Part 1 - some of what I know.

My parents were introduced by a mutual friend in the mid-60's and they dated for 10 years before they got married in 1974. My mom was 30 and my dad was 40 - or so she thought. I'll come back to this later. I was born in 1976 and was an only child - or so I thought (more on this in the next part) - until my brother came along in 1981. My dad worked for the Ann Arbor Public School system as a custodian before switching to the paint department. He painted all of the schools in the school system, and I was always a little excited and proud to see my dad working when it was my school's turn to be painted.
Life hummed along as life tends to do until a letter from the Social Security Administration, addressed to my father, came in 1989. The letter was basically asking my father why he wasn't retired yet. Exactly what happened after this, I am not sure. I do know, however, that the shit really hit the fan once my dad was finally forced to tell my mom the truth. He knew exactly why the SSA had sent him that letter. When my parents first started dating, my dad told my mother that he was born in California about 1934, which would have made him 10 years her senior. This is the birthplace and birthdate that is listed on my birth certificate as well as my marriage certificate (since it was on my birth certificate). He told her his real age at that time: 78 years old, making him not 10 years her senior, but 33 years her senior! He said that he'd had to lie about his age in order to get work at some point and he just never corrected the error. Much later as an adult, I hypothesized that he was living in California in the mid-1930's when he was issued a social security number (FDR's "New Deal" really was new then) and it was convenient to make that his new birth year. I wasn't able to verify that he lived in California (even though he said he did) until a few days after he died last November. I was searching Ancestry.com for any new scrap of information I could find to help me make sense out of his life when I stumbled upon an "Index to Register of Voters" for Los Angeles precinct 238, dated 1934. And there was his name staring back at me. As well as the name of his first wife, Dora, whom he'd also kept secret. He voted democrat and so did his wife, but I digress.
I was 13 when this all came out, and all of a sudden my dad had become old enough to be my grandfather. In fact, he was older than both of my mom's parents! He became the "cool" dad somehow, just because he was that old and didn't act like it. He had always loved clothes and cars, and although his own fashion sense fell by the wayside, he still liked a sweet-looking ride - with lots of bass-heavy music blasting out of it. He never kept a car for too long before getting a new one. The one he had the longest was also his last, like he told me it would be. It was a black 1998 Pontiac Grand Prix two-door, with a rear spoiler. Nearly every time I'd come over to visit, he'd be out in the driveway happily polishing it. For a few years, he ran an auto detailing business as a side job. He had a small number of clients - mostly older women. When I bought my first new car 11 years ago - the Jetta, which is now on its last legs - he taught me how to detail it properly (this is a story in and of itself). He hesitated to point out what I was doing wrong when he saw me washing it because as he told me, "I know you don't like nobody tellin' you what to do". Can't imagine where I got that from. Ultimately though, he got to the point that he couldn't drive safely anymore because of his dementia, and my mom made me take it to my house so he couldn't see it and keep asking about it. It soon became clear that we needed to sell the car. We got the necessary repairs made to it, since he hadn't been able to maintain it himself in quite some time. I spent most of a day detailing it, inside and out one last time. It was so pretty:

The people I sold it to were buying it for their teenage daughter and wanted something driven by a little old lady. This was the next best thing. So I took my dad's old license plate off and sold his car.  Before the buyers had even made it to the end of the street, I just started sobbing. I mean, to the point of not being able to talk or breathe. I felt like such a traitor. I had just sold my dad's car right out from under him. Since finding out he had Alzheimer's, emotionally, I think the day I sold his car was one of my darkest. He loved to drive. He had driven damn near his entire life (his first car was a Ford Model A, for Christ's sake!) and I just sold the last remnant of his independence. That really drove home for me the fact that he was going to die and I felt like I had just helped speed the process along.
Good grief, that tangent really took a turn for the macabre, didn't it? Sorry. More of the story later.