proteanme

Truman with James in Washington D.C.

Originally uploaded by proteanme
My sister and I are exchanging emails with subject lines, like “burial” and “obit”. It’s a mad race to mine our brains for the details we might be overlooking before we set in to motion the actual plans. And everyone’s got their way of tackling the task. My sister’s started a word doc with her list of things to do. My mom is gathering her info in an actual notebook. And me, I’ve just stapled together pieces of scrap paper with my notes and created a “dad” label in gmail and “dad” tag in delicious. Tomorrow I’ll be doing things like calling the coroner and the fire marshall and the post office and the veteran’s affairs office. But tomorrow is a historic day. And I don’t believe I’ll have much luck with any of these calls because all eyes and ears will be turned on Washington D.C. History, with a capital “H” is happening tomorrow.

But history with a small “h” doesn’t really care. Not the history that is happening in my life.

My dad grew up in D.C. Or at least grew up there until he was in high school. He lived in D.C. because he was adopted by his grandparents after his parents divorced and his mom died. His grandfather, my great grandfather, was a federal judge. And I’ve heard rumor my dad watched inaugural parades from his grandfather’s office. As an aside, I’m also proud to say (in that strange and irrational way that one takes pride in one’s ancestors and lineage) that my great grandfather was also the Dean of Howard Law School and worked to get the law school accredited.

The picture here is of my dad with James. James worked in my dad’s house. And if you asked my dad, he would tell you that James and his wife Sally helped him raise him. This might be as close to a father son photo as there is of my dad.

I was just watching Homer Simpson apologize to Lisa through  a crossword puzzle and I lost it.

I was thinking that maybe your dad doesn’t stop being your dad because he died; maybe he just becomes your dead dad.

I have learned two things today. The first is about the mysteries of life. And what I learned is that they involve a lot of phone calls. And paper work.  I always thought the great mysteries would involve something much more heroic and romantic. But apparently it’s more about figuring out who’s going to call what agency or office to track down what info. To some degree or another my family is going to be project managing my dad’s death. I am a good project manager.

The second thing I learned is that I will be getting to know my dad better in his death than I knew him in his life. Bittersweet. For sure. I learned today fifty people have already called my dad’s old boss because they want to find out if we are planning a service. I learned that there every Memorial day my dad went to Crown Hill cemetary to attend the veteran’s service and lay flowers on his cousin’s grave, the one who was like a brother to him, the one who died at Battle of the Bulge. I learned that when my dad’s best friend was sick and everyone else stopped coming around, my dad was there for his friend. He did things no one else would do for his friend. I learned my dad didn’t have a refridgerator in his house for a long time. Nothing shocking and all things I suspected. He was a nice guy. And he was one of a kind.

The thing is I’ve always intellectually understood my dad could be close, in his own way, to other people even if he couldn’t be close to us. I’ve never embraced it though. And now we’re about to be submerged. I’ve been on the periphery a couple times in my life of the phenomena that is my dad. Met some folks who were fascinated to meet me just because I was Truman’s daughter. I’ve been greeted with welcomes “no shit” and “I’ll be damned”.  Just never done it en mass.

Or not. Unless we’re talking the wh0le shebang. As in life’s beginning and end.

And that’s what we’re talking about.

Right now as I’m typing I’m pretty sure my sister is talking with the Marion County Coroner who has emailed my sister a photo of my dad’s tattooed arm so that she can identify my dad’s body. Apparently there was a fire at my dad’s house this morning. Firefighters found him. He was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

It’s been an hour or two since I started this post. My sister made the ID. Then she called me after wards. She said the coroner was incredibly nice to her. I asked my sister to send me the photo of my dad’s arm and she did. I needed to see him. Get his death in my mind more concretely. I am so far away and my dad was mostly absent from my life even without all this geographical distance. Add onto that the suddenness of it his death and it was just getting to abstract. I don’t know if this is the right place to air these thoughts. But I think I just want to be witnessed. The experience of having him in my life was not known to many folks and I don’t want his passing to have the same kind of loneliness.

When I was talking to my sister today she told me the sweetest story about my dad comforting her once as a kid when she was sad and angry with him. It was a little heartbreaking, the story she told me, but I was grateful for the tenderness of it.  I think my sister and I both harbored secret fantasies that maybe one day we’d have some heartfelt conversation with our dad about his absence in our lives. It never happened; now, it never will. I was trying to think of my last conversation with my dad. I talked to him on the phone maybe twice a year and it was usually around the holidays. But this Christmas he was sick and we didn’t connect, so that means the last time I talked to him was before the holidays. I think that was when we were talking about this Byzantine church he goes to and I asked him if I could go with him the next time I came home. And he said, “I dunno.” And when I pressed him on it he said,”I gotta go.”

