I was in real danger of ending up in that headspace, I think. But I seem to have a 100% accurate copy of Pop's voice in my head that makes an appearance, from time to time - and, one day, it gave me a piece of its... er... IDK. But it reminded me that, while mourning is a fact of life, so is
living, and it was time for me to get back to doing so. Sort of. He would - and did - help anyone who needed it... but he wasn't a bit shy about telling them what they needed to hear. And he was honest about it, too. He once told one of our more useful mayors, who had been instrumental in bringing a needed thing (that Dad was one of the people building) to town, and who was there with some other people to ask whether they needed anything (and for a quick photo, of course), "Yeah, I need you to get back in your car and leave so that we can get back to work and finish this pour before the weather turns nasty." Which the mayor and his party did, lol ("photo op rescheduled to Sunday"
). And I doubt any of Dad's girlfriends before he met Mom, or Mom would have ever been dumb enough to ask, "Does this dress make me look fat?" Because - if true - he likely would have replied, "Of course not - that would be your big ass." Or something similar.
I forget where I was going with that, exactly. But, at some point, you might find that some form of "what would Dad do in this situation" wins out over the effects of grief. <SHRUGS> Or not. But probably. We cannot live in memory - but our lost loved ones live in our memories of them. And, in so doing, are likely to have some lasting influence on how we act and even how we feel. Which I have probably stated badly.
I envy you that, a little. I have one picture of my father, although Mom has a couple. We weren't really a "photograph" family. We didn't have much in the way of luxuries. And trying to get a picture that had my mother in it would have required an extreme telephoto lens and a long distance - or the winning of a war. There is one picture at her house of the two of them together ("you two boys can each have a copy of this after I'm gone") back in the late '60s, and a three-photo display thing of her, plus two of her sisters, taken in 1961 or about then (ditto). Maybe it's four photos, one of the four sisters? I haven't seen them in years. Other than that, there are a couple of school-age photos of my brother and of me, one each of two of the kids she babysat years ago, and maybe half a dozen pictures of our eldest brother, who was killed (long ago) when he was 12.
If you don't mind a suggestion: Make multiple copies of all photographs you wish to preserve! Both real and electronic (the latter first, just in case). I am certain that I once possessed one or two more pictures of Dad, but they're gone now, and so are the negatives. One of them was a family type one from just before he managed to fall out of the third story window and break his back (so he'd only have been two or a very early three), but I'm pretty sure that I had one of him holding me when I was but an infant old fart, that one of their neighbors snapped 50+ years ago. I really wish I still had that one, both because my mental copy of it is beginning to blur a bit, and it captured his visage (mostly) before life and its burdens had landed upon his shoulders. Well, a lot of it, at least. His childhood wasn't exactly easy, either, but I like to think he might have still had a hope that he'd one day, having raised the three boys to adulthood and paid off a house, that his wife (Mom) and he would be able to take it easy and live happy ever after. Which, yeah, I guess never really happens for most people, but the really lucky ones get to be unaware of that fact for a little while. Or something. Note to self: Don't post after the second night of it being too hot to sleep. But, yeah, that's what I'd recommend. Put them in separate locations.
Your son is named Wookie? His beard must look like mine, LOL. Or else he gets a haircut about as many times per year as I did before the pandemic hit and I learned that I could do it myself fir free. That's... a nickname, I assume? Er, no offense intended if that's his actual name, and IDK maybe it helped him grow up tough.
