What A Week

Tuesday, Sept. 07, 2010 - 12:35 a.m.

Hi, all. I'm back. What a week it's been.

Here's what I was going to read into a microphone at some point during the funeral or the reception, but I was recuperating from a bad cold and didn't trust myself to stand up long enough to read this. So instead, here it is:

~ ~ ~

My name is Brin McLaughlin, and Joe Espinosa was my father in law.

The first date John took me on, some twenty years and change ago was to Joe and Nadine's home in Mountain View for Joe's 55th birthday.

What I didn't know was that Joe was in the home stretch of years of public service with the Mountain View Fire Department, but I found this out when several of his co-workers arrived in vehicles with the option of 'lights, but no sirens', trapised merrily into their home and sang Happy Birthday, stayed for the length of a very fast cup of coffee, which is the only way a firefighter on active duty is able to drink coffee, and then trooping back out and returning to work.

I absolutely adored Joe and Nadine, starting that afternoon, many months before John and I became engaged.

And even if I hadn't had the incredible good fortune of actually being related to them, I was always going to remember my date with John, and be glad I had met such wonderful people.

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Through the years of being Mrs John McLaughlin, I grew to know my inlaws and the various branches and ramifications of the Espinosa clan, and for many years, I was still memorizing names at Thanksgiving and Christmas, so that when John and I are driving home and John says Now Who Was That Again, I'll have an answer. But whenever there were new faces at the family gatherings, Joe had taken the time to say "Hey, have you met so and so? This is Johnny's wife, Brin."

When my mother died in 1995, Joe sent me a sympathy card with direct written orders from him to me, to mourn her in my own way and not to let anybody else tell me how to do this.

This advice came in handy again in 2003 when my father died of a heart attack. But an interesting thing happened from that moment on. I had always mostly called my father in law Joe up until that point, because that's what John had been raised calling him, but after my father had passed, Joe finally felt like it was okay to say to me, "Hey, call me Dad!" I mean I kind of had been doing so when I remembered, but the comfort level had been established, and it had taken me entirely too long to understand this, but Joe was somebody I should have always been calling Dad from the get go. I never called him Joe again after that.

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One of the main things I'm always going to remember is that Dad had an unparalelled sense of humor. And in the leg-pulling department, he gave as good as he got, and whenever John and I thought we stood a chance at getting away with a little something, we did.

Holiday drives from San Francisco to Livermore are either pretty much as predicted, or they are glacial. And there's never any way to actually gauge what's going to happen on which holiday, either. So more often than not, John and I have been tardy to family gatherings.

But one year, the drive was miraculous, and when we got to Livermore, we parked with the engine running about a half a block away and we had John call the house, told Nadine what we were about to do, and ask to speak to Dad.

Then John said, "Oh, DAD our ALARM didn't go OFF! OH geez, we'll be there ASAP!!!" and Dad kind of moaned and groaned and said "Okyayyyy get here when ya can..." so John said "Gotta get going!" and hung the phone up and we gunned the car and screeched around the corner, dashed out of the car and across the lawn and FLANG the door open and John said "Hey Dad! FAST enough for ya???"

And Dad's reaction was priceless, memorable, and almost completely unrepeatable here. "Oh, BLANK, you BLANKS" followed by gales of laughter.

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I'm very glad we had Joe Espinosa for as long as we did. I never imagined I'd ever treasure another guy as much as I did my own dad, but it was an easy thing to do.

I'm going to honor him by drying my tears and laughing at something as soon as I possibly can.

Dad, may you sleep in peace and wake in wonderment, and to quote one of my favorite writers, "We will see you again, in the place where no shadows fall."

~ ~ ~

That's it. Have a good Tuesday.

See you tomorrow.

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