almost a year
on this beautiful, sunny day in NYC, I am intending to work hard on copyediting my book manuscript, an easy and ultimately brainless task that just needs to be completed. Classes have started at Fancy U and I am not there, instead living in this odd time-bubble in Brooklyn where I am so amazed by the joy of living with Jen day after day that I seem unable to actually focus on getting most things (not just the copyediting, but also the calling up of most friends and general life-maintenance tasks) done. I haven't written in LJ for several months, the longest break by far since I started writing, and, I had thought, maybe a permanent ending to this form of self-expression/communication with friends. I'm not sure why I feel compelled to write again except that today is the one-year anniversary of the last day of my father's life. Tomorrow will be the one-year anniversary of his stroke, and the day after that will be the one-year anniversary of his death. I had kind of known that I shouldn't make a whole lot of the sillier kinds of social plans for this week, but I hadn't quite counted on how aware I would be of every minute's passing today. Not painfully, not even very emotionally, but just as a fact: on this day a year ago, my father was still alive. This evening, a year ago, I called him, idly putting finishing touches on a syllabus while I chatted with him about how he was trying to read "To the Lighthouse" because I had said it was my favorite novel (one of those odd things we say: I don't think I *have* a favorite novel, but am sometimes forced to come up with one...). I remember that I stopped fiddling with cut n' pasting my syllabus long enough to really hear him when he said that he loved me, and to say it back, but it's not like I had the faintest idea of what was coming. Last night, I dreamed two dreams: in one, my dog Pumpkin had, for some inexplicable reason, been involved in a dogfight and was all bruised and broken and beaten up, lying in the front seat of the car so I drove it from the back, my arms reaching over her head as I worried she wasn't going to make it. In another dream, my mother had succumbed to some lightly debilitating illness, something that made her bedridden for a time, and was seriously considering killing herself because she couldn't stand the idea that she would need us to take care of her (I'd been lying in an insomniac haze thinking about how *easy* my father had made his death for us -- simple and sudden, no goodbyes but also very little pathos, and how grateful and angry I am about how this took away our opportunity to take care of him). Ok, I'm a bit of a wreck. A few times a month, I wake up crying from dreams like this, and thank whatever gods there be that there is a Jen to hold me. I wish my father had met her. I can totally see the kind of pedantic, fascinated questions he would ask her about economics and the current crisis. I wish my father had lived to see this new President. I wish he'd lived to see this sunny day. But, well, there it is. I'm going to post this, even though I don't know who's still reading...