Wait - Wookie was the hairball in Star Wars, right? I never saw the movie (I never saw most movies
), but the commercials were all over creation, off and on for years, it seemed like, and one of them had a seven-foot tall... yeah, hairball. Hirsute. Hair... suit? IDFK. Up with the force, or whatever. Think I've been to the theater about... Hmm. ET. One of the Psycho movies - saw it with Mom, of all people, because she'd seen the original and thought it might be worth watching (it wasn't - we could have heard it in the next county because they had the audio turned all the way up to "aneurism," FFS, but the theater was at least air conditioned, so we endured it because we both start to sweat at 66 degrees
. Hmm... I saw some horror movie or other, something about a seventh son of a seventh son? Or maybe that was one of the "previews of upcoming..." that they showed before the actual movie started, lol? I saw that with the woman I was married to at the time and... Huh. I don't even remember. Some couple - it would have been friends of hers, because mine weren't really welcome (plus, they all thought she was a c*nt because... er... some folks are pretty perceptive?), so they just eventually all kind of faded away. Oh, and there was another one that she dragged me to, I think one of her friends could go to the movies for free or something. Probably friends with the owner of the place; all her friends had money. Might have been a requirement for being one. IDK how she ended up marrying me; about the time we'd had our second date, the guy that she'd previously inflicted herself on flew into town - in his own airplane - to try to get her to return with him. I don't recall much (I was actually there, sort of, because we were working at the same sh!thole at the time, although she was there for three weeks and I was there for a few years because its scheduling allowed me to get 40 hours there, 40 at my day job, plus16 on the weekends painting). But I do recall that he was offering to sell his trucking company "and hire someone to run the air freight business so I can spend a lot more time with you and my kids." Which scared the sh!t out of me, because I was working day and night, so much so that I was using... copious amounts of a drug to stay awake, a different drug to find unconsciousness (when the opportunity presented itself), and smoking bud/hash/oil constantly in between to keep me from going off and attacking someone who annoyed me (which was pretty much everyone, of course, because I was neither well-rested nor able to do more than crash on my weekend "light days" of only eight hours each, which often turned into tens or twelves. Anyway, even that - as one might guess - recipe for success wasn't a decent substitute for sleep... I was on the Interstate, heading from my graveyard shift job to my day job. Understand that they're not crowded around here, and that "5 over the limit is fine" is the rule anyway. Anyway... Anyway... Oh, yeah: ANYWAY, I was driving like I always did, which was as fast as the car would go. IDK how fast, because the speedometer only read to 85 MPH, then there was a bit more room for the needle to swing, then the tip hit the bottom of the instrument panel and couldn't go any farther. But somewhere in excess of 100 MPH, because a friend helped me determine that "just as it first touches" was 100 MPH exactly, and I passed that point, accelerating. So I was headed back towards town on the Interstate - and then, suddenly, I was hitting the intersection at the bottom of an offramp - and I do mean hitting, lmao, the car might even have bottomed out on its suspension. IDK I managed not to total the car that morning, because it was pointed every which way going up the upramp (and that wasn't even a voluntary direction of travel; I just happened to shoot up it instead of having drifted into the concrete/embankment at the bottom when I blew through the stop sign at... some speed sufficient that I had to swerve around somebody when I reached the top and got back on the highway. Puh-
lenty. I got to my day job and the boss asked me HtH I ended up with a big burn hole in my shirt. I'd have had a lit cigarette when I fell asleep, but have no idea how I managed to not notice that I'd dropped the thing after I woke up. No worries - I had a spare shirt in the trunk, but not a replacement seat cover. Another morning, I flew past a state police vehicle. Not an unmarked one, exactly - it had "STATE POLICE" in black on yellow on the edge of the trunk lid, and official license plate, but no light bar on the roof. Maybe it was the captain and he had one of those lights you stick on the dashboard when needed, who knows. But I glanced over and saw that - for an instant - as I shot past. He must have been feeling froggy that morning or something, though, because as I was braking hard in preparation of pulling over to receive my ticket and get yelled at (I always got both instead of one or the other, for some reason), he flew by me - and he had hid right arm straight out to the side, pointing his finger (no, not
that one!) at me. And he just kept on going. He wasn't even one of the cops I was dealing to; I'd never, to my knowledge, encountered him before. So I thanked my lucky stars and decided to drive slow... enough that I didn't pass him again. I got lucky, that day. I got lucky on a different day, when a different cop in a different state read me the riot act for not having a carbon filter and "pissing off his dog," but that's... er... completely unrelated to... whatever it is that I'm talking about. Which is... Hmm... Movies, yeah. I saw another one with the (now) ex-wife and a couple of her friends, but I don't remember much about it. Something about a construction worker that finds a pair of sunglasses that allows him to see that half the people walking around are really ugly-ass alien critters. Not exactly an intellectual flick, lol. My tastes in video run more towards documentaries. Give me something about hard science, or ancient history, thanks. As far as I can remember, those are the only movies I saw in a theater.
