proteanme

I wore a pair of shoes today that I’ve warn exactly twice in the last two years. Once was at my dad’s funeral and once was at Ned and Kristi’s wedding. I don’t know why I thought about that when I looked down at my feet today, but that’s what happened. I was walking down the sidewalk and looking at my feet and remembering how I’d worn these shoes to the funeral and it made me feel sad to think of these shoes as funeral shoes. But then I remembered wearing them to the wedding and it felt like a relief not to have a pair of funeral shoes.

This time last year I really wanted to get a BB gun so I could set up tin cans on the wall in my bike yard and shoot them. RU vetoed the idea for fear I’d shoot a cat or a bird or a squirrel or neighbor a kid; plus it’s illegal, she argued. At the time, I was sure she just didn’t understand that sitting on the deck and shooting shit was a perfectly reasonable way to express grief. But she’d been so accommodating on almost all the other ways I was dealing with grief that I didn’t begrudge her that veto.

A year later I myself don’t exactly understand the sentiment to shoot shit except as expression of the futility one feels about life in the face dealing with such a crappy death. In fact, I’d forgotten how strong that sentiment was until last night when I was watching an episode form The Wire and they showed a guy in the morgue in a white, plastic body bag with a zipper, which reminded me that we had to keep my dad’s body at the county morgue for at least a week while we were trying to figure out funeral arrangements. I imagine he was in a body bag too. As I was falling asleep I thought to myself “of course” I wanted to shoot crap with a BB gun.

These days I try to talk more casually about my dad dying, the way I talk about going to Paris or moving out here or a breakup, to convey it’s significant, but “hey I’m ok.” Or at least I feel like that’s how I’ve been trying to talk about it recently. Who knows? Maybe I’m not successful. I guess the only thing I can truly identify is that for the most part I don’t feel compelled to talk about his death, at least not at length, which seems about right for right now.

Great coffee in Palm  Springs. I’d never have guessed it, but every morning RU and I have walked to Koffi for lattes and americanos that rival Portland’s own. Seriously. That’s one thing about traveling and being kind of addicted to coffee. It’s hard to find great stuff on the road. So Koffi’s a terrific find. Way, way better than the Blue Bottle in SF. And makes the beans in NYC not even worth mentioning.

At first we couldn’t find the place. The guys that run the little hotel where we’re staying had called it coffee with a “k” and that’s literally what RU and I looked for as we drove down Palm Canyon, craning our necks at the signage on either side of the road. We shared a collective “doh” when we finally spotted it. Prices run about the same as in Portland, which tells you something about the Rose City’s cost of living. Anyway, it’s just been this nice, unexpected pleasure to have such good coffee every morning.

I’ve been swimming twice since I’ve been here, which seems almost unbelievable to me. It makes a big difference that the pool is heated, for sure, still, I can’t think of the last time I went swimming outside. I don’t go swimming in Portland in the summer. And any time I’ve been to any of the Oregon beaches the water is too cold for me, even in warm weather. I’ve only swum in the Pacific twice. Once when I was visiting Martha and she took me to this semi isolated beach in Malibu and another time in the Bahia de Banderas when RU and I went to Puerto Vallarta.

The last time I was in a pool though was this time last year, when Kath and I went home to bury Dad. We stayed in the suburbs at a hotel with a pool and I brought my swim suit just in case. I swam on the one night that we didn’t have other things to do. I don’t know why. I wanted to do something normal I think. But it was like trying to take respite in my junior high gym after everyone had gone home for the day — if it had had a pool. It was empty and out of place and I wasn’t sure what I was doing there.

I didn’t plan this trip to coincide with last year’s but it’s ok it turned out that way. It doesn’t make Dad’s dying the way he did any worse or any better, but the sun feels good and I got a slight recharge. Which is a lucky thing because I still need to write a letter to the VA appealing their denial of our application for his death benefits. Fucking bureaucratic bullshit. Something I’ve had little energy to deal with for the last year, but time is running out.

I hadn’t planned on writing about Dad. I had no idea how much his death would become part of my life. I’m not surprised that it has, it just wasn’t something I predicted. For so long he wasn’t really part of my life.

Yesterday, after spending the better part of the day by our hotel pool, Rachel and I went on a self-guided MCM architecture tour that took us from one end of Palm Springs to the other. It was late in the afternoon and we were driving on these wide streets that reminded me more of the midwest than of Portland. Something about the traffic and way the sun was shining made me flashback to a teenage summer evening in Indy, riding in the car with my mom over to my cousin’s, window rolled down, pushing my hand against the air, skin a little sun burnt, chlorine rainbows jumping off everything that was shiny, and there was the faintest smell of coconut oil hanging around me. The impossibly sexy smell.

