Is the Purple People Eater purple? Or does he eat purple people? My father wasn’t too sure so he and my mother tried it both ways at Halloween. He loved Halloween, dressing in drag, dyeing his skin to become the Jolly Green Giant (green long underwear wouldn’t do), and building a robot costume. We had scenes with headless and pumpkin-headed characters to entertain and scare the kids. He was gregarious. When he took us trick-or-treating he’d present a shot glass for his treat.

Robin was an explorer. He didn’t sit around and watch sports on TV. We’d visit ghost towns, spend weeks traveling to national parks on our way to grandparents. We rafted in El Paso aqueducts after a rain. He tinkered with electronics using the same skills that led him to be an Army computer engineer back when that was wondrous. When he wasn’t drinking and his temper in check, he was a fun dad.

I didn’t know that men came to your home to fix things – my father fixed everything. Cars, TVs, dishwashers, washing machines were all dismantled, the offending part replaced and put back together. He finally tackled one job too much for him, a new clutch on the car handed down to me, a Datsun 610 wagon. He couldn’t get the transmission back in correctly. He had me help him tow the car to a bank parking lot. When the bank called to tell him they would repossess the car he told them, “Look out your window.”

Nice people covered for him for a while, but eventually the multiple DUIs, missed work, fines and legal bills caught up with him. One hopes that a failed marriage, a bankruptcy, being fired from work and a stint in jail will be the “hitting bottom” necessary for a recovery but that was not to be. He moved to Germany to escape, my mother, brother and I left to fend for ourselves. And we did.

We rarely heard from him. I practiced ambivalence.

Once he returned to the States and El Paso, he remarried and began anew. He visited a few times, most recently in 1996 with his wife Patti and their miniature dogs. Patti made an effort to reconnect us and some years I would call him near his birthday. I never visited him.

When his father died, going through papers he learned he was the offspring of a pre-marital relationship between his father and a “tall blonde”. It always appeared to him that his younger brother was mom’s favorite and now he knew why. And we know from where the height comes, kinda.

Robin and Patti were rearing her grandchildren after tragedy struck Patti’s son. His new family got to know the same man my family knew, all the good and the bad. Recently he found the latest DUI, his ninth, would lead to jail, something he could not face at 71. Sunday morning he committed suicide.

With all this personal wreckage it’s hard to hard to focus on the positive, but it was there. Years of it.