"Can you recall
How you took me to school
We couldn't talk much at all
It's been so many years
And now these tears
Guess I'm still a child"
["Father, Son", Peter Gabriel]
I've been thinking about my father more than usual of late, probably because I knew today was coming. But even before that, I've also found these last few years I've been thinking of him a little more often, more so than my mother. That might seem natural, based solely on the fact that he died much more recently, but I don't credit that with being the reason.
Rather, I find in recent years I feel like I can relate to him more. I am about now the age he was when I was nearing the end of my childhood. And increasingly, my brother and a few other men in my life seem to remind me of him. That's probably a good thing, both ways: it's nice to be reminded of him, and it makes me perhaps a little more fond of those men who do. I think it's their sense of humor. Dad has a certain simple, silly, foolish sense of humor. He could laugh at the smallest of things.
I miss hearing him laugh.
I miss making him laugh.
I remember how I used to memorize jokes before going to visit. They had to be just right: something he'd find funny, perfect for his sense of humor, and I'd rehearse them in my mind to get the timing just right. In the modern era of memes, I feel like jokes with punchlines and even the joke-telling tradition seems to be going the way of the dodo.
From the moment the pandemic began, my ability to reconstruct timelines in my head fell to shit. Nowadays remembering when something happened is like putting together a frustrating jigsaw. My brother suggests this is merely a function of age, and that the stress or fatigue of the pandemic has nothing to do with it. He may be right. If I ever don't feel exhausted again, I'll try to figure it out. But whenever this happens, I'm reminded of my father, and the challenges he faced that way, and it makes me think about the fact that we're all strangers, in a way. We think we know how others live or feel but we don't, especially when we just assume everyone feels or lives as we do and assume "well if I was in their position, I'd..." but you wouldn't, because that position comes with a whole different lifetime of events that led to it. My father's life and mine are so very, very different.
And yet... we're not so very, very different. The older I get the more I feel like I understand him, but in ways I can't put into words. I planned today off, hoping to write, and even started this page a few days ago and researched yesterday for an appropriate song (beautiful and appropriate story behind the choice above, if you dig, thank you Mr Gabriel).
But just now, as I came upstairs to write, I felt like it might just be a pointless exercise. I felt like I had nothing to share. For some of the things in my head, this isn't the place or the time, except to say that 'Odd a couple as they may have seemed, he was the right man at the right time for my mother. They were great together. He was perfect. She couldn't have found a better match.'
But the other things, the things about why I feel closer to him, or how I feel I understand him better now... for those things I simply... lack the words, which is either fitting or ironic or both, considering what I wrote about him when he died.
So I'm afraid I don't have much to share today. Typing through tears and nothing much to say.
After he died, in his honour I had a simple but vitally import precept of Taoism tattooed on my chest above my heart: 'Manifest plainness. Embrace simplicity.'
So in that spirit of simplicity, let me sign off with just this:
Ten years, Pop. I love you. I still miss you. You were a good man.
