Hi Guest,
I took off with some books, got lots of reading in, and stayed away from chocolate and fags.
That sounds like such a nice, pleasant weekend!
Wish I'd done that. Instead, I went digging around for more land mines. An ACON Easter egg hunt, I guess you could say.
Found a couple live ones, too. I pondered detonating them for a few hours before I finally came to my senses and decided to wait for the bomb squad – AKA my therapist – to arrive. I think I just might be getting smarter.
Wow do I relate to what you said about giving compliments! Giving my mom a compliment is like going out in a yard full of dogs wearing a steak suit. To this day I have to prod myself to give someone a compliment, because I want to be nice – but I do
not want to open the doors to the bottomless pit of need for affirmation (BPNA).
I think I can find some way to acknowledge John now, as a part of my life.
Maybe that’s all you need. There’s something so great about being able to gather rays of sunshine from the past.
My relationship with my good dad is really limited in that I talk to him once every few months, and it’s half so, so familiar in ways I can hardly describe. But the other half is filled with longing for what could have been and a realization that our lives have simply moved on, so I can see why you might want to keep remembering John how he was - even if your mom hadn't forced him to make that promise (wish I could punch her for you
). In some ways, there’s no going home. But I think there are ways of bringing home to us – like knowing RG’s dog is inside him now.
But reconnecting with my good dad is kind of a weird story and really relates to the whole memory discussion we’ve had here. It's a bit long, but it's really positive, and I just wanted to share it with you guys – especially after all the negative stuff that’s been clogging up my brain lately.
When I was in junior high, a couple of friends and I decided to make logos for ourselves. Silly junior high thing kind of thing to do. Among the cute puppies and pretty flowers and mangled attempts at horses, I came up with two very strange looking dogs. One was sitting up and one was kind of lying down, but both had very angular heads. My mom said that the sitting-up one looked like a Steinberg drawing, and I always thought the lying-down one looked like a normal lying-down animal with a Star Trek symbol for a head (you know those things on their suits they use to call the ship?). Weird.
That’s part one. Part two is that my mom had a massive collection of classical music – all records, of course. I think there might have been five or six non-classical albums in the entire collection. Anyway, every now and then I’d get this itch to find an album that I was never sure existed. All I knew was that there was a record that opened up and had comics inside. That’s it. Was it The Monkees? Was it that Rolling Stones album? Donavan? Let’s just say there are a few albums I now love because I used to listen to them every time wondering, is this it? Am I just nuts?
And then (part 3) in high school, some of my friends used to listen to one of the stations that played older rock music, and I started having these weirdo deja-vu experiences where I was convinced I knew the song, but I couldn’t imagine where I’d heard it since my mom had nothing but classical music!! I seriously thought I was losing my mind (well, I guess I was at that time
).
I saw my good dad once during high school, but before I went to see him, my mom got all weird and said “you know, he’s not the man you remember, he’s changed. Just be careful.” What was that supposed to mean? That really freaked me out and I was really nervous around him for the couple of ours we had lunch.
Well, my first summer after college, I went on a road trip around the southwestern US, and my first stop was in the same city where my good dad lived. I stayed a couple of days with his family (he had since remarried and had two kids), and it was SOOOOO WONDERFULLY DISORIENTING.
He took me water skiing for the first time, and I was terrible at it
, and just when I was starting to beat myself up and get really frustrated, he leaned over the side of the boat and said something to me (sure wish I remembered what it was, though I’m sure it wasn’t “Relax. You’re just overreacting.”
), and my whole body relaxed. Right then, in the water, skiis pointing in every direction, I blurted out, “Was I a bad kid?” He was taken aback by this, of course, but he said, “No way. You were a really good kid. You were kinda sensitive, but a good kid.” I choked down a couple of tears, went for one more failed attempt at standup UP on the skiis
, and got back in the boat.
When it was time to head back in, he tried to start the motor and nothing. Dead. He started opening up the motor and tinkering around (he’s a bit of a mechanic), and he cursed at it a bit. And then I really don’t know what happened to snap me out of it, but I kind of “woke up” sitting on the very front tip of the boat – the farthest place I could find from where he was. I knew right then that if it had been my biological father swearing at the engine, I’d be next in line for the swearing or whatever other scary stuff came next. I thought, “Wow, how conditioned have I become?? How abusive IS my dad?” I came back down and he was already laughing at himself about how his wife was going to kill him for forgetting to charge the backup battery. She’d be pissed about having to drive out to the lake to get him a new one. She did though. And we got back to shore. Laughing.
And in the truck on the way home, he put on some music – and it was all the music I’d been hearing on the radio with my friends in high school. All of a sudden I knew where I’d heard it before, and I blurted out again, “Did you use to play this music in your band?” He replied, “Oh yeah, you don’t remember this?!? You used to know all the words and sing along with us during rehearsals. It was really cute.”
So now I’m reeling. Everything’s starting to make sense again and I feel like I’m coming out of a long coma. When we get back to the house, I figure, hey, why not, and I ask him about this mysterious record I’d been looking for over the years. He laughed (by this time he was really getting a kick out of all the weird questions I was asking him) and said yes, he had that album. He pulled it out, and there it was.
I started tearing up. He sat me down on the couch and opened it up (there were the comics!! I wasn’t crazy
), and he pointed to one frame and said, “We used to listen to this every day after you got home from school. You always made me play this song over again.” I could hardly contain myself. And when he turned the page, there was the Star Trek dog I’d drawn in junior high – right there in the middle of the page!!!
That night, after he and his wife had gone to bed, I sat out on their back porch and knew that of all the discoveries I’d made in my life up to that point, this one was the biggest one. And I’ll never forget how the wind was blowing wildly that night, and that’s exactly how I felt inside – all stirred up and blowing in all directions.
So now, whenever I get a weird fuzzy image or yearning or thought that makes me wonder if I’m crazy, I think about how those strange moments pulled me closer to the truth – and I start digging.
Anyway, I know this was long, but thanks for letting me share this.
Wildflower
