All The Light On A Summer Day, It Never Ends (An Essay for Poppop)

I said goodbye to him last Wednesday. He wasn’t able to eat or drink much anymore, but he could still crack a joke. Even with a voice that didn’t entirely want to cooperate, he was committed to working a room.

My middle brother, my wife, and I were there together, sitting with him, in the nursing home. He started turning in his seat like he was looking for something in a far off corner, and we naturally, because our default setting is to talk to an unwell 86-year-old like an increasingly frustrated 2-year-old, asked, “What can we help you find Poppop? What are you looking for?”

We’re all thinking it’s his coat again. He had kept wondering where his trusty wind breaker had gotten off to the other day and was worried it was lost when we couldn’t produce it. We’re also all a little concerned he’s looking for his wallet again, because he’d kept wanting to give out tips to the nursing home staff, or hand somebody in the family “just a couple of dollars,” because it’s just how he’s wired, which is as heart-wrenchingly lovely as it is sad and problematic, given the circumstances.

He ignores all of us and starts patting his breast pocket, proceeds to take out and study an invisible package in his right hand, furrows his brow, taps the invisible blank space two times with his left hand lightly, unfurrows his brow, and then puts one hand to his chin with his other cupped over his mouth. I recognize this motion from him, even if I haven’t seen it in decades. “Are you trying to light a cigarette in here Poppop,” I ask?

His eyes lock on mine with a pre-grin acknowledging I caught onto his bit. He cocks his head back, blows a long exhale from his secret smoke stack way up into the sky, and then flashes as big a smile as he can muster while swiveling in his seat to make sure each of us are smiling back. Of course we were. “God if I could give this guy one more smoke, anything he wanted in the world, you know I would,” I’m thinking to myself, still laughing as I’m choking up.

If you didn’t know Nick, or Nicky, or Poppop, or Junie, or this, man, by any of his (known) aliases, it’s hard to describe the size of his character. For a small Italian guy from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, he was a force of nature. He had enough swagger to make James Dean jealous, and was just barely tall enough to make Danny DeVito look up. He was as complicated as they come, and yet, he was as simple as pizza pies and pitchers of beer, which for years were a regular part of his Friday night rituals, especially after he retired and moved with my Gram to be closer to their daughters. If you were in town on a Friday night back then, you didn’t have to ask to know the plans, you were invited to pizza night, and you only had to ask “where?”

He’d kicked smoking in his 50s, right before his heart surgery, and I mean right before his heart surgery. My Gram tells the story about his last cigarette, how he started smoking it walking from the car to the hospital entrance, how he stepped up and onto the curb outside of the main doors, took one last deep drag, let out one big final puff, and politely stubbed it out in the communal ashtray like he’d done a thousand times before. He paused for a moment in some form of solidarity with the last ember giving up its ghost against the sand, probably out of respect for each of them doing their job well in that moment, and then gestured to my Gram he was ready to walk in, fully prepared to be put under, have his chest opened up, and recover as a non-smoker. And that was it. After the procedure, he never smoked again. Not that he didn’t close his eyes and breathe deeply around other people smoking at a restaurant or a diner and go, “Do you smell that? Oh I miss that,” but he never lit up again.

So here he was now, sitting upright in a nursing home wheel chair, sick, not of life, but sort of from life, or at least from age more than anything else, and he was still unwilling to give up the habit of making us smile. He used to love the Redd Foxx joke about how people who didn’t smoke or drink or eat good food would “feel like damn fools lying in a hospital, dying of nothing.” I was looking at him thinking about how he sure didn’t do nothing, but also reunderstanding the joke. It wasn’t about the cigarettes or the shots or the snacks, it was about the smiles, and how much time you put into having a time.

When I say he was simple, I’m trying to express how much he didn’t need complicated things to be happy. If anything, his sheer capacity for loving all sorts of simple pleasures rubbed off on you. I know it imprinted on me from a young age, his way of experiencing life, how you could and should love a simple thing as much if not more than anything else in the whole world because, why not? Damn fools, life is bursting with somethings.

You could see it in the way he’d pick a fresh picked cherry tomato from his garden, how it’d widen his eyes just as much as holding one of his great grandkids for the first time. The moment of blissful appreciation that’d occur. Which isn’t to diminish or even equate a tomato and a baby, but it is to put a highlighter on the way he would articulate his most easily impressioned expression, “Be-yooo-tee-ful!”

I wish I could write the sound of his voice saying “beautiful” for you. I wish I could write it exactly, especially if you’d never heard him say it, just so you could hear him say it once, and not just anybody in our family imitating his tagline, as we all do, just so you could get the full experience of being in the presence of his admiration.

