LITMIR.BIZ

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hospital bed. He was waiting to be taken into surgery to have a screw drilled into his broken ankle. This latest crash hadn’t been with a car. Instead, he had been racing another cyclist early in the morning. Sprinting neck and neck—as Dad told the story—he was about to overtake the other cyclist when he had to swerve out of the way of a car and rammed into a cement median, shattering his ankle into bits.

      “I had this guy,” Dad said.

      “Forget about the guy,” I said. “You have to chill out. Mom is really worried.”

      “I know. I know. It’s fine. It’s fiiine. Don’t worry.”

      “It’s not fine,” I said, doubling down. “You have to take it easy. You’re fifty-two years old, for god’s sake.”

      The surgeon entered the room, trailed by my mother, and picked up Dad’s chart from the end of the bed. “Mr. Cocuzzo, any medical history we should know about?”

      “No, Doc,” he proudly reported. “I’m perfectly healthy.”

      My mother shot him an exasperated look. “Actually, he has three coronary stents.” Four years earlier, Dad almost had a heart attack when three of his arteries nearly closed while he was running to work. Despite his being a strict vegetarian for the past thirty years, hereditary heart disease had clogged up his arteries. He now had tiny plastic tubes in his heart and swallowed a cocktail of pills every day to keep the blood flowing.

      “Other than that, I’m pretty healthy,” my father said.

      “Do you smoke?”

      Dad shook his head.

      “Drink?”

      “Haven’t had a drop in thirty-plus years,” he said.

      “How ’bout caffeine? How much coffee to do you drink?”

      “You know . . . a couple cups.”

      “A couple cups?” my mother chimed in. “Stephen, you drink a pot a day!”

      The doctor closed the file. “Alright, Mr. Cocuzzo, a nurse will be in shortly to get you ready for surgery.”

      With the doctor gone, I continued to make my case. “It’s unfair to Mom,” I said. “She doesn’t want to see you end up dead. And what about Mark and me? You owe it to us. You have to slow down.”

      He nodded. Truth be told, I didn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to slow down and be more cautious—I did. But his all-or-nothing attitude was who he was and who he’d always be. I didn’t fully understand it, but my father held a primal devotion to his athletic endeavors. Cycling, being physical, was more than an addiction—it was a way of life. I didn’t actually expect him to stop. And, honestly, I admired him for it. Dad had one gear and one gear only: GO!

      AS I PLANNED OUR trip to Italy, the thought of leading my collision-prone parent down Italian back roads and through the Tuscan countryside simmered anxiously in my mind. If I’ve learned anything from my years traveling, it’s that you can absolutely count on the shit hitting the fan spectacularly. I just hoped that any catastrophes we encountered in Italy didn’t involve me pulling a Fiat hood ornament out of my father’s forehead.

      That was, of course, if I didn’t kill him myself. This would be the longest uninterrupted time my father and I had ever spent together. Our relationship had benefited significantly from us not living under the same roof over the past thirteen years. Before I left home for college, we were like two bull elks circling a small watering hole. Our horns locked often. Spending every waking hour together, navigating hundreds of miles on unfamiliar roads, and encountering the normal, run-of-the-mill inconveniences of international travel would be a challenge for any two human beings. The thought of doing all that with a man who had a penchant for danger and a Rubik’s Cube of idiosyncrasies made me anxious. I was absolutely certain that we would reach a breaking point. The only question was how broken that fight would leave us. Would we find strength to come together, or would it drive us further apart?

      “DAD, YOUR PASSPORT IS expired.”

      “Wha—?”

      “I’m looking at it right now,” I said over the phone. “We need to get you a new passport. Pronto.”

      “You gotta be kidding me,” he said. “We’re leaving next week.”

      “We are?” I deadpanned. “Listen, go down to CVS and have them take a passport photo of you. I’m coming to get ya.” Thirty minutes later, I pulled up to my childhood home in Arlington, Massachusetts, a suburb outside of Boston. My parents had lived there my entire life. Despite Dad and Papa renovating the house over the years, the two-bedroom was now dwarfed by all the new McMansions rising up on our quiet residential street.

      Waiting at the door, Dad spotted my car through the rain and darted across the front lawn, which he had converted into a Zen rock garden a few years back. “Thank God we checked, huh?” he said, climbing into the car. He was wearing ripped jeans, a pair of beaded moccasins, a tight white undershirt inside out, and his fanny pack across his chest like a seat belt.

      “Yeah, now let’s just hope we can get a new passport in time for the flight.”

      Dad drew quiet. Situations like this, the lack of control, were exactly why he hated air travel. To him, the whole process was daunting. On the extremely rare occasions we flew anywhere when I was younger, well before the post-9/11 scrutiny of TSA security, Dad had the family encamped at the airport a full four hours before our flight. So I guess it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to learn that the last time he used his passport, Reagan was in office.

      Luckily for him, this wasn’t my first time getting an emergency passport. While backpacking through Europe during college, I had my passport, along with my student visa and all my credit cards and money, stolen in Amsterdam. Earlier that day I had checked out of my hostel and set off on a psychedelic romp through the pot capital of the planet. Lost in a haze, I left my backpack with all my possessions on the floor of a coffee shop. With no money to book another hostel, I ended up sleeping on the floor of the train station before reporting to the US embassy the next morning. At the embassy a line stretched around the gates, each person neatly dressed, with their applications organized and ready to be presented. Meanwhile, I looked like a piece of dryer lint stuck to the skirt of reality. At 8:30 on the nose, a big Hawaiian opened the gates and called out, “Are there any Americans in line?” I was the only one to raise my hand. “Okay, come to the front.” I had a new passport by the time the closest cannabis cafe opened.

      By contrast, the passport office in Boston’s City Hall looked like Noah’s ark. All walks of humanity sat on the edge of their seats, praying they had the proper combination of paperwork to beat the flood. Dad took a seat and pulled his readers out from his fanny pack to fill out his passport renewal application. I watched him scan the instructions with the tip of his pen before jotting his first name in the box designated for last.

      “Dad, last name goes there.”

      “Ugh—”

      “It’s cool,” I said, trying to keep him calm. “It’s cool. I’ll grab you another.” As I fetched him a fresh application, I considered what the road ahead held. Ninety-nine percent of my traveling abroad had been done alone, where I was only responsible for myself. I could go where I wanted, do what I wanted. Traveling with another person would be a continual negotiation, pleading a case of where to stay, when to eat, and what to do. That type of travel was completely foreign to me. And now I was about to experience it with the most travel-phobic person I knew.

      “Here you go,” I said, handing him a new application.

      “Alright, let’s see.” I held my breath as he scanned the instructions again. You got this, Dad, I thought. You got this. But then I wondered, Do I got this?

      I DROPPED MY FATHER back home and returned to my apartment in Boston. “How’d it go?” Jenny asked.

      “Well,

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