Zach Selch's father, a Korean War veteran in a nursing home, calls on Yom Kippur with a plan to escape: withdraw $5,000, buy a car, live in a flophouse. Zach talks him down with cash for taxis and a haircut instead. His father dies that spring, the escape never happens.
Chapters
Keep that going for Zach Selch! Zach, hello! How are you? Hi, yeah. Oh, you are by far not our shortest storyteller. So I come out of synagogue on Yom Kippur. It's probably the only day of the year that you can't get me on the phone for 6 or 7 hours. And I have 7 missed calls from Winnipeg. And 4 from upstate New York, and I know it's not good. So I call Winnipeg, and he says he's escaping. And I call upstate New York, and he says, I'm out of here. I can't take it any longer. So I said, wait 24 hours. I'll be there. I'll help you get out. I go home, I change, I get in the car, and I start driving towards Albany. And I'm thinking, you know, the guy was a farm boy and then a Korean War veteran, combat infantry. And then he spent 30 years pretending to be an engineer for a big corporation without a college degree and 30 years building houses. If there's anybody in the world with the skills, And the street smarts and the potential for violence and the ability to lie to break his way out of a small rural nursing home. It's my dad. And I'm not too worried about him getting out. I'm thinking about the bill for the hole in the wall or the tunnel or the stolen getaway car. So I get there the next morning, and I take him out for a beer. And we go out, and we get to a veterans hall. And I don't know if you've ever seen a veterans hall, but imagine a plywood box with sawwood floor and a tin roof where they sell 50-cent beers and dollar shots. Woo! And we sit down, and we have a beer. And I say, so tell me the plan. And he goes, there's a bank. There's a branch of my bank down the street. I'm going to go in, and I have 5 grand there. And I think, my dad is Danny Ocean. Is like Sammy and Dino, are they going to take part in this caper? And he goes, I'm gonna take out my money and then I'm gonna go, there's a car lot next to the bank, and I'm gonna buy a car and I'm gonna drive into Albany. So I point at the wheelchair that he didn't have 6 weeks ago, the last time I saw him, and I said, you're going to roll into a car lot down the street from a nursing home in a wheelchair? And you think they're going to sell you a car? You don't think some alarm is going to go off? They're not going to think maybe this guy shouldn't be driving? So he goes, that's a, that's a good point. Plan B, you buy me the car. So I go, okay, I'll buy you the car. Then what? So he goes, well, I'm going to drive into Albany. I know where there are flop houses. I'm going to find a flop house. And he goes, They don't ask for identification. I have cash. I'm going to go under the radar. They won't be able to find me. So I point at the 50-pound, 5-foot oxygen tank that he didn't have 6 weeks ago. And I said, you know, you can't buy oxygen at a drugstore. What happens when you run out? So he says, I don't really need it. I don't know why they make me wear this. I go, okay. And I reach over and I turn off his oxygen. And I said, so why do you want to get out? And he says, you know, when I was living by myself, I'd go every day and I'd have a beer with my friends. And I can't do that anymore. So I pull out 40 $5 bills I had picked up. And I give them to him. I say, you can come here whenever you want to the Veterans Hall, take a taxi, take a taxi back. I go, when you run out of money, call me, I'll send you more. Problem solved. I said, what else? Why else aren't you happy? And he goes, well, I used to get a haircut every 2 weeks. Now I feel all shaggy. So I said, you know, there's a barbershop in the nursing home, and I've actually paid for you to get haircuts whenever you want. Get a haircut whenever you want. Just go in, tell them your name. So he goes, okay. He goes, can I have my oxygen back? So I reach over and I turn on his oxygen. He goes, yeah, I guess I do need the oxygen. I said, okay. I said, I'll tell you what. You know, we're going into the fall. It's going to be cold. You don't want to escape in the winter. That's a rough time. I said, I'll tell you what. In the spring, if you still wanna escape, I'll come back, I'll break you out, and I'll take you into Albany. I'll find you a flophouse. I said, I'll get you out of that place in the spring if you still want to. So he goes, okay, I guess that's a plan. Thank you. So I took him out for lunch. I bought him some new clothes he needed. I took him back to the home. And sure enough, if If he had still wanted to break out in the spring, I would have come back and broken him out. But it was a moot point because by the spring he wasn't there anymore. Thank you.