As far as television goes, well... When I was a little kid, we didn't have cable TV, so it was just one local network station and a PBS one about 45 miles away that came in pretty legibly - well enough that I learned to read at age three by watching The Electric Company and Sesame Street (and, I guess, with the aid of the evening newspaper and the books that were in the house, of which there were quite a number, mostly history, light science, and gothic murder mysteries). So I watched whatever was on PBS, the local 6:00pm news, and the NBC nightly news at 6:30PM. Later, I discovered drugs (age 10
), and they were WAAAAY more entertaining than any movie. Especially the ones that could turn reality into cartoonland. Which could be somewhat inconvenient, now and then. Like one particular Thanksgiving dinner when I was... 15, I think. You probably don't want to have to deal with the parents wondering what's wrong with you while the half-eaten turkey carcass is trying to have a conversation. But it was interesting, at least. Except for my brother, who knew that I was tripping balls, and thought it would be funny to screw with me. But that's brothers, for you. Having completely lost count of the number of times I scored (various) party favors out of his bedroom moments before Mom wandered in to snoop around, though, I guess it all evened out. I think half the early customers I had bought from me because I was his brother (he was well-known for quality, at the time). Well, maybe not
half, heh, but quite a few. I didn't really focus on the "druggie set." Everyone got high on something, right?
Later, I met the woman I ended up (quickly) marrying, and did. No, I don't really know why. I cannot claim that I was thinking all that coherently at the time. Or... now, to be honest. I wasn't sleeping much, either. So much that she asked me, soon after we hooked up, to promise her to make sure I get three hours of sleep every day. And then spent the next nine years or so trying to get me to break the promise by sucking up all the money I could earn. I ended up dropping down to 80 hours/week. But then I was selling a lot (only bud and oil, though, mostly) to make up for it - and I still ended up having to buy used car parts on several occasions, instead of new ones. Turned out that she had a huge amount of debt when I met her. School loans that I didn't know about. A legal judgment from a wreck she'd had with no insurance, that resulted in property damage and injury (I knew about that, because she couldn't get her DL reinstated for something like 10 years, but not the extreme amount of money she owed because of it. Bunch of miscellaneous crap that was just a drop in the bucket, but added up. I later learned that, when we got divorced, she owed not a penny (and had accumulated a decent little chunk, besides, enough to buy a four-year old vehicle outright and have "a bit" left over). I ended up with a $300 car, (most of) my clothes, a spoon, a plate, a skillet, and the early signs of some health issues. Oh, and rid of her, which I suppose was worth a LOT - but, looking back, I'd have been better off if I'd have buried her under the basement two weeks after the honeymoon... and then confessed. Lol (I... guess?). But I digress. After I got married, we had one of those cable package deals with lots of channels, then satellite TV when the mini-dishes became popular. But only the one TV. I think, by the time I thought to suggest that we might be able to use a second one, "there wasn't enough money." And she was a loyal, can't possibly miss a single episode, fan of such notable classics as Professional Wrestling (I didn't know which of those two words most deserved quotation marks, so didn't bother) - of which there were apparently multiple ones each day - Jerry Springer, soap operas, etc. And drugs can only provide so much help, lol, so I went back to reading. A library card was free, luckily.
So... IDK. Whatever it was, you're probably right. I think I'm beginning to ramble from exhaustion, so I probably ought to hurry up and post this, then maybe go outside and see if it's any cooler out there. It surely has to be, I hope. Maybe I'll sack out on the porch for the... whoops, hour and a half until sunrise. Better not - tired as I am, the sunlight trying to drill into my eyeballs might not be enough to awaken me, and it might be mildly embarrassing if I'm still out there sleeping when the mailman comes by. Guess I'll just go horizontal with the old fan blowing on my head, and wish for the billionth time that I could flip a switch and turn off the 300 MPH thoughts for a minute or two. As per usual. There's probably a reason why the woman I was most compatible with was a highly intelligent lady with schizophrenia and the associated racing thoughts, whose issues kept her up all night. Either that or the fact that she was built like Mona Lisa with a machine gun, lol, and a truly epic pair of... eyes, and had a number of attractive female friends (some of whom weren't strippers) - that she liked just as much as I did. IDK. It's six to five, and pick 'em, as they used to say. We all have our little faults. For example, I have been told that I was born at least 150 years too late. And, possibly, on the wrong planet.
I cannot offer much, except: The pain will fade well before the memories will. One day, you'll still have the latter, and they will be a solace. Until that day, just do the best you can to live your life, even if you have to fake it. You will smile again. And it will not feel wrong to do so. You can hear it, read it, even think it - and, one of these days, you will feel it and know it. . . .
still remember that moment when you figured that one out.
