Life Celebration Pt.4

Loving and missing Dad.

This found Brooke and John at the store right after the services. Holy shit.

Very little sleep and then I had to teach yoga. Brooke came this morning and had this wall hanging for me. After the luncheon yesterday her and Johnny walked to the antique store across the street to grab his sister a gift for her birthday. This literally FELL off the shelf and when they picked it up it was the Winnie the Pooh quote I posted the day that my Dad died. Obviously Dad wanted for me to have this. Thanks John and Brooke, I'm glad that it found you :)

Life Celebration Pt.3

Mom and Katie.

TA telling hysterical stories about Dad back in college.

Richard Schad chiming in on the details of the college days...

Andrew Welker, the power hooker.

At this point I'm not even sure WHAT the fuck was happening.

And the wine kept flowing and the stories kept coming.

Life Celebration Pt.2

Kill em and eat em.

Story time.

And so the laughter and celebration continued.

Life Celebration Pt.1

Uncle Sean (#10 of the 10 Callahan kids) had everyone holding their sides because they were laughing so hard.

Katie and Mom having a laugh.

My two New Yorkers came down to honor dad.

Gina and Me.

And then we got home and shit got crazy. Food and laughter and LOTS of booze.

Yesterday was Dads service, and what a beautiful day it was. We were shitting ourselves the night before because the forecasts were calling for rain and high winds...and our venue was outside. The Whitebrier was the perfect place...it's where my mom worked back in the day when she met my Dad. So once again, the heavens above blessed us with a beautiful day to celebrate my Dad's life. It was a packed house, filled with family, friends and even some who have never met Dad but wanted to be there to celebrate his life. We told stories and laughed and cried and laughed and cried...it was exactly the way that Dad would have wanted it. I wrote an outline for my speech, and I rambled for a long time around the subject, but I'll just include the backbone of the speech.

(It started out with me approaching the mic saying "I'm powerful and amazing" several times to fight back the tears and deliver this speech for my Dad):

My Dad taught me how to Live, like REALLY live. From the time that I was a little kid, and even through his death - he has given me a passion for life that is so strong, so intense, so vibrant. Sometimes I feel stressed because there aren't enough minutes in my day, days in my week, or weeks in my year to do all that I want to do. I want to taste everything, and see everything, and experience everything. This passion was a gift from my Dad. 

You all may know him as a loud, crazy man -- KILL EM AND EAT EM -- I GOT IT!! -- LEFT RIGHT!! but my Dad was also a wise, kind man who always knew just what to say. No question was too stupid, no emotion too silly. And even in this time of sadness I'm comforted by a conversation that we once had years back, he said...

"Cailin, life is like a river. It is going to bend right and left, and some days it is going to rage with water and at times it's going to run dry. YOU CAN'T CONTROL THE RIVER. You can only control how you handle yourself and how you respond to that, and that makes you who.you.are."

Well this fucking river has taken me down a turn that I don't like, and now it has run dry. And some days this sadness seems so great and so dark that I might lose myself in it completely. But then I remember our conversation and I know that I'm going to be okay. We are All going to be okay. Because my Dad taught us ALL how to life. And through his passing he reminds us that:

• each day is a blessing
• each breath is a miracle
• every relationship is to be cherished
• never underestimate the power of friendship
• and that an ice cold beer can turn any day around. 

Osho says "Be a drunkard, drunk with life, with the wine of existence. Don't remain sober. The sober person remains dead. Drink the wine of life. It has SO much poetry, and SO much love, and SO much juice.   I tell you you are born and you will certainly die, but something in you was before your birth and something is there which will remain after your death. And that something is life. Life is eternal."

My dad may be gone, but he lives on in all of us today, and for all the days to come. He was so beautiful, and so bright and so fucking vibrant -- and a Life like that doesn't just disappear, it can't. So try not to be sad, but to celebrate his life by living each day of yours to its height and depth. 

God bless ya Dad. I love you. 



After the beautiful service we headed to the Abbey for a luncheon, where Jim and Christian Mahr played music and we ate, drank, laughed and remembered Dad through stories and photos.

Captain Callahan

Our good friend Iggy keeps an amazing blog, After Hours With Iggy. He is a chef and avid fisherman, as well as a man who loves his cocktails -  and he is always posting great stories and recipes. Yesterday he wrote a blog about my Dad, and he really hits the nail on the head.....

He writes:

This has been a year of loss for me, and many in South Jersey.  This past weekend, one of the more large than life characters I have had the pleasure of knowing has passed.  His name was Paul Callahan and he was known and loved by many.  There are so many stories running around in my head, and so many things to say, but for once, Paul has got me, I just cannot put into words what his passing means to me.  If ever there was somebody I thought was going to outlive us all, if there was someone I would have voted for that was going to enjoy their retirement more than anyone, it was this guy.  He hunted and fished for a hobby, and grew up on commercial fishing boats, so he knew a thing or two about those two subjects.  His most famous saying was “Kill em and eat em” .  Let me tell you, to a chef, those words were music to my ears when he and his wife Doreen would throw parties at their house.  He did everything South Jersey style (hunt fish, surf,ect) but with more flair and working knowledge than anyone else, and don’t try to tell him different.  Not enough birds to shoot on a hunting trip.  No problem, I’ll raise them and then let them loose into the wild and then go hunt them.  No waves today because of the way they are breaking out on the tip of the Jetty?  No problem, I’ll just row my kayak out there and take advantage of the Striped Bass feeding out there.  Want fresh pig for the parties, I know how to raise, kill, butcher and cook them better than those services that come and  bury them in your yard.

