When there’s no role model, how does a man decide what kind of father he’d like to be, and actually become that?
            We learn by imitation.  I love setting a formal table with porcelain and sterling, and making eating into dining.  My mother did that and I learned both by watching, and then doing.  She praised me for my work, and I then began to emulate her creative displays of food.  How she nurtured my baby sister I practiced with my dolls, and eventually was automatic with my own children.  She was always home after school to either listen or disappear into the kitchen if she sensed I just needed alone time; I did the same as a mother.  So with these couple of examples, I wonder about my dad.
            He was five when his father died at age 41; he had two older brothers and a sister, and one baby brother.  Having had two sons of my own, plus a daughter, my boys learned to shave by watching my husband, to throw a baseball from his instruction, even to ride a bicycle with him holding the handlebars.  My dad, I later learned, never had a bicycle nor played baseball, but who taught him to shave?  Who told him about relationships?  Who showed him how to form a necktie?
            My dad had to be annoyed when, riding in the car’s front seat, I continually changed radio stations whenever a commercial went on; he allowed me to annoy.  I wanted to surprise him and wash his car on our driveway that had a gravel center section, common in my childhood days.  I climbed on the hood to get to the top and gravel, caught on my feet, scratched the car; he thanked me for the surprise and didn’t show me any upset about the scratches.  I only had to mention, almost in passing, that I wanted Crane stationery, in yellow, to find it a few days later. When he took me shopping for a dress, he seemed to just know what I liked and in the color that made me feel extra pretty.  No matter how difficult or long-hours any of his days were, he stayed up to pick me up late in the evening after a club meeting or a dance, and he drove all of my friends home waiting until each was safely inside the house before driving away.  Who taught him these things?
            During my dating years, I’d decide at midnight that the boy had such a very long trip back to The Bronx or Brooklyn from our Long Island house, that my father then drove the boy home.  I went to sleep.  I didn’t think of the long drive my father had, 30 miles each way, to Brooklyn and that he might be tired; he never complained.
            Every interest was encouraged; every talent was enriched; every dream could be revealed and neither he nor my mom thought any dream was silly.
            He was active in the community. He helped out during World War II, when the draft rejected him because he had an active thrombophlebitis when called for his physical, by becoming a street air-raid warden.  He was a founder of the synagogue we belonged to, and rose to president of it giving dignified speeches and identifying with all the congregants.  He silently helped his brothers and a brother-in-law, financially, not wanting recognition or praise.  Once again, who showed him this side of manhood so he could copy it?
            Honesty and fairness were automatic; so was caring and tenderness.  What I saw as a husband to my mother was love, affection, understanding, encouragement, a gentle man, a quiet provider.  But he never saw a man in the role of husband, so where did he learn to behave this way?
            It’s taken me getting old to be able to answer the question that’s rambled in my head for so many decades: how did he learn to be a father when he had none growing up?  I now believe he became the kind he would have liked as his own role model had his dad lived past age 41.  What his head imagined was what he developed for his daughters.
 
©2008 The Jewish Press

John (“Jake”) Cosmos Aller is a novelist, poet, and former Foreign Service officer having served 27 years with the U.S. State Department serving in ten countries (Korea, Thailand, India, the Eastern Caribbean (Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts, St Lucia, and St Vincent) and Spain. Prior to joining the U.S. State Department, Jake taught overseas for eight years. Jake served in the Peace Corps in Korea. He grew up in Berkeley but has lived in Seattle, Stockton, Washington DC, Alexandria, Virginia and Medford, Oregon. He has traveled to over 45 countries and 49 states. He has been writing poetry, fiction, and novels for years. He has completed four SF novels and is seeking publication. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines online. His poetry blog can be found at https://theworldaccordingtocosmos.com

    In my 62 trips around the sun, I cheated death 20 times.  These are the true stories. If I ever meet the grim reaper I’d like to ask him why he spared me all these times.  

