And we start this post with (Marvel) Avengers| Wake Me Up playing in the background.
Been back from visiting my the city of my birth and combing through my parents’ garage for 24 hours now and I have unpacked all of my bags and the boxes I shipped home.
Technically it is mom’s garage cuz Dad died 7.5 years ago but I am not ready to separate the two and I spent hours moving boxes around and sorting through the remnants of my father’s life.
Brought back two different chess sets, the one he used to teach me how to play and the one I used to teach my son.
Found a diary of his from his time in the Peace Corps and read bits and pieces of the thoughts of a 23 year-old man I never know but occasionally saw hints of and or heard stories about.
Read the memorial book they used at my great-grandmothers funeral in ’53 and saw my own grandmother’s notes about not just the death of her mother but many of her siblings.
Found pictures of my father’s younger brother who died from complications of HIV in February of ’94 just short of 50 and thought again about how very young he was when he died.
Took baseball gloves and tools from LA back to Texas and have spent time holding some of them, eyes closed, memories flowing through my mind of the boy and teenager I once was.
Am I really older and wiser now, or just older.
Will We Meet Or Talk Again?
I wrote a few letters to people I who are no longer part of my life because I had things to say. I had things I needed to get off of my chest. I left them in places where they might or might not be found.
I wasn’t prepared to reach out by phone or email but was tired of carrying out some thoughts, ideas and feelings.
Sometimes you have to create your own closure. People have asked me about them, the question is always ‘will we ever meet or talking again?’
The answer is ‘I don’t know.’
Life is simultaneously so very long and so very short. You never know who will come into or leave your life and so I leave it to the universe to determine if we will cross paths again and if that should happen then I’ll figure out at that time what will or won’t come next.
It is enough for me and it is fitting that it should happen at the verge of the Jewish New Year. A time where I always watch this video and think of Unataneh Tokef. Alternatively you can always sub Enya’s May It Be or throw in the music for the fall of Gandalf.
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I am driving down PCH listening to With Or Without You lost thinking about how The Joshua Tree came out during my senior year of high school and how many twists and turns I have experienced since then.
Life didn’t turn out as I expected it to but that is not something I think about in negative terms, it is just something that is because who we are at 18 isn’t who we are in our fifties.
I remember that guy and I can step back into many of his thoughts and ideas but not all because I know and have experienced too much.
Some of what has happened would crush him because he wouldn’t have been emotionally mature enough to handle it and some of it would have been nothing.
Some of it he would have crushed because he wouldn’t have recognized how big and how crazy it was so he would have just handled it.
Ultimately he would have come out the other side or the man he became wouldn’t be writing any of this. But still I wonder after all that has happened am I really older and wiser or just older.
The Guy At The Deli
On the way to Brent’s Deli I drove by the place where my first apartment was just off of Ventua Boulevard in Encino.
Turned on the soundtrack to The Crow and remembered sitting in the living room right after I rented it. No furniture in it yet, just me and a few CDs, including this soundtrack and the memories of having seen the movie a few months before.
The place was old and worn out but I didn’t care because it was all mine. Didn’t need a cosigner or anyone to kick in cash for me, it was mine and paid for out of the paycheck I earned at my first job out of college.
I felt accomplished.
Thought about all that and things that took place there that are not fit for print here while I sat at the deli eating lunch.
Sat in a booth by myself enjoying my coffee and reveling in being home even though I knew the time would fly by. Even though I knew the next week would be filled with some big challenges.
Watched a young father with young children wrestle with his children and remembered when mine were that young. Thought about how it is more than ten years since they were close to that age and how fast the time has gone.
When I visited my own father I sat on grass next to his grave and told him about my plans for the future and how 10 years from now I’ll tell him if they turned out as I expected.
“Dad, the really strange part to me is ten years from now I will probably be thinking about whether I want to do something special for 70.
That is fine cuz the guys and I are talking a little bit about whether we want to do something big for our 60th birthdays. That used to sound old, but not so much anymore. Might be hard for me to say I am almost middle aged then like I do now huh.”
As I stood up and walked away from his grave I thought about all of the chaos in the world now and figured much of it will be resolved by that point.
“This too shall pass” has been a pretty effective mantra for me, kind of interesting to see how much it started here, if not earlier.
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