I watched the movie "The Big Labowski" the other night. This 1998 cult classic follows the misadventures of 3 idiots, as they attempt to navigate the turbulent waters of the Cohen Brothers' imaginations. Jeff Bridges plays the lovable Lebowski, a burned out free loader, whose friends call, "The Dude." After surviving a severe beating by rug pissers, a shoot out with nihilistic terrorists, and several bad (but creative) hallucinations, Jeff Labowski explains it all away with the simple statement, "The Dude Abides."
My dad, Lieutenant Commander Robert J. Riger was also called "The Dood." My little sister Betsy named him that when she was in second grade. Dood was a devout smoker of KOOL 100s, and Betsy made him a ceramic ashtray with this new monicker permanently fired into it. Everyone called him Dood for the rest of his life.
The journey from Lieutenant Commander to Dood involved an electrical engineering degree from the Naval Academy in 1949, the Korean Conflict, a nervous breakdown, schizophrenia, mental institutions, Thorazine and the ubiquitous dark cloud of depression that also followed him for the rest of his life.
Nicotene was Dood's drug of choice. He only took the anti-psychotics because he had to. Without them, his life would turn into a Cohen brothers movie, replete with hallucinations and terrorists and the occasional rug pisser. Cigarettes (and coffee) had a marvelously calming affect on Dood, and just plain took the razor sharp edge off of his life. After his third heart attack, my mom made him stop, which meant she quit buying them for him. After several weeks of brooding angst, I became his connection to the tobacco industry. I couldn't stand to see my old man live the rest of his obviously short life, in a constant state of frustration and anger. Even Mom had grown weary of the old curmudgeon my dad had become. Cigarettes were as permanent a part of his life, as the stains between his index and middle fingers.
Except for those stains, my old man had beautiful hands. With them, he could play the piano with exceptional ability. In fact, Dood could play anything he ever heard. When pressured, he would sit down in front of our Chickering upright baby grand and proceed to blow us all away with his repetoire of show tunes, college fight songs, and just about anything else that had earned its way into the lexicon of musical Americana. Often someone would ask him to play one of the current hits. He would hang his head and look at the keyboard for a few seconds as if he could see something moving. And then, out of nowhere but his permanently damaged mind, he would hammer out the request, better than if it was in a professional musician's fake book. There was more singing in my house than in most Irish pubs on a Saturday night.
Dood was a gentle, talented, loving soul. It took me fifty years to realize that there was nothing wrong with him that's not inherently wrong with us all. Eugene O'Neill nailed it when he said that "Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." Dood died at 53. The official cause of death was heart failure and emphysema. He was buried at the Lutheran Church in Gatesburg, Pennsylvania, where he had been living for nearly 10 years. But the Dood abides forever in my heart and mind and DNA.