I miss him. I always have.

Thank you all for being my witness here. It means the world to me.

Sometimes I hate loving things too much. Or loving anything at all. And I go about the business of shutting down, turning off the music and putting down the pen, eating junk, doing nothing on the computer and buying stuff I don’t need, except with less and less excess and vigor as I get older. I swear it’s like I can’t even put my heart into being shut down. I just go through the motions. Which is what I’ve been doing since I came back from my trip out east. But then something happens like a friend sends an email to say she enjoyed finishing off the dish I brought to her pot luck and was feeling dubious about. And at the last minute RU came to dim sum with me this morning and we had a real nice time.  And later I talked to my sister, who I haven’t talked to in months and it made my day. Made my day even if I didn’t want it to because I’m not sure I want anything to make my day because made days are as impossible as unmade ones. I understand life is impossible. It really is. You don’t get to negotiate with it at all. Fariness is an illusion. Seriously. I’m trying to figure out how to be ok with that. Curious even. I’m not one for resolutions. But I’ve been working with how to be curious about impossibilities for about 6 years. Here’s to year number seven.

Rachel Papo is an Israeli who was born in 1970 in Columbus, Ohio but was raised in Israel. She began photographing as a teenager and attended a renowned fine-arts high-school in Haifa, Israel. At age eighteen she served in the Israeli Air Force as a photographer. These two intensive years of service inspired her current photographic project titled after her own number during service — Serial No. 3817131.

It’s 10pm on a Saturday night and I’m making latkes and reading posts about “best records of the year”. After more than a week of snow, warmer temps have came back to town, along with the rain. And now Portland is awash in a sea of slush. My feet are still wet from an epic walk around the sotuheast side. Trying to quiet the blues that seem to be weighing heavy on me as 2008 winds down. iTunes is playing random songs and  “Band on the Run” just came on and suddenly I’m at the pool waiting my turn at the diving board and every where the smell of coconut oil mixes with the smell of chlorine. The lifegaurd  cranked her little radio, but I can’t tell if she’s looking at me through her mirrored sunglasses.

That’s how it is so often with music and for some reason these last couple months I’ve been listening to it less and less. I think because I wanted to shut down to myself.  Music opens me up. And I couldn’t bare it these las couple months.

Earlier today I was at the grocery store and the Smashing Pumpkins “1979” came on. I cannot hear that song without remembering a certain girl. I hear that drum fill in the beginning, sticks on the rim, and I’m in her car at Taco Bell late at night and at that moment I didn’t want to be any where else. Sometimes I wonder what we would have done without each other that winter.

The latkes were good. The applesauce and sour cream helped. But that’s what they’re supposed to do.

Hard to believe it’s Christmas eve. Pep had it right about kindness. That’s one thing I’ve thought about a lot this year. Enough can’t be said about kindness. Truly. A good thing to think about as the year winds down.

In honor of the most snow in something like fifty years.

It’s crazy here. Not a crazy amount of snow by most standards, but crazy for Portland Oregon.  There must be at least a foot in most places. Maybe more. This is my second day of being mostly home bound, although I just walked to get coffee and will probably trek my movies back to the video store. In the minute or two since I started my post, it started snowing again.

Since I came back from the east coast I’ve been dabbling with a state of “junk”. Spending more time shopping online, but not buying anything. Just filling up carts and abandoning them. Eating more crap food than usual – chips, soda, cookies, cereal, even the old stand by from my childhood — spaghetti-o’s.  I look at the weights in my room and maybe once or twice a week I don’t take my laziness seriously and I lift them. But mostly, I feel like a teenager rebelling against doing anything productive, even as I tackle some productive tasks, like taking stuff to Goodwill, clearing out the paper mill that accumulated from a couple years worth of personal records shoved in piles, deep cleaning parts of my apartment, recording some new music which I might post later this week. It’s just something inside feels off and askew, which I’m trying to be curious about.

Whether it’s “strategic” or not, whether it’s what our “leaders” think we should do or not, it’s pretty clear that real actual LGBT people are done with the closet. We’re seeing things in a new way. We’re no longer willing to settle for simply not getting beaten to death, for being able to live in our constricted safe zones without fear of baseball bats to the head and getting fired.