The Big C

The Oprah-tization of existence means that your life is now a Story, complete with Chapters and Themes and Movements and the like. (And sometimes, when the Story is more compelling than the person, people believe in the Story so much that the person is swept along in the tide of transformation and [re]creation, such as the differences between Erick and "MrH8," but that's for another post.) So if that axiom holds true, my time at Evergreen Park Grocery – from a fourteen-year-old bottle bitch and gas pump monkey to a twenty-one-year-old counter jockey and do-everything – represents a fun and exciting set of chapters, tracking teenage crushes and midnight basketball and blood and sweat and mullets and cut-off t-shirts and tanning and high fructose corn syrup and gelled hair and grief and loss and ice cream and laughter and more.

Did I mention the laughter? Lots and lots of laughter. So much laughter that I wrongly imagined all jobs to be this joyful, even if you did have to work a bit here and there. One of my favorite tricks was to ring someone up for ice, then sneak out of the store into the ice chests so that when the customer came to pick up his or her ice, I would jump out of the ice chest, ice in hand, and say something banal like “Here’s your ice!” in a loud voice, which invariably scared the shit out of the customer and got laughs from my fellow employees. And I'm sure I stole that trick from watching Dave Tieppo do the same thing first.

I love my father, and nothing that can be said or done in life will take that love away. (He just turned 60, which is a number I would have never associated with my dad. And he looks younger than I do, too, which makes it even less believable.) He is a father and a dad in a world that sometimes only gives you one or the other, if at all. But if there are father figures at various parts of one's life, someone to look to for perspective and pondering, for a stable voice in the swirling cacophony of chatter, Dave was that figure during my summertime EPG days, and although the decades have passed since then, that will never change.

Dave Tieppo was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with all the awful import that diagnosis brings, and it’s hard for me to picture a world without him. EPG was co-owned by Dave and Karen Tieppo for many years, and while Karen was the stern authoritarian (although, to be fair, not without her light and joyful side), Dave was the “fun parent” of the bunch. In my early years, there would be more than one occasion where Dave would come back to the store after golfing with my dad – and knocking one or five beers back, along with whatever glaucoma medication might be handy – and have us fire up a pizza in the evening, filling the EPG air with oven smells and playful banter. There was my ever-present nickname of “Stretch,” used when he thought I said something funny, or on the rare instance where I crossed the line in some way.

I’m very lucky in that both my grandmothers are still alive, well into their eighties. I’ve had some brushes with death in the form of relatives passing – my paternal grandfather, an uncle on either side of the family – but the tail end of 2010 was the first year that I saw the awful march of cancer up close and personal, when my mother was diagnosed with leukemia. Thankfully, she got the type of leukemia that you want – if such a thing makes sense – and she has so far kicked ass with her treatment, but day after day and week after week of visiting the oncology ward of Northern Michigan Hospital showed me that many people aren’t as lucky. Especially those with pancreatic cancer. But if anyone can beat it, it’s Dave Tieppo, and I hope he’s around for me to say it to his face in a year, and in ten years, and ten years after that. I owe him that, for all the laughter he’s given me, to laugh together in the face of this awful disease.