If you didn’t know him, maybe you’re starting to know him now, and maybe you’re starting to understand why I love him so much. Maybe you get why saying goodbye is so goddamn hard. And maybe you understand how hard it is not to have my eyes fill up while I’m smiling all at the same time whenever I think about him. About my own simple and beautiful life, somewhere near the comfort of his shadow, somehow on the confidence of his shoulders, and how it would keep moving forward, without his voice.

Before we left the nursing home that morning, he held my hand and squeezed it tight. I told him I loved him and kissed him on his forehead. I knew it would be the last time I saw him. We all cried, walking out into the late morning sun after saying goodbye.

When the sun hit my face I heard a whisper from a week or so prior, when he was still speaking stronger. We were sitting in a hospital room and he was in a big chair, gazing off out the window. I’d asked him what he was thinking about. “All the light on a summer day, it never ends.” I wrote it as a note in my phone. I didn’t want to forget it. It was the only thing I wrote down that day. It flickered in and out of my mind like the way a snippet of a song cuts through the static on a transistor radio just long enough for you to recognize it. The line was there and then it was gone in a second. We walked around the corner of the nursing home and got into the car.

We drove home, mostly in silence, with Dean Martin in the background singing to us,

Up in the mornin'
Out on the job
Work like the devil for my pay
But that lucky old sun got nothin' to do
But roll around heaven all day

It’s all of a 7-minute drive from the nursing home to our house. Nobody said a word but Dean Martin. We all were privately feeling the weight of the goodbye. My brother was about to fly back to his home with his family. My wife and I were about to take a short vacation. This wasn’t the end of summer any of us had been looking for.

Our standing plan was to go say goodbye to the Wonderland Pier, in Ocean City, New Jersey. They were closing it down for good at the end of the season. The Gillian family opened it in 1929. Poppop was born less than a decade later in 1938. The boardwalk amusement park was part of his youth, then his kids, then his grandkids, and most recently his great grandkids. It was barely going to bookend his run.

We said a second set of hopefully less permanent goodbyes to our family, which hurt doubly, and my wife and I left town. I had to change the music from Dino at the end of our block. The sun was at our backs as we drove east, late in the afternoon. It was the kind of late afternoon highway sun where you can feel it’s warmth radiating through the whole car. Our dog was panting in the backseat so I turned up the air. My wife put a fleece blanket over her legs to keep warm and it reminded me of the blanket Poppop always had with him because he’d been so cold lately. “Not enough summer sun in those rooms, even with the windows to make him warm enough,” I thought.

My wife held my hand as we passed through Philly on our way to the shore. She sang “On the Way to Cape May” to me as we got close and passed a highway sign. Her Grandmother used to sing it to her in the car whenever they made the same trip as a kid. Simple habits, beautiful times.

I got up early the next morning and walked the dog, and then walked myself down to the boardwalk. I stopped and sat next to Wonderland Pier and waited for the sun to come up. No calls from my family were a good sign. I took this picture and text it to my Gram.

I showed the picture to my wife when I got back to the place where we were staying and she pointed at the clouds. “I like the way they’re almost shaped like a heart, and how there’s a trail wandering towards the sun,” she said. “All the light on a summer day,” echoed off a basement wall in my mind and I thought, “that’s him alright, not gone, and still finding ways to get a smile.” I’m looking at the picture again now and can feel the warmth of the sun through the late summer wind, I can taste the salt on my lips. I can half remember some mysterious amalgamation of feelings of all the times I stood on that spot in front of that pier with him.

We spent two days in Ocean City before we said goodbye to the boardwalk. My wife touched the rails at the end for good luck - something her grandparents taught her to do too - and we waved goodbye to the sand and the ocean on our trek back across the bridge. These are all habits, old ones, the kind an older generation has to teach you. The kind that never end, the kind you never quit. You just do them because you can’t not do them, not because not doing them would be wrong, but because not doing them would feel wrong.

We had two more days booked on our trip. Next up: Philly. We stopped at the Cherry Street Tavern for sandwiches and beer that afternoon. The spot opened in the 1900s. Two brothers started working there right before the Bicentennial in 1976 and then fully took it over in 1990. Their simple roast pork (and roast beef) sandwiches are my wife’s favorite and she was thrilled to put me on to them. Poppop would have loved the whole aesthetic, I wondered if he’d ever been here.

Two brothers running a spot for the love of making basic food and seeing people smile—it’s not a lot and it’s everything all at once. We got to talking with one of them who was busy making sandwiches across the bar from us. He told us he’d been through 48 St. Paddy’s Day’s so far and wasn’t sure if he had it in him to do the party the city would throw for his 50th. The city was wild on the national birthday celebration in 1976, he could only imagine what the 250th party would look like in 2026. He told us all this while he wiped down the slicer and swept around it at a pace that would make a young person dizzy. And he did it all while carrying on good conversation too.

