84

My father would have been 84 today. 

As I look for his traces in the world, I stop and the mirror shows him to me.  My current choice of reading material, Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Inc., is a book I would have loved to discuss with him.  It is a book I can hear him quoting.  How I would have loved to hear his thoughts on our current political dystopia.  When his intellect was intact, he was always ahead of the curve. 

Last week I spent many hours, many rocks and 800 lbs. of top soil extending a rock wall on the south side of our screened in porch.  I even enjoyed this process.  I am now planning to get a covering layer of mulch and set up a foundation for my compost pile behind the garage.  What could be more Dennis-like than this? 

I look at my dog, once only Paul’s dog but now our dog.  My dad loved Elsa and remembered her name much longer than Paul’s.  Elsa is now a spry at-least-fifteen years old.  The last picture I have of him was taken while he was asleep in the back seat of the car with Elsa on the way home from Wisconsin. 

Later today I will go running.  Like my father, I am slow but persistent.  I love the scenery more than the exercise.

Grief is a funny thing.  I don’t really know where it comes from or why.  I was never sentimental about my father, but sometimes I feel so sad that he has gone on.  It was never an easy relationship.  My father was an awkward man, and I am acutely aware of my own awkwardness on a daily basis.  Almost six years later I still don’t have the words. 

As I grow older I seem to grow more into who he was.  I see the wisdom in his madness; his compost pile and vegetable garden, his bicycling to work on the burnt orange Schwinn with the baby seat never removed, his love of politics, his reuse of every possible every day item, his desire to darn his socks rather than getting new ones, his happiness in the simple things of life, of trees and loons, of building a retaining wall or just sitting and looking out at the lake. 

(published a little after the actual date)