DIED 2000
EVERY HALLOWEEN I THINK of him because he gave out holographic slap bracelets and bouncy balls instead of candy. My kids actually looked forward to it; they already had ten pounds of sugar in those pillowcases by the time they got to his house.
It was funny to meet someone my age who had become a dentist, a dentist with shoulder-length hair, Hot Tuna on his CD player, a redwood hot tub, unselfconscious ’80s-style narcissism spiking the stolid, beleaguered-but-amused demeanor I more often associate with Jewish men of our parents’ generation. His prices were high and we had no dental insurance, so we didn’t see him professionally, but prices were low in the beauty parlor my husband ran out of our mudroom. Both the dentist and his wife came in. Until she got a little crazy about her highlights, and it turned into something of a catfight. Then it was just him.
After their divorce, the dentist had the kind of sudden insight into his life that requires shiny vehicles and foreign travel. He started a tour company that led motorcycle trips through the Copper Canyon in Mexico, where the Tarahumara run their famous runs and drink their famous beer. God forbid you meet a Mexican driver on one of those roads.
He didn’t—it was a white bird, or a black bird, or, depending on whom you believe, not a bird at all that snapped his head back as he came down the mountain into the sun with his twelve-year-old daughter riding behind him. He was killed almost instantly; she was fine. Fine, but 112, because that’s how fast you grow up when you are alone on a road in Mexico and your father is dying in a ditch beneath his motorcycle, killed by a white bird. (She, at least, was sure of this.)
One can only hope the rest of her life has continued to unfold like a myth of the Tarahumara: that the hands that were wrapped around her father’s waist cannot feel heat or cold, that white birds appear at times of mortal danger, that she receives a visit from her father every year on El Día de los Muertos. That the light from the mountains keeps coming down.