This is an attitude that I can get behind.  Why rely on others when you can so it yourself, and do it better.  One of the reasons I became a minister.  When old Paul there found that out (his daughter, 15 at the time, told him she wanted me to marry her.  She meant do the ceremony, but let me tell you, I had a lot of fun with that one at Paul’s expense for awhile) he took to calling me the Anti Christ.  Little did he know that his wife would enlist me to renew their vows two years ago.

I can still remember the day I went over Doreen’s and Paul’s house and was told that a tumor was found in his head.  He had whacked himself with a surfboard and some wax had gotten lodged into the wound and gotten infected.  When they x-rayed his head to find out what was up, they found that ugly fucker in there as well.  No one I knew other than the Callahan’s even entertained the thought that it could have been serious.  And at the time, it was not, it was benign, but they wanted to keep an eye on it.  Well long story short, eventually it wasn’t benign.  Doreen said it best, he wasn’t dying form it, he was living with it, and live with it he did.  He did everything to the fullest until he couldn’t, and that is the way Paul Callahan rolls, and we should all take a big lesson from that.

So what do I say to remember him by?  That his parties were awesome, they were.  That he could surf like a champ?  Anyone who says that South Jersey doesn’t get any waves never saw Paul charge Hurricane surf in Cape May.  That he was a great hunter?  Look on his facebook page to see all the deer.  I will always remember the day we were in a surf contest and he was waxing “STAND HERE” on the nose of his board.  With three fishing sharpies gone this year (Bill Nickerson, Doc Adams, and now Paul) the fish population should skyrocket in Jersey, let me tell you.

So what to do to toast the man the myth the legend?  A drink called the old salt?  Well, unfortunately Capt. Paul left us far before he could get old, so not that one.  I am going to have to say the HERO COCKTAIL.  Why? Well because anyone who did anything dangerous first on our beach was called the “hero” and Paul go that title a lot.

THE HERO

1/3 oz coconut rum

1/3 oz peach schnapps

1/3 oz triple sec

1 splash of grenadine

1 cup of pineapple juice

Layer in a tall zombie style glass filled with ice and top with pineapple juice.  Stir, drink until you kill em and eat em.

My Dad

Yesterday was Father's Day...and I gotta say that I have a pretty phenomenal Dad. A person of epic proportions. He knows more about everything than anyone I know. He's absolutely insane, intensely obsessive, completely hysterical, skilled beyond belief, enthusiastic to boot, and the loudest person that I know. He was born into an Irish Catholic family...7 sisters and 2 brothers. This probably explains why he guards his plate at dinner, speaks LOUD and FAST, and knows how to survive in the wild {my Nan would lock all 10 outside for the day so she could get some peace and quiet...}. His mantra is "Kill 'Em and Eat 'Em"...and that he does. I grew up thinking that meat wasn't purchased at the store...funny, I know, but true. I thought that lobsters came in huge bags, deer hung in the garage walk-in box, and that everyone had pigs in their backyards...fattening em up for slaughter. My Dad was a "green" farmer before being organic was the cool thing to do. We had a half acre of fruits, veggies, berries and herbs. My mom said that my Dad would have all of the bugs he'd find in the garden under jars on the kitchen table. He'd study them until he found out what they were, whether they were good or bad, and how to get rid of them {without harmful pesticides}. I still remember my little fisher-price wheelbarrow. I wanted to help my Dad so I would take my wheelbarrow (with a built in water-holder w/ hose) into the garden and water the plants. I would pull the hose out of the wheelbarrow, water the plant, put the hose back into the wheelbarrow, wheel forward about 4 inches, put the wheelbarrow back down and repeat. Ha. It was rather counterproductive though, because once I was finished I would waddle down the strawberry patch and stuff my face with every red, ripe strawberry there was. I don't think that my parents ate one of those strawberry's the whole time that the patch existed.... Yep, even back then I loved food. When I was a kid my Dad was a fisherman and my mother was a waitress. When Mom would work at the restaurant my Dad would watch me. Most of the home-video we have from my childhood were from the days and nights my Dad watched me...and 90% of that is film of me eating, and my Dad laughing in the background. "Chubby child, stuffing food into face as quickly as possible"...then he'd zoom into the floor, where everything that had missed my mouth had fallen.



My Dad may be crazy, but he does live by a set of morals, or codes. He knows a good person when he meets them, he is generous with his time, knowledge and goods -- he is always, always learning something new, and he loves my mom as much now as he did back in the day. It always seems like jokes and laughter with my Dad, but the few times I've been in a bit of a hard place, he always knows exactly what to say. His wisdom has gotten me through several trying times, but one of my favorites was this.... he said "Cailin, life is like a river. It's going to bend right, then left, and it's going to rage with water and sometimes run dry. You can't control any of it, all you can control is how you react to situations and how you handle yourself. And that's all that matters."

Paul Callahan is a nose-walking, trash-talking, loud-mouth, know-it-all sonofabitch, and he's my Dad. Happy Father's Day Dad!

Fathers Day Gift:
Kill Em and Eat Em
handcarved plaque from Dominical, Costa Rica