Apu's epitaph: The old Hungarian who went to Heaven for an Olde English 800

Me, Jennifer and Apu on the final road trip.

Editor's note: I wrote this the morning my father died. It's been some years now. The avowed socialist, anticommunist freedom fighter and Hungarian patriot was a stubborn sort. I still get sentimental thinking about him.

My dad was 71 when he died. He called me one night 2 1/2 years earlier saying the SS (the Shutzstaffel, the Nazi paramilitary corps) were on his doorstep with guns and were going to take him to the camps. My dad, Imre Antal Nemeth, had a Jewish mother and had been hidden in Hungary during World War II. He was raised Catholic and squirreled away with his maternal grandparents in a tiny village on the Croatian border. 

The SS Nazi  soldier reference was my first real clue we had any Jewish heritage. Then his friend Steve a month later called to say I had to do something. Luckily, Jennifer, my daughter, drove from Bellingham, Wash. to Seattle every night and slept over and went back to work (two hours each way). She spent weekends with him, too. She took leave for the final weeks, continuing for five or six. But he had clearly lost his mind. She could no longer distract his crazy plans with a cookie.

He was just months from retiring after decades welding big steel girders for commercial buildings as a union ironworker. Most people called him Red. Nobody could prononce his real name. He gave it to me, too. That's why I'm called Mike.

I flew up to Seattle and in three hours loaded up six boxes of his stuff and told him to get in his little Ford Escape. "You're coming with me," I said. He had been eating rotting meat, had nearly burned his house down and was seeing imaginary people. And he was angry others couldn't see it. He almost killed a woman in a car accident, so Jennifer had taken his keys. He berated her something awful, but she is tough. 

After I got him to Clovis, Calif., where I live, I tried to keep him at my house, but he flew into a rage and tried to beat me up. I stayed up all night the first night after driving 17 hours (he tried to escape once at a gas station). I had to keep him in the house. I put on double locking deadbolts that next day. 

For the first couple of months, he lived OK in assisted care at $1,500 a month. Then he ran off twice, once when it was 107 degrees. He found his way to an Indian casino. We found him a second time confused and sun burned. He had wandered near my house. Three cop agencies were out looking for him. He was the first ever to escape from the facility's memory care center, sneaking out a window and scaling an 8-foot gate. Dogs tracked him for nearly a dozen miles of weird wandering.

How my son Calvin smelled worse than a tiger with explosive bowels

Calvin in his tiger suit with sister Jennifer.

This is a simple story about the most explosive shit my son ever took. I was unprepared as usual. What did this kid eat? I asked at the time. How could anyone shit his pants so fully?

Here's how we get to that fateful day in the shadow of Seattle's Paramount Theater. I was a semi-young father, thinking I had an answer for things I didn't have a clue about.

It was Saturday, and Saturdays meant I had my son Calvin from about 5 a.m. until my wife finished delivering the mail in nearby Marysville, usually after 5 or 6 p.m. We lived on the west side of remote Camano Island near the beach. All the responsibilities she shouldered most of the previous week fell to me, and I wasn't all that great at dealing with them.

By responsibilities, I mean Calvin. He was a fussy kid. He needed a lot of distraction. I couldn't do anything else. No work, no projects. I once took him to my father's 5 acres on the south side of the island where we lived and did some maintenance. He was right next to me. The next thing I knew, he had wandered uphill to the highway and some older couple was escorting him back. The look the lady gave me was "what kind of inbred loser are you?"

Calvin was all or nothing. So those Saturdays, I kept him busy. I would bundle him up and head out running. I'd push him in the runner's stroller while Sajo, our black Lab, ran alongside. He loved it and would continue a running commentary of the trees, weeds, houses and the blasts of wind off Puget Sound. But that only took an hour. I ran just 5 miles.