It's been 10 years

It's been five years since I posted on this blog. But, I've decided to revive it (and, possibly, me). So much has changed.

The point of the moment: it's been 10 years since my father died. I'll post a photo, if I can remember how. Many anniversaries of his death have come and gone with little fanfare on my part, and this year - maybe because it's the 10th - seemed like the right time to do a bit of acknowledgment of his death and life and my reactions to both.

A detail: when he died, I sat in his hospital room, with my arm around his neck and my other hand holding his. He had been unconscious for days, and the life support had just been turned off. I sat with him as the monitors marked his demise in their precision. Beep, beep, beep, nothing.

I remember: the beeps marked time for a while, and when they stopped, time stopped. I noticed everything, everything, for a while. The sounds and smells in the room, the quiet of the hospital. Nothing mattered, nor would it ever again, in the same way. I recognized the Buddhist sense of being in the moment, and, lord Buddha God, was I in the moment. My father was motionless, mostly gone, not caring any more about his equipment or the yard work left to be done. One of his last things he asked me, a few days before: "who is going to take care of the details?" Not you, Dad, I replied. You don't have to, any more. Somebody else will.

The father-son relationship we had was fraught with difficulty. I hope there are those with much better experiences, but my father and I had a problematic time. We argued with no resolution, I hurt him in evil ways, he ignored my need to grow up and be a man. We had a peace that only manifested itself when we spent time together on a project. In the latter years, those projects were usually just cooking on the grill, drinking whiskey, and watching the sun set from his deck behind his house.

Perhaps the best time we ever had was when I invited him to go down to the coast of Texas to the "bay house" that my wife and I co-owned with her family. My father and I spent an awkward weekend with chilly weather and grey skies, but we ate a lot of great seafood and drank good whiskey. And, we talked. Our conversations were not profound, at least that I can remember, but they were conversations between a father, who had grown up on a farm in Kansas, was the high school football star, and became an engineer for an oil company, and his son, who had grown up in the suburbs of Dallas, never excelled at anything in school, dreamed of becoming a writer and ended up a poster child of ADD with dozens of careers. An awkward, difficult, meandering set of conversations, but that was us. I think he enjoyed it as much as I did.

We found an oak tree together. This oak was huge, having multiple trunks coming out of the ground all over a park, and had existed for hundreds of years. It was huge when the North shelled the Texas coast and burned the little town nearby to dust during the Civil War. The tree survived this and the myriad of droughts, hurricanes, and whatever else must have occurred during its life. My father and I walked around under its branches and talked about things. When the conversation was finished, we found a local restaurant that had great seafood.