The Ryan Medicare voucher thing is very personal to me

     This whole Ryan Medicare voucher thing is very personal to me. 

     My dad went to college during the Great Depression. He worked his way through grad school by working at an observatory. I didn’t realize until earlier this year that at that time it housed the largest telescope in the world. One of the things he did there was to layout a system for mapping the stars and galaxies. It’s the system everyone uses today. He would have gotten a doctorate for it had he written it up, but I’ve learned my dad was not a good writer. 

     He went to work for a large firm and he and a friend designed all the cameras that firm used for years. He was lured away from there to a small start up, this in the late 1930’s. He was the seventh employee. His first job was working on a camera that was to be used to film what the Norden bombsight was dropping bombs on. I didn’t realize how special that was until I read about it in Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken. Once the bomber set the bombsight on a target the bombsight took over flying the plane until the bomb was dropped. Whether the camera was in the Enola Gay when it dropped the atomic bombs on Japan my dad never knew. He never spoke about it because it was top secret. What I knew I learned from my mom.

       After that he worked on all kinds of cameras and telescopes. His firm designed the optics, the stuff that made the cameras really work. They always worked as a sub-contractor so their name rarely if ever appears in manifests of the equipment. The pictures of the Cuban missiles, the U2 pictures, all the pictures from space, the Hubble, they are all the optical systems that my dad and the company he was with designed and built. 

      My dad’s idea of recreation was to work on various unsolved mathematical problems. While I was growing up he worked on Fermat’s Last Theorem. We never talked about sports. He wasn’t interested. His idea of a great Sunday afternoon was to sit in the living room alone with a spiral note pad and a #2 pencil and scratch out equations. He was so honest that he wouldn’t even take a pencil from work to use. I remember him skipping into the dining room one day; he never skipped. He had solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. 

     Before he sent it off to one of his buddies to review, a guy named Chandra, he gave it a last look. There was a problem. I only realized a few years ago that Chandra was Chandra Sekhar, the man who won the Nobel prize for theorizing that there were black holes.

     My dad had the ability to concentrate and lock out distractions. There were funny stories about how he drove and missed a turn. He missed the turn off the Garden State Parkway for The New Jersey Turnpike and didn’t realize it until he got to Cape May. He drove around the Washington Beltway twice before he found the turn to route 95 north.

      He was suffering from some form of dementia and we all missed the signs for years. My parents moved from their retirement home to a senior living center, from the independent living space to a condo, and finally my dad was put in a senior assisted living center. A place that he specifically asked not to be placed. I visited numerous other facilities, much nicer, much better care; but my mother went with her doctor’s suggestion because it was the only place the doctor had visiting rights. 

      One of the last times I saw my dad he had taken off all his clothes except his boxer shorts and he was pawing the side of the mattress. I always remember that sight when I think of Dad and all the great things he accomplished in his life.

      I think of Paul Ryan strolling in and handing my dad an envelope with a piece of paper in it and saying, “Here’s some money for your health care. You’re free to negotiate with whomever you like. Good luck.” And strolling out whistling to himself.