​    I was a preemie.  Born two months early.  They had just developed oxygen tents for preemies and I was one of the first babies they saved using that technology, so in a way even being born meant that I had cheated death.  The doctors thought that I would develop severe medical conditions.  They were right; I have had bad eyes, bad teeth, and a residual learning disability from birth. And I had a weak immune system to boot.  When I was six years old, I missed almost all the first grade and had to repeat the first grade because I developed all the childhood illnesses at once.  I had whooping cough, pneumonia, the flu, German measles, and regular measles, chicken pox, and mono all in that year.  And hay fever to boot.  for me once I recovered I was in good health for years except for seasonal allergies in the fall and spring. 

​I graduated from high school and college and mostly was healthy, no major issues other than colds, the flu, and seasonal allergies.  While I was in the Peace Corps training, we did a hike in the mountains in the East Coast of Korea. We stopped to drink water from a stream.  I developed severe diarrhea and a fever. I was rushed to the local hospital and transferred to a hospital in Seoul.  I had developed Typhoid fever, one of the last such cases in Korea as the Koreans had largely eliminated the threat of Typhoid Fever given the overall improvement in the country's infrastructure.  The doctors at first could not figure it out, but in the end they figured it out.  I spent four weeks in the hospital missing a lot of my crucial language training. The Peace Corps offered me the opportunity to go home or transfer to another Peace Corps program but opted to finish the training and my service.  During the stay in the hospital, I was a celebrity of sorts – the only foreign patient and the nurses and doctors stopped by to practice their English with and I practiced my very rudimentary Korean as I flirted up a storm with the pretty nurses. 

​I have always been a skeptical person, and not much of a believer. I have never been a Christian.  I have always been an agnostic or even an atheist.   But one day many years ago I experienced an event that changed my perspective on life. Since that time, I have become a believer in guardian angels that look after us in this corrupted world of ours.  I can’t explain what happened that day, other than to realize that there are stranger things in life than we can imagine and that someone or something was looking out for me that day.
In 1990, I was living in South Korea teaching ESL for a Korean University and government, and Asian studies for the University of Maryland for military forces stationed in Korea.  I was living in Seoul with my spouse who was a U.S. army officer, newly assigned to Korea.  She was born in Korea and was in fact the first Korean American female officer to be assigned to Korea.
We had been married for about six years having met in 1982 and had a whirlwind romance, marrying two months after we met.  That is the subject of another story though.  One spring day we took a trip to the east coast of Korea.  It was about a five to six-hour journey by car.  My wife was driving because I did not drive due to bad vision and because I was afraid to drive in the chaotic driving environment in South Korea.  We left Seoul about 11 am and by 3 pm we were halfway to our destination, Soraksan which is the number one mountain park in South Korea. It was a fine Spring day, just perfect weather, and we were both looking forward to taking a few days off.
Just outside of the town of Wongju, the freeway backed up and there was heavy traffic ahead of us.  I saw a sign for the Wongaksan National Park which I had never visited before and I told Angela, let’s get off the freeway and check it out.  I felt something telling me we had to exit the freeway that moment. I had a premonition that something bad was coming down the freeway and we were heading right into it.  We never forgot that day.  And to this day almost thirty years later I often think back what would have happened if I had ignored that warning in my head and had insisted that we keep going to what would have been our death.   

​          While in my first tour in Seoul, Korea I joined the Hash House Harriers. The hash was an international drinking club with a running problem as they put it.   The Hash started in colonial Malaysia and spread around the world.  Mostly expat Americans and British.  The runs ended with beer drinking, ritual punishments and British style jokes and bawdy not safe for work and not politically correct humor.  I thought it was a lot of fun, but it was certainly not for everyone.
One day we did a run down by the train tracks.  I was running along listening to music and did not hear the train approaching.  I jumped off at the last moment barely avoiding being killed by the train.  Afterwards I said that I had cheated death yet again, not knowing that my real experience cheating death was waiting for me a few years down the road.
Mutant Drug Resistance Staph Infection and 14 Operations Almost Kills Me
The event that changed my life was a simple decision. One morning I decided to go for a jog.  It was dark outside and I thought that I knew the path.  I made a strategic miscalculation and fell down a five-foot gap in the bushes where I thought was a series of steps.
 
