happened to the statues? You still have them?” He thought I’d sold them, which I might have, or I might have tried to get them back down to Peru, where they belonged. I didn’t know, but the point was now moot.

I took a big breath, put on a big ironic smile, and told him about the appraisal. Alabaster said his face showed shock. Then he expressed doubt that Art, a gold minor and amateur archaeologist, would have been duped about buying fake artifacts. And I said what I’d been thinking. “None of us asked about them. We just all assumed the beautiful little sculptures were real gold Pre-Columbian artifacts, and he let us keep on thinking that.”

Then my dad laughed, and said, “Ah, that old bugger. I bet he’s laughing at us all right now.” It was the only such indulgence I’d ever heard my dad make about some possible afterlife. Then he told us about how Art liked to play jokes on people, and that sounded familiar. He and my aunt Evelyn also did not have kids. They were my only relatives on my dad’s side that I knew growing up, after my Grammy Leona had died when I was ten.

At the end of the Peruvian Gold conversation, I asked if maybe I could choose another heirloom, like “what’s behind curtain number 3, cuz I got a dud,” and we laughed hard at that. It was a very good last visit.

Under the bridge

As I said, my grandfather Alcidos was a construction worker whom my dad never knew. He had been born in Minnesota to French Canadian Godins, who were one of the original Acadians who settled in Canada in the 17^th century, and then were displaced when the Brits took over. Some of the Acadian Godins moved to Quebec–if you play guitar, you may have heard of the Godin maker, and others moved down to Louisiana to become Cajuns. Others moved south into Maine and then westward, as my Godins did, and settled in other parts of the US. My Godins settled in Minnesota, which is where Alcidos Sinai Godin was born in 1910.

At some point in his travels from Minnesota to San Francisco, Alcidos added another “o” to Godin to make it Goodin, because, as the stories have it, he was tired of being called God in, rather than the French way, which pronounces it like French sculptor Rodin.

If you were wondering why my dad is Goodin, and I’m Godin, it’s because, with his blessing, I reclaimed the French spelling. That said, he never got used to me taking my middle name, his mother’s name Leona, for my primary name.

I wrote a fanciful tale about all this, called “Likenesses: A Family History Through Photos, Real and Imagined,” which was originally published at FLAPPERHOUSE. I brought the zine to him and he read, with me next to him. When he’d finished he said, Katerina wasn’t a seamstress, she was a barmaid.

My dad wanted to be cremated and strewn into his beloved San Francisco Bay, under the bridges his father helped to build. I’ll be traveling back to say goodbye to him for that ceremony on September 1, followed by a celebration of his life at Fior d’Italia on Sunday September 2. His band will be there to play his old favorites, which, tended towards the dark. He loved his lighthearted musicals, but he also loved “St. James Infirmary,” and would delightedly snap his fingers to the macabre lyrics every time.

I miss and love you dad. See you on the Bay.