I inherited my large nose from my father.  Along with a calm and slightly depressed affect, an exposure to good books, a love-hate relationship with redheaded women, bad knees, a lack of fashion sense, a stubborn faith in the goodness of our children...  From my younger brother I got a sense of guilty inadequacy in my ability to nurture or protect, as well as a humourous Harry Potter t-shirt I swiped while he was off on a mission for his church...  From my sisters and elder brother, a wealth of love, selfless patience, and devotion, alongside a crippling inferiority complex.  From my mother, an appreciation for the complexity of human relationships, an inflated value placed on learning, an exposure to mindfulness practice, poor eyesight, and a nearly-hopeless “addictive personality” courtesy of her father (I am told this grandfather also passed along his fondness for baseball and playing the guitar).  One of the more interesting opportunities of my life has been observing my mother flesh out her image of this man, discovering her father if you will, through the process of losing her mother.

     

Fresh out of rehab and no longer having a job or family of my own, I volunteered a lot of my excessive free time to helping my mother and stepfather clean out my Alzheimer-stricken grandma’s home and relocate her to an assisted living facility nearer to us.  My grandma was a recovering hoarder but never fully kicked the habit.  Consequently there were boxes upon boxes of pictures, documents, letters, tax statements, newspaper clippings, cookbooks, weight loss and TV guides to sort through.  I imagine I will not soon forget (unless I also inherit Alzheimer's) the moment my mother discovered the love letters her dad had written to her mom from prison.  They were eloquent, affectionate, and beautifully handwritten.  I don’t pretend to know all the feelings my mother held towards her father but I got the feeling that the author of these letters did not fit the image she had shared with us of a deadbeat, absentee meth addict.  She would later come upon several exquisite leather purses which he had embellished with silver and intricately-worked floral patterns.  The last treasure unearthed was a black and white photo of my mother, about age 7, sitting on the knee of her proud father during a visit at the prison.  A couple of his friends sit on either side, mid-laugh, with half-smoked cigarettes momentarily forgotten.

15 years prior to cleaning out that house, at about age 13, I had discovered, while using the relatively-novel internet, that this man had passed away on my 10th birthday, reportedly sober for the last few years of his life, before succumbing to bleeding stomach ulcers.  We held a small service at his 3-year-old grave-site.  Prior to that, the last time my mother had seen him had been while pregnant with me, also at a funeral, this time for one of their shared relatives.  If he noticed her at that time, he showed no indication of it.

   

We are always planting seeds. Whether we’re asleep or in the shower or in church or getting high or writing blogs.   We are always planting seeds and we will, in one form or another, reap a harvest similar to the seeds which we planted.

"You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

The dog’s food dish is empty.  I will fill it then go to bed.  Words can be beautiful but can’t be taken too seriously.

O Great Telephone

Wouldn't it be strange
If light had made that trip and
Found no eyes in range?