The guy next to us at the bar, a recent retiree who had been kind enough to share the soccer match he was watching on his phone with me earlier, leaned over and said, “I’ve been coming here for years and I had no idea that’s when they started! I’d always wondered.” “Beautiful,” I thought.

We ate our roast pork, my wife laughing at me choking on the extra spicy horseradish I forked onto every bite at her very correct suggestion, and I ordered another beer after my first draft disappeared too fast. I raised my glass and to toast her and thought about the damn fools and the lucky old fools, the beach we’d just left behind us, the American birthday fast approaching us, and wondered if we’d make it back to this bar before the brothers retired or worse. Poppop could have run a wonderland like this in an alternate life. I wished he was there with us trading stories with the brother. They’d have had some good laughs together, I could tell. It was a cool summer evening on our walk back to the hotel.

Still no call as of Saturday morning. We did more Philly stuff. Every so often my wife would catch me gazing off and ask if I was OK. I said I was, but I also said, “You know, Poppop,” and she’d know what that meant, and then we’d walk more in silence. She knew him, she felt it too, it didn’t take more than a hand squeeze or a look to communicate it. We decided to spend the afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art.

When we looked at the map I insisted we stop and see the Ceremonial Teahouse. It had made an impression on me years ago. “It’s almost as good as the Rocky steps,” I assured her. “But, we also need to at least walk down the Rocky steps when we leave.” “Haha, I know baby. We can’t come all the way here and not do THAT,” she assured me. That’s pretty much why I married her, in about three sentences. Old stuff plus new experiences equals simple somethings, with nothing foolish about any of it. I made a mental note of it, figuring it might come in handy for a renewal of vows at some point.

What I had long forgotten about the teahouse, once we found our way through the museum maze to get to it, was just how plain it is. A plaque explained the “artless style.” How the texture of every surface, inside and outside of the space, was almost raw, just natural. The radio in my head picked up a line about the garden my grandfather kept. I remembered the time a local paper wrote up an article about their backyard, and how proud him and my Gram were about it getting published. On our way out of the space I noticed a sign that said a Japanese word with the translation, “evanescent joys.” I liked how “joys” was plural. Good call from a structure built in 1917. Such are ceremonies, such are somethings, definitionally.

Time was somehow flying by and we found ourselves in a corner exhibit, looking at a collection of Daniel Garber works. There were a couple of teenagers who were busy on their phones on a bench. “Damn fools,” I thought, but then figured, “at least they’re in here.” Our presence helped them decide to stand up and leave, so we agreed it was a good time for us to take a break.

We took over the bench in front of a picture titled “Tanis” that we wanted to sit in front of just to sit, as much as we wanted to sit in front of just to look closer at. A plaque told us it was a Pennsylvania-impressionist painting of Garber’s young daughter on a summer day. She’s distractedly touching a post at the edge of a deep garden with sun rays washing out the top of her blond hair and shining through the edges of her blousy white shirt. The more we sat the more we felt the love inside of the painting. The way the summer light was captured by Garber is something else altogether. The clock said we sat for five minutes but it felt like fifty. I lost myself in the sun and colors.

I made a note of the painting’s name and creator in my phone. “Maybe that’s what the teenagers were doing too,” I wondered aloud, gesturing to the note on my screen. “Probably not. This place has nothing on Instagram,” my wife joked. I stood up, stretched my back and pitched, “Rocky steps time?” “Rocky steps time indeed, she agreed, all with a nod. The museum would be closing soon anyway. We had done more miles in the past few days than in the past few months, so walking down the Rocky steps just once on this trip would be more than enough. We walked through the museum doors to quit fine art and find somewhere to watch the baseball game.

We ended up taking in half a Phillies game over at Oscars and split a hot Italian sausage sandwich. The sandwich was on fire, the Phillies were being burned down by the Braves, and the giant glasses of beer were colder than the air outside. Dive bars following fine art is a good enough pairing, even if your team is losing, just saying.

We strolled back to the hotel and decided to have one more drink at the bar. Not long after sitting down a couple came in, fully-decked out in Phillies gear, and sat next to us. “Were you at the game too,” they asked? “We wish. We started watching down the street at a bar, but left after—” “Oh yeah, they’re getting crushed. We just left the stadium and caught the train back to beat the crowd. [Gesturing to the bartender, who clearly knew them] Let’s get the game on!”

