100 words a day

Pope John Paul 2 shot-on the playground at St. John’s

John Lennon shot:  home sick from school

Ronald Reagan shot:  home sick from school

Jackie Onassis death:  at the David Letterman show

Princess Diana:  babysitting my nephews

JFK Jr’s plane missing:  in my LI apartment, headed to NYC (where for some reason people set up tributes at the Imagine Mosaic)

9/11:  in the subway, on the street, in Murray’s Bagels (it took all 3 to sort of figure out what was going on just 2 miles away)

Farrah died:  sitting on my sofa

Michael Jackson died:  still on my sofa

Sarah Jessica Parker.  Florence Henderson.  Rocco Dispirito.  Lance Armstrong.  Monica Lewinski.  Matt Lauer (several times).  Katie Couric (not w/Matt).  Seal.  Howard Stern.  Cindy Crawford.  Robert DeNiro.  David Schwimmer.  Woody Allen.  Peter Jennings.  Billy Baldwin.  Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova.  Yoko Ono.  Diane Sawyer.  Joan Collins.  Al Roker (not w/Katie or Matt).  Alec Baldwin.  Amy Sedaris.  Ed Burns and Christy Turlington. Andrew Shue.  Joy Behar.

And, Friday, a big one:  Donald Trump!  A friend asked what the hair was like and I told him, “Combover’s putting it politely.  More like a few strands of Barbie hair, stretched over a bowling ball.”

I first heard about her in a tweet from William Gibson (@GreatDismal) on Saturday:

“Young woman protester on her back, bleeding out. Orbit of one eye a perfect unspilled pool of blood. Image burns in, indelible. History now.”

Her name was Neda.  She was caught on video just after being shot in the heart while protesting the Iran election.  Who shot her is unclear, and perhaps irrelevant.  She’s now the new face of revolution.

Yesterday, a link to an article featuring the video of Neda’s death showed up in my RSS feeds.

I am not brave enough to watch it.

I’ve been a son for almost a half century and a father a mere 16 years.  Being a son this Father’s Day means feeling more appreciative and grateful; fortunate to spend another day with my dad.

Being the father of two children means spending my first “dad’s day” without them.  My oldest is away at a six-week academic honor and my youngest is 1000 miles away with his mome.  I miss them so much and want to be angry; but I’m not.

Truth is, everyday is Father’s Day for me.  I am loved and missed by my daughter and son.

I’m a grateful recovering Catholic and I carry around all the guilt associated with it.  Catholics take their religion as seriously as any other believers, but have all sorts of rules, covenants and rituals which if not followed…well, they send you to Hell.

My Godmother, my Dear Aunt is a great Catholic. 

She taught Catholic school for more than half her life, raised a daughter, loved her family and treated everyone with care.

She also found a way to play poker, dance, have a drink, smoke some, anger a sister or two and make everyone’s life better.

I love her.  Hell will have to wait.

Beams of dusty sunlight throw themselves on to the faded floor. We’re at Friday evening ‘ceroc’ dancing – which people take extremely seriously. Couples twirl around, lost in the joy of movement. On stage, a beautiful woman with a river of hair which almost reaches her calves, calls out instructions into a headset.  

G and I sit on the edge, watching. We’re such different heights, our earlier attempts at joining in ended in miserable failure within seconds. So we sit there instead, as the evening and music drift on, as I wonder why dancing always leaves me feeling so left out.

Every community has its unique individuals.  One of ours is a rock star.

He wanders the streets of Federal Heights, playing air guitar to a capacity crowd that only he can see, making music that only he can hear.  He serenades Federal Boulevard in ragged Levis, concert T-shirt, and jean jacket vest, tapping out a rhythm with his foot, his long brown hair stirring in the wind created by the passing cars.  His wallet chain glints in the sunlight as he points to the crowd, his fretting hand still blazing, hammering out his never-ending solo.

Rock on, Air Guitar Dude.

She’s there in the ticket queue at the station in my home town – a rather plump blonde woman in a navy suit with white piping around the jacket.

When I get to London, she’s there again, standing on the subway platform. Even more weirdly, she’s right here on the subway train a couple of hours later, as I’m heading home.

So, I think, here’s the thing. Am I following her or is she following me? Does she think I am stalking her? Or am I imagining it all?

I walk briskly, hoping this time I’ve shaken her off for good.

I haven’t been sleeping well, between not having a job, more weight gain and disappointment about possibly not running the NYC marathon in November. 

Usually this means tossing and turning but last night, mid-nightmare, I yelled out so loud that I woke both myself and my boyfriend up. 