I shattered my heel in a million pieces.  I made it back to my room, called 9-11 after an hour when I realized my foot was broken.  I called my wife as well.     I was a foreign service officer newly returned to DC for my first assignment in DC after working five years overseas in Korea and Thailand.  She was an army officer stationed in Ft Sam Houston, San Antonio Texas.
The ER doctor bandaged me up and told me that I needed surgery and after surgery would be bed ridden for at least four months.  We opted to do the surgery in Texas and we arranged for me to fly using a wheel chair assistance. By the time I arrived the swelling was so bad that we had to wait a week to do the surgery.
The Air Force doctors wanted to try an experimental procedure using shark cartilage as a replacement bone material.   A few days after the surgery I developed a fever and went back to the hospital and they discovered I had a staph infection.  They treated me with IV antibiotics and opened the wound area and cleaned it out and replaced the cartridge.  Then sent me home to recover.  I had to take antibiotics for four months.
I went back to her house.  She got me an internet account and I learned how to surf the net and read a lot of stuff on line. I could not stand watching day time TV. We did not have cable service. We rented a movie nightly and I watched movies every day and surfed the net and read some books she bought me as well.
Her dog, Jason, was a cute dachshund that was bilingual – Korean and English.  He became my best friend for the four months I was out of commission.  I called my office once a week to check in.
Once I returned to DC, I stayed there for almost a month and commuted by crutches.  I was amazed at how cruel drivers were.  Many people cursed me for holding up traffic as I could not walk across the street with the green light which seemed to be timed to allow for only Olympic 50-year dashers to get across the street in the allocated time.  Then on the metro not once during the two weeks I commuted by metro I was not offered a seat once during the entire time and I often had to stand on my crutches the entire trip.  and several times people rushed by me yelling at me to get out of the way on the subway stairs. 
I went one day to the military hospital for a routine check up on a different issue – a cist on my arm that I wanted removed. The doctor noticed that I was running a fever, quickly realized that the infection had returned, and I was back into surgery the next day.  
My wife came out that weekend to see me in the hospital.  I ended up having 12 more operations as the staff infection had become MDR.  I had an IV inserted in my stomach and went through intensive vancomycin the nuclear bomb of antibiotics for four months.  The final operation was a bone graft from my hip after they finally realized that the shark cartridge would not work.
My wife had to argue with the military doctors to allow me to stay in the hospital for a month.  They wanted me to stay on the IV antibiotics, but I had to report in twice a day for blood work.  She pointed out that I would be home alone and could not drive to the hospital but would have to go back and forth by metro and bus.  Two hours each way.  So, I stayed on until June.
I stayed sane by reading a book a day. During that year I read almost 300 books and started a daily journal.   I went to the hospital library every day and got another book.  The doctors were amused as every morning I had another book to read.  I also watched lots of TV becoming hooked on the X files.  I watched it frequently with the elderly black night janitor who was a big fan.  He was also a conspiracy nut.   He introduced me to the “reptilian overlords” conspiracy theory and speculated over who might secretly be an “reptilian overlord.”
My fellow patients were all army troops – everyone called me major as they could just not comprehend that my wife was the major and not me. One of my fellow patients was recovering from an accident and had gangrene and was facing amputation and a divorce.
Another soldier was back in the army.  He and his wife had inherited half million dollars and left the military and spend two years enjoying the high life and blew through almost all the money, so he went back into the military then had an accident and was recovering from a broken leg as well.
My best friend who was an actor in town for a season visited almost every day. My wife came for most of the surgery and many friends who had heard where I came for a visit. But I was cut off as this just before everyone got email and there was no internet in the hospital.  Finally, I was released as Angela got assigned back to DC.
I went back to work. And things were going okay.
I returned to work and my life. The fibromyalgia was a chronic condition but when I went to India and discovered yoga it became manageable.  The arthritis was chronic, but I eventually quit taking anti-inflammatory drugs and learned to just deal with the pain.  Every four months I must see a foot doctor to debride calluses that build up. Then in 2007 almost ten years after the accident I developed hammer toes and had to have four operations to smash my feet back into shape. Ten years after the operation I was faced with chronic pain due to the fibromyalgia and arthritis and some limited mobility but was recovering enough to resume daily walks.
1996-1997 was my personal year of hell. The year in the hospital changed my life. Afterwards I felt that I had been given a new lease on life, almost as if I was given bonus games in the great video game of life.  And despite my constant pain I was just happy to be alive, and to still be married and to still have a high-powered job. I had read 300 books in one year.  I started keeping track of my reading and movies and never came close to that record.
 