This time last year Katherine and I were getting ourselves ready to come home and bury Dad. I’ve been thinking about him more on the anniversary of this trip than I did on the anniversary of his death, which was just a couple weeks ago. It’s not surprising that it took coming home and being immersed in his after-life, to make his death real to me in a way it hadn’t been up to that point. Sadly, I was never as close to Dad as I was that week last year, which probably doesn’t sound that weird to anyone else who’s lost a parent.

As a rule, I’ve not speculated a lot on what exactly happened to Dad. It was a fire. He was found kneeling by his bed with his arms folded over the top of the mattress and his head laying face down in them. His cell phone was on the floor. His dog on the rug beside him. The coroner had Kath identify the tattoos on Dad’s arm via a photo and you can see the redness of burnt skin on the side of his chest. Nothing good in any of that to speculate on.

But this morning, when I was just half awake and the sun wasn’t up yet, I got filled with a kind of palpable imagining of him waking up to a dark room so full of smoke that he couldn’t see and reaching out for the phone, but knocking it off the table. I could feel the fear and confusion, and the disbelief he must have felt, even if only for a split second, when he realized that he wasn’t going to make it.

Ever since my dad died I keep waiting for him to show up somewhere. It’s this absurd thing you do when you grieve. You look for hidden messages in songs and poems and tv shows and things your neighbor says and how the weather’s changing. It’s all fair game; anything can be a conduit. I prefer dreams. They seem to have the most obvious potential.

The funny thing is there’s no message in a bottle; all the the things my dad never said when he was alive he’s never going to say now that he’s dead.

My memory is so shot this year. I hope it’s just the grief. Because I feel nuts sometimes the way I can’t remember things. I forget names of bands and authors and restaurants and the titles of movies and books. I meet someone new, they say their name and I promptly forget it, which I’ve never done until now. I’ll be in the middle of a sentence and I’ll just space some random word. Like tonight I couldn’t remember the word titanium. I was asking a firend if his racing bike was carbon or titanium except I couldn’t think of titanium so I kept saying you know the other that begins with a “t”.

I had a dream about my dad last night. When I first woke up, around 5am or so, I thought to myself oh man, I really want to remember this dream, but then the second time I awoke up at 6:30am I’d all but forgotten everything except a general outline, which basically consisted of my dad and I working on a project together. Maybe building something or fixing something; I don’t know exactly, but we were wearing big, matching, straw hats. And at some point my mom walked into the room where my dad and I were working and she said something to us about my sister.

I wanted so much to remember more of it, which for a little while made me feel sad. Dreaming about my dad is the only way to be close to him now; plus, I am afraid I am going to forget him.

I know it must sound like I’m way down, and sometimes the grief does hit hard, but mostly I’ve wanted to use the blog to my chronicle grief. It’s a intense. Door opens and it’s a different world.

I’m sick of being sad. Ya know. I really am. Even though I’m not sad all the time, I’m tired of it. It’s like the other day I was standing at a party talking with a friend about running. And I thought, wow, this is a pleasurable, standing here talking like this. I can’t believe how much I’m enjoying talking about running shoes and body form and training regimens. It was almost a luxury. A small one. A secret one. But sweet to be following every word he was saying and saying things in response that made sense. And maybe he asked me about what I’d been up to or how my year was going and I said something about how amazing it was to be standing there enjoying this conversation and not be conscious of the fact my dad had died in a house fire this past winter.

Things kinda quietly fell apart from there. He went inside to find his girlfriend or something. I can be sad or notice I’m bot being sad and either way if I say something people stare at their feet and go away. No pity. I mean I’m not looking for pity when I say that. I just want more people to look back. Ya know.

The grieving know that grief is more than a single emotion, that, in fact, it is a doorway to all the other emotions, from anger to something approaching joy.

I’ve recently become aware of some loss and tragedy in the lives of a couple friends. Since hearing the news I find myself thinking of the small and ordinary pieces of their days that must be taking on some different shape and meaning. And not one of their choosing, as far as I can tell from my own experience.

I also know of some other friends or friends of friends who are in the middle of other kinds of changes. Changes that involve some type of upheaval, like break-ups and big moves and job loss. Life got altered for them too.

And everybody is kinda standing apart from the routine but negotiating with it at the same time. I don’t know if that makes sense. I keep picturing crying in one’s coffee, not euphemistically, but more as image of how one grieves and “gets on with it” at the same time.
My heart and my mind is with a lot of people these days.