He yelled back “What the hell?”  at the same time as I insisted, “I’ve never done that before!”

He said “How do you know?”, which struck me as really funny.  Now I’m wondering if I routinely yell in my sleep, and last night was just the first time I woke anyone up.

A big block falls off a very small chip next week as my daughter heads off for six weeks of academic bliss, courtesy of the governor of the south.  My daughter is a recipient of an incredible reward for her writing prowess; that and the fact she’s again class valedictorian, superb test-taker and all-around everythinger.

My daughter will spend her summer with like-bees in like-hives, solving the world’s problems and figuring out where we all should be.

I won’t have the chance to send her off on this educational adventure.  She doesn’t need me anymore.  Like any father, I’ll wait.

So I’m struggling up the hill by my flat, laden down with three bags of shopping, ready for a weekend away. I wonder if I’ll make it home. Then, the inevitable. One of the plastic sacks burst splits, spilling stuff on the sidewalk. I sigh, and scoop it up as best I can. Then I see him, an older guy, standing opposite me, holding out a supermarket grocery bag.

“Take it,” he says. “It’s spare.”

He continues on his way down the hill, leaving me calling my thanks after him.

Wow, I think. What were the chances of that happening?

Friday afternoon, and I am waiting for him to pick me up to go away for the weekend. He calls. There’s been an accident, and he’s stuck, not moving, in a queue of traffic.

Two hours later, he finally makes it. But he’s mad I didn’t make it over to his.

I raise my eyebrows, and gesture at the groceries and bags waiting to be loaded up.

“How could I have done?” I say. “Look at all this stuff.”

But, no matter, it’s still all my fault. We spend the next couple of hours on the road, in complete silence.

I’m not a landscaper.  The last time I did any significant landscaping was when I worked on the grounds crew at my high school for a summer, nearly thirty years ago.

Nonetheless, my family and I have been working on transforming the small front yard of our home.  It’s going slowly, but I can say this much: we have a small pavestone sidewalk in place.  It still needs a little leveling before I lift the stones temporarily to put anti-weed fabric down, but it’s usable now.

I get a silly joy out of walking the length of that little sidewalk.

My last day of graduate school was in 1981, so it’s been 28 years since I sang Alice Cooper’s classic “School’s Out” one last time.  I phoned my kids this morning and sang out over their speaker phone “school’s out for summer – school’s out forever – school’s been blown to pieces.”

I was rocking on their last day of this school calendar.  I kept up with “no more pencils, no more books…” when I realized there was total silence on the other end; absolutely no response.

Either I’m an idiot or they have much to learn.  School starts again August 17^th.

Months — years — of creditor phone calls are finally over, as of tonight.  Armed with a case number, I no longer have to fear picking up the phone when I don’t recognize the number.  The looming bugbear of garnishment has been defeated (in theory), and with responsible money management, maybe we can begin to make progress, instead of just making up lost ground.  I see a light in the distance that just might be hope.  Everyone tells me I’m doing the right thing, that things will turn around quickly.

So when do I start feeling relieved, rather than guilty?

The weather has been sublime the last few weeks in The Great Northwest.  We pasty Seattlites emerge from our dank dens and remember why we live here in the first place.

Around this time of year - along with the blossoming buds and the bombinating bees - comes another fact of nature:  the tree sperm.

The Cottonwood trees release their soldiers into the wind, resulting in a snowy effect.  The air is thick with them.  The curbs spill over with them.  No one and no nose is safe.

Spring is meaning to outdo Winter.

I’m going to need more Kleenex.

I Skype him, to wish him a Happy Birthday, and there he is, on the webcam again like Captain Kirk, 67 today. He is neatly turned out, as spruce as a child ready to go to a party, in a clean shirt, all ready for whatever the day holds. Mum wanders into view, and she, too, is nicely got up, in a pretty blouse I haven’t seen before.

“I put on my best blouse for Dad’s birthday,” she tells me proudly.

And that is suddenly so sweet, I feel the familiar little tightening of my throat.

“That’s nice,” I say.

My birthday sometimes falls on Memorial Day.

As a kid/teen, that brought mixed emotions.  Sometimes I had my birthday off school, but that also meant that everyone was on vacation, so a birthday party was out.

My birthday was on Memorial Day this year and I decided to go to Chuck E. Cheese and then out to a club to ring it in.

I didn’t mind it when people informed me they couldn’t make it when I invited them. I DID mind when half of those that SAID they would be there, just didn’t come and didn’t text or call.