​          After enduring 14 operations and nine months in the hospital, I had developed intense chronic pain and after going to many different doctors was diagnosed with fibromyalgia as well as arthritis due to the operation.  I also developed a frozen shoulder syndrome and had to have a steroid shot.
While I was in the hospital undergoing the 14 operations, the internal medicine doctor told me that there was some other infection going on.  He eventually found out that I had a rare parasite that I had picked up in Thailand.  He had asked me whether I had spent time in Southeast Asia.  I told him that I had indeed spent time in Thailand.  He said,
“Well I know what is causing the symptoms.”
While I was in Thailand, I had fallen into a canal during a Hash House harrier run. This parasite was benign, but I should take some medicine to get rid of it. If I ever had a steroid shot for any reason, the parasite would expand to the size of a basketball and then kill me within one hour of taking the steroid. I noted this in my journal and commented that this might be proof that God if he existed had a morbid sense of humor for if he created the universe what was the point of creating this parasite?  Fortunately for me, due to the persistence of that doctor, they discovered the parasite before I had the steroid shot.
 

​One day in the fall, when Angela my wife who was on a business trip to Korea, I developed strange symptoms.  I could not eat or drink anything, but my stomach blew up as if I were pregnant.  I called a taxi and made it to the nearest military base ER at Ft Belvoir.  I was admitted to the ER and spent two weeks there recovering from an acute GI track infection.  Apparently the nine months of antibiotic treatment had so disturbed my internal microflora that bad bacteria had killed off the good bacteria.  They told me that was a side effect of taking IV antibiotics like vancomycin and that doctors in general don’t do a good enough job of monitoring people after being discharged after extended anti-biotic usage.  Someone should have warned me that this could have happened.  In an event, the doctors said that I had waited more than an hour I would have been dead.

​The last time I almost died was like the guardian angel incident in South Korea.  I had gone to Texas to recover from the accident and the first two operations.  I wanted to go back to work.  In retrospect I should have asked for a few more weeks to recover.  It was December and San Antonio where my wife was based was experiencing rare winter weather. The roads were covered with ice and commercial flights were closed but the military was still flying, and we had booked passage on a med evac flight. 
          While driving to the airport, Angela and I started talking about the weather and she had just explained to me what to do if we encountered black ice and boom we encountered black ice and she instantly reacted appropriately because we had just discussed it. Something had told us to expect ice on the road.   We totaled the car but walked away unhurt.  I went back a few days later but in retrospect should have stayed behind for a few more weeks.   They might have caught the staph infection before it spread out of control. 
 

            When we moved into the house on Nurmi Street, in Sylmar, California, we knew we had an avocado tree. Being from Canada, where it’s too cold for an avocado tree to live; we had no idea what this fruit was. These days they’re much more popular then when I was growing up there.
 
             In Jr. High School I can remember having bologna and avocado sandwiches for lunch, but the avocado wasn’t ripe, my mom would carve it off of the avocado, possibly with a machete, and lay it on the bread with mayonnaise. Being very hard and tasteless, I didn’t develop a love for them, although I do remember other people liking them. At that time we gave them away to neighbors, and didn’t think much of them.
 
