MISSING MY DAD ON A RAINY DAY

Well, I’m sitting in PT CRUISER, drinking a big Mason jar of fresh coffee creamed with sweetened condensed COCONUT MILK!

Yes, it’s equally delicious, and I would have switched sooner had I known it was available, because I think it’s healthier. Word.

I’m listening to an audiobook by one of my mentors, who is talking about his complicated feelings about his long-absent father, whom he never knew except by the terrible stories his relatives told about him.

His father never contacted him or his brothers and died in a backwater southern town.

In spite of a bitterness that rankled my teacher’s heart for many years, he was able to forgive his dad at the site of his grave, which he was led to by undeniably supernatural circumstances

This has had a powerful effect on me today, sitting in this car in a torrent of rain that seems to penetrate the walls of the vehicle and sink deep into my own heart.

My dad died in my arms the day before graduating Garces, and I was so incredibly numb at the time that I graduated at Civic Auditorium, as it was known then, under the influence of the psychedelic Mescaline, and remember the event in disjointed flashes of Peter Max colors, the audience a giant, swirling sea of the brightest reds, blues, greens, and yellows.

I had no way of coping at the time, and could not cry at the loss.

Frozen inside, for many years I could do nothing but patch the cracks in the dam to keep it from breaking and sweeping me away.

I have a tendency towards bad habits, and these were my comforts, even though they were harmful to my health and state of mind.

But I’m pretty sure I had to go through all that to understand that I am not alone in the way I responded to fear, loneliness, perceived lack, jealousy, and all the other unwanted emotions human flesh is heir to; and as compensation I have somehow been able, in recent years, to articulate how I let go of those things, and gave them up for the way I live now.

I guess I had to go through a lot to get there too, as the events of recent years make plain. But I lived to tell the tale, and am always looking for ways toward a deeper understanding of what these things mean, and how I can make my experiences useful for others.

But back to my dad…

I sometimes have dreams where he has returned, as though he has been on a business trip or is simply living elsewhere, and in these dreams he sits on my bed and talks calmly and gently to me.

As we speak, I have a strong knowing that he cannot stay, and the feeling I have when I awaken is the ultimate in bittersweetness.

And the point of this entire post is just to say how much I miss my dad; even at 62, my age now, I am still that kid who wants to see him every day at the table, eating baloney sandwiches when he came home for lunch from the television station as an economy measure thought necessary by a man with six ravenous kids.

I still want to play golf with him, hear him whistle like a pro, shoot baskets in the alley, and try to impress him with my non-existent sports prowess, which he must have thought hilarious – a fat asthmatic kid like me had little stroke in sports.

But he loved me without question, without reservation, and I am proud to have been his son in every way.

I love you, dad, and I just wanted to put it down in words today. Thank you for loving me too, and teaching me by example what that means.

I’m more than ready to be like you, and in some ways briefly visible to me, I see you in the things I say and do.

I hope you will be proud of me, in the same way I am of you, and will tell me so when we meet again.

Love you!

I love you, dad.

I love you.