SOUTH NEWFANE — In his last years my father and his retired friends would play pinochle in his real estate office, a converted garage in a burb house in upstate New York.
A few hands into the game, and the real estate banter turned into stories about their failing health. I would be nearby writing his bills, embarrassed by this talk of what old Hamlet called “the natural gates and alleys of the body.”
One of his card buddies was a retired Army colonel named Dominick Vanzetti, a man as far from the famed anarchist as you can get.
Vanzetti had the right answer for everything. As a younger man he got into a fistfight at an officer's club. Vanzetti, having thrown the first punch, was charged with assault. Unwilling to pay a lawyer, he argued the case himself. Vanzetti was acquitted and praised by the judge for his presentation. My father loved this story of a man who won against the odds.
Vanzetti suffered from heart disease, and at the time of his death my father had developed Parkinson's. I was his wheel man by then, helping him in and out of the car because he couldn't lift his legs.
On the day Vanzetti died we pulled up to my father's office where some of his buddies were waiting for the card game to start.
"They got Vanzetti!" my father cried, as I set his feet on the pavement.
They, he'd said, not it - not the singular, Death. It wasn't as scary to see it that way, even though the end would come for them all. Even Vanzetti couldn't beat it.
Those pinochle days stick with me as I live out my own.