(no subject)
Yesterday while wandering around Selfridge's I saw a Halloween display complete with pumpkins and carving stuff. I immediately started to cry. It made me miss my dad.
We always used to go and pick out pumpkins together. We would spend forever at a random patch or parking lot staring at bright orange pumpkins, rejecting the ugly ones, passing up the small ones, narrowing the number of acceptable candidates down and then gently twisting them around looking for the ones with the best face. And then we would load them into the car and take them home. We would wash them in the sink to the sounds of classic rock and then he would expertly cut around the top, making a small notch, a perfect little triangle, to make sure the top would fit back on perfectly. Then we would clean out the insides, dumping the guts onto layers of old newspaper. When we thought we were finished he would always take a look and point out a few spots we had missed in our haste. Then we would rinse out the insides with cold water and begin the process of creating our faces. He was on the eternal quest to make a scary face. He made stencils and carefully placed them on the pumpkin trying to get the angles just right, the eyes angled enough to look sinister the grin rounded enough but not too round. In the end he was never quite satisfied, the glowing eyes and jagged smile were never exactly what he had hoped they would be. He was never that way about our creations though. They were always "rockin" or "spooky". He always seemed so proud of something so insignificant that I can remember feeling vaguely embarrased. I didn't deserve that kind of praise, it was a pumpkin for crying out loud. When we are finished we would turn the lights out and gaze appreciatively on the glowing faces of our pumpkins enjoying the moment. A daddy and his girls.
I haven't had one of those moment's in awhile.
Sometimes it is so hard to know I will never see him again.
That needs a lot of work. It's not good enough really, so unpolished and choppy. But I think it is enough for now.
We always used to go and pick out pumpkins together. We would spend forever at a random patch or parking lot staring at bright orange pumpkins, rejecting the ugly ones, passing up the small ones, narrowing the number of acceptable candidates down and then gently twisting them around looking for the ones with the best face. And then we would load them into the car and take them home. We would wash them in the sink to the sounds of classic rock and then he would expertly cut around the top, making a small notch, a perfect little triangle, to make sure the top would fit back on perfectly. Then we would clean out the insides, dumping the guts onto layers of old newspaper. When we thought we were finished he would always take a look and point out a few spots we had missed in our haste. Then we would rinse out the insides with cold water and begin the process of creating our faces. He was on the eternal quest to make a scary face. He made stencils and carefully placed them on the pumpkin trying to get the angles just right, the eyes angled enough to look sinister the grin rounded enough but not too round. In the end he was never quite satisfied, the glowing eyes and jagged smile were never exactly what he had hoped they would be. He was never that way about our creations though. They were always "rockin" or "spooky". He always seemed so proud of something so insignificant that I can remember feeling vaguely embarrased. I didn't deserve that kind of praise, it was a pumpkin for crying out loud. When we are finished we would turn the lights out and gaze appreciatively on the glowing faces of our pumpkins enjoying the moment. A daddy and his girls.
I haven't had one of those moment's in awhile.
Sometimes it is so hard to know I will never see him again.
That needs a lot of work. It's not good enough really, so unpolished and choppy. But I think it is enough for now.