My father’s birthday was June 28, 1907.  He died in 1989 at 81.

He loved boats of all shapes and sizes and photography.  He took this photo in 1953 of my older brother and pigtailed me on Kodachrome slide film that shall be discontinued in the coming months according to Kodak and no longer available.

In 2007, I made the slide into what is called a “Polaroid Transfer” using Polaroid instant film.  It’s a transfer process involving the slide, Polaroid film, electric skillets with water baths of 100 degrees, and a lightweight contraption that takes a photo of the slide on the Polaroid film.

You arrange the emulsion gently with your fingers on paper but God help you if your fine motor coordination fishing the emulsion from the electric skillet takes a vacation that day.

Goodbye everything that went before and you have to start over.

O, yes.  Did I mention that Polaroid film was discontinued last year?

So, there you have it.  No more father (1989), brother (1998), mother (2001), Kodachrome (2009) or Polaroid film (2008).

Goodbye everything that goes before,  goddammit.

But, memory has not been discontinued (so far) you bastards of the Disappearance of Life’s Good Things, and I poke your rheumy eye with a sharp stick with this memory of my father when I was 11 and my brother, 14.

It was 1956 and our family of four had just returned from Italy on the Italian Liner, “Andrea Doria”.  We had gone over on the “Queen Mary” and I can safely say that for four of the five day crossing, during a raging storm, I threw up several lifetimes.  But, the return trip was on smooth seas and what I lost in the trip over, I made up in spaghetti on the trip back, which is sadly one of my best memories of this luxurious ship–spaghetti and the pool.

15 days after we’d landed back in New York and we were home near Cape Cod,  the “Andrea Doria” was on her return trip to New York but sank off Nantucket after colliding with another ship, “Stockholm”, in the fog.

My father was a ham radio operator and heard the distress call on his bedside radio around 11 PM and stayed up all night listening to the radio traffic.   He woke us at daylight when the first newsreels were broadcast on TV.

We were only about 50 miles from where the ship was sinking.

Around 10 AM, eleven hours after the collision, with a twist and roll which exposed her propeller, the “Andrea Doria” turned to a sickening 180 degree angle.   The swimming pool where I had lived for most of our voyage was totally submerged and now faced the bottom of the Atlantic instead of the overcast sky.

We all watched the black and white aerial coverage of her last moments in silence.

After a few minutes of paralysis looking at the TV, my father quietly got up and went outside to the lawn and raised our flag but only to half mast. I watched him from the window hook the edges of the stars and stripes and raise it half way up the pole.  He had taught us that when someone important died this was how one paid respect.

We kept the newspapers and magazines covering the story in the library closet and fifty years later in 2006, I made a digital collage of their covers and hung it in my living room.  My grand niece and nephews looked at it and wanted to know where Papa Tim (my late brother, their grandfather) and I had slept on the ship.

Port side, midship.

Cabin #445.

Take that–Pow! KAZAAM!–you bastards of goodbye everything.

©Pat Coakley 2009

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**Select photographs from this blog and my wider archive can be purchased at www.patcoakley.com