            In high school, I dated a Mexican girl for a couple of years. That was when I got my first taste of a ripe avocado, and my first clue of my continuing love for avocadoes. It still wasn’t love at 1st bite though, it was a few more years for it to develop. I used to give her most of them in those years.
 
           Once I started dating and going to Mexican Restaurants a lot, we always ordered guacamole to eat with our chips. This was when the avocados became a part of many of my meals. I really appreciated our avocado tree from then on.
 
        Since then, we’ve enjoyed them almost every year and look forward to each crop. The amounts always vary and we wondered why. In 1996, I got interested in raising red worms. They eat everything organic, and we put our avocado skins and pits into the worm beds, along with other organic materials. One day, I opened the plywood bins to discover the pits we’re growing into avocado trees. I transplanted and planted a lot of avocado trees into various sized pots. I began to study them and learned the worm castings were very high in nitrogen, and the avocado trees as well as all citrus trees need that nitrogen. Starting then, I’ve fertilized our very large avocado tree every year. I also found out that the blossoms need to be sprayed with water, it helps to open them up more for the birds and bees to pollinate. I put a nozzle on the hose, so that I can get the water up as high in the tree as possible. I also put most of the castings from my worms on the tree throughout the year, as I harvest the worms. This helps to give us very large and tasty avocadoes. We get lots of compliments on how delicious our avocadoes are.
 
           I was told by our neighbor, the tree had been planted in 1957, he remembered when they planted it. I was born in 1957, and thought that was quite a coincidence. Since 1996, I’ve spent a lot of time taking better care of my tree, watering and fertilizing it. I also made a long fruit picking pole out of copper pipe, and a basket. This has helped me to get the avocados when they’re very high in the tree, I can add or cut out a length of pipe as needed.
 
            Our avocados are ready to eat between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They don’t ripen on the tree, but have to be picked, then put in a brown paper bag, and into a dark place. It takes them a few days to over a week to soften up. Some people put them in the bag and then into the oven. They can also be left in a bowl and will ripen as well, but takes longer. If they’re picked early, they don’t ripen properly and they have a rubbery feel to them and aren’t edible. Our annual crop varies, usually its 2-300, but we’ve had some years of only getting 20 – 30, and other years of getting 5 – 700. I’ve eaten 5 – 10 avocadoes a day many times. I’ve made a lot of friends sharing them with people. I eat them with a spoon, and a little salt, garlic salt and some lemon juice. But, most of the time I make guacamole.
 
            There are also many ways to make guacamole, using tomatoes, chili peppers, onions, green onions, cilantro, various herbs and spices and cheeses. I’ve also made them different ways over the years. It doesn’t seem like there is really a bad way to make guacamole, and it goes with almost everything.
 
            We have a lot of wind at different times in southern California called the Santa Ana’s.
 
          They’ll help to blow the avocadoes off of the tree. They’ve also ruined some of our crops when the winds come early and either blow the blossoms off, or blow the little avocados off before they can grow to maturity.
 
            The avocadoes we have are the Haas type, they have the “alligator”, bumpy skin, rather than the smooth skin of other varieties.         
 
            An avocado is technically a fruit, and even more specifically a single-seeded berry. It also has many health benefits including more potassium than a banana. They’re very high in protein, reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases andlower risks of prostate and breast cancer. There are many more healthy reasons to eat them. The antioxidants, amino acids and essential oils inside an avocado can help repair damaged hair, moisturize dry skin and treat sunburns.
 
            In many ways my avocado tree has become one of my pets. I feed and water it, clean up under it, trim some of the branches, and yes I even talk to it sometimes. It continues to give me crop after crop of delicious avocadoes. People who walk by, stop and look up into the tree admiring it, especially when it’s full of avocadoes. They also compliment me on how healthy it looks, the rich green color of the leaves, and it’s size.