I picked up the phone and started to dial a number to ask if someone understood the moment where you try to call someone you know cannot and will not answer.
Started to dial and then pulled back and stared at the phone trying to figure out whether I had slipped out of reality and fallen into the Twilight Zone.
It wouldn’t have surprised me because there are few moments I can think of that are stranger than now, if any.
So I stared at the number, muttered something about talking to June later and pulled up the picture below and talked.
“Dad, I remember sitting in the back seat of the station wagon while you were driving.
This song was on the radio and we driving along the coast, can’t remember if it was on the way to or from a family vacation, just the sand and the waves.
You won’t believe the crap that is going on now or what I am trying to pull off. Or maybe you would.”
He didn’t answer and given there was no one else in the car with me there was nothing to disturb the silence other than the noise in my head.
But there was a moment where I swear I could almost see him standing there with grandpa, smiling at me.
Maybe it is or was nothing more than imagination, that would be ok with me. No harm in such dreams or memories, but maybe it was something more.
Maybe the veil between the worlds opened up for a moment and I straddled them.
Maybe what I felt and saw had more truth and greater touch with reality than I am comfortable acknowledging.
Because if it did and if it does than we’re talking about some “Ghostbusters Shit” but not necessarily in the negative sense.
More like the “we can’t explain so it scares us” kind of possibility.
Don’t know if there is real significance in any of this, don’t know that there isn’t.
****
Feels a bit like there ought to be a soundtrack for the current time and if I had the energy I’d put one together but for now we can use this.
The foolish folks who came at me today were irked because I gave no quarter and shot fire from my nostrils and lasers from my eyes.
When they tried to taunt me I pushed back, “if you have to rely upon memes and comments like saying someone is butt hurt it means you either know the facts aren’t on your side or you are not smart enough to understand how to apply them.”
Either way it doesn’t matter because their failure to use fact, to establish a benchmark and demonstrate meaning and significance is a sign of the weakness of their position.
At least in times past that would have held true, now people have no trouble denying science and pushing back against inconvenient truths with claims that if they don’t like it there are no issues because feelings trump fact.
Maybe I ought to take advantage of such time and go find a group of druids to dance with, watch out Stonehenge, here we come.
Throw on some ELO and walk out into the freezing night because if the same thoughts ping-pong back and forth there is no reason to run away.
Echoes of two different conversations from the past merge and I can hear dad laying into me.
“I don’t care what kind of beating you have to take, you take it and you figure out a way to move forward. You can give back as good as you got.”
That is not as colorful as what the old man said, but you get the gist.
Bookmarked by my grandfathers commentary, I hear, see and feel it all. It is almost sensory overload, but not quite.
Just have to stand in the fire a moment longer and the pain will fade as I adjust.
Drawing a line the sand because sometimes there is no graceful retreat or simple way to avoid the trouble you know lies outside.
****
“Dad, your grandchildren, every single one of them, will graduate from high school thinking school shootings and gun violence are just part of life.
It is not unusual, it is normal.
Maybe we can find a way to change things and make this a historical blip, an anomaly. Maybe we’ll get there, but we aren’t remotely close enough now.
But I am doing my best to do something, to help make it better. You always said that was enough, but let’s be real, it is not. But it will have to do…somehow.”
There is still no verbal answer, but that sense of dad and grandpa smiling at is still there and I figure there is still no harm in wrapping myself in it.
So I do and I step outside and look in the night sky for the moon, wondering if maybe I’ll find an answer or answers other than the awareness I ought to be wearing a jacket because it is really freaking cold out there.
Maybe.