We started up a conversation. They had a family tie to a player on the team and were in from California to see a bummer of a game. “We’re from Sonoma, most people out here just think of it as wine country,” they said. The radio flickered on in my mind again. Poppop used to always have a jug of wine at the ready. One of those giant glass jugs of cheap stuff. Econo-wine. Simple wine. “Dago red” he sometimes called it. I’d always assumed that dago meant something quasi-racist and I shouldn’t repeat it, but a quick google search says the internet doesn’t entirely agree, so I’ll risk writing it in his words for sake of accuracy. My favorite explanation for the name is the one that says Italian immigrants wanted to be paid “as the day goes” as opposed to by an unreliable promise of a salary, hence “dago” (i.e. “day-go”). I can get behind that. And as far as the actual wine he drank went, I never got the impression he cared where it came from, so long as it was red and wet.

The friendly couple told us how they were both retired from the California public school system. We heard about their family, we told them about ours. There was something about their warmth and kindness, the care for each other across generations, and our conversation flowed as naturally as a second round of drinks. Somewhere along the line we found out we shared the same wedding anniversary, which obligated a big toast between the four of us. Glasses were clinked, smiles were shared. “What are the odds of THAT” we all wondered.

The radio was on in my mind again. I was thinking about our wedding. About how lucky I was my Gram and Poppop both were able to be there. About how lucky I was when we moved back to the area when we did, because I got to spend all of this time with him in the past few years, time I otherwise would have missed. My how the days go, always full of something, something beautiful, if you’re paying close enough attention.

The Phillies game ended in a loss and we all speculated if they would still take the series. The couple gave us the inside scoop on the team, or at least their impression of it, and how close the players were, not just as athletes but as regular-life friends. “It’s really special. It’s just not like this normally on a pro team, where it’s just another job to the players, we haven’t experienced anything like it so far in his career.” You could feel their pride. “Oh, and consider it a belated wedding gift, but we picked up your tab.” As quickly as they rolled in, they said goodnight and left.

My Poppop used to be like this with a bill too, always picking it up, or at least trying to, just for the smiles and the memories it was worth. My Dad tells stories about the lengths he’d have to go to, to occasionally treat him and my Gram to dinner. How my Dad would excuse himself to use the restroom before dessert, but really it was to track down the waiter, only to be told in the kitchen door by a flummoxed server, “You’re too late, he already paid me,” all while getting the “Your family is nuts, you know that?!” look. This couple picking up our tab when they were closing out, it was him again, shining through.

We thanked them graciously and said goodbye, wishing them and our team good luck. My wife immediately started daydreaming ways we could pay their gesture forward. “And they even had our anniversary?!” was repeated 7 or 8 more times on the elevator ride back up to our room. The day was done. It gave us all the somethings we could take from it and more than we ever could have expected. A few more elevator rides for a quick dog walk later and we were passed out soundly.

I woke up at first light. I had closed the blackout shades just enough to not quite be closed all of the way apparently, and a slice of light was just starting to pierce the darkness across the room. I knew the sun wouldn’t be up for a while yet. I laid awake, just restless enough to not fall all the way back to asleep, and just tired enough to not want to admit I was up. The sun came up around 6:30 and let me know its signal was only getting stronger. Simple and beautiful, just the sun happily starting out on another day’s work.

I was laying in bed, my mind wandering through the maze of the last few days. I was thinking about Poppop. My phone started to vibrate at 6:48 am, it was my Mom.

RIP Nicholas William “Nick” DeBellis, Jr. 1938-2024.

Eras inside of eras inside of eras. Simple and beautiful. All a something to be lived, all an everything to be experienced, you lucky old son of a gun you. Make ‘em smile up there Poppop, we’re still smiling at you down here and it is be-yoo-ti-ful. All the light on a summer day, I know exactly what you mean when you say it never ends.

Ps. In the days that have followed his passing, I found out his wish was to have his ashes spread in the ocean, right off the coast of Atlantic City/Ocean City. As soon as I heard, I realized that’s more or less right where the sun was rising in the picture I took. I knew I could still hear him. He could fake light a cigarette, but he couldn’t fake a sunrise.

Pss. My wife proofread this post for me. After a good mutual cry, she let me know she’d made a note in her phone that same day I did in the hospital. “I don’t know if you’ll remember this, but the other thing he had said to you was, ‘I’ll never be far.’” We both cried again. Thank the gods.

Psss. Grandma Z, on my Dad’s side, is with me every day too. I can feel her somewhere out there right now correcting this essay with red ink like it’s an English paper (or the local newspaper and cursing whatever “that damn editor” missed again), all while agreeing through a grin and a laugh, “That ol’ Nick sure was a character.” She’d also make a point of saying how she approved of the use of “evanescent” and would encourage you to look up its meaning if you didn’t know what the word meant. 

Pssss. To Gram and Grandpa Z, I’ll see you both real soon too.

Psssss. It feels like we have to end here, and it feels like I’ll never hear this song the same way again, in the best of ways. Take us out, Dino: