To Custer, With Love

Today is the first Father’s Day since my dad died. I know this is also true for millions of other people, but knowing that doesn’t really make anything different.

Dad last Christmas.

I didn’t really think today would be a big deal, and mostly it hasn’t been. Father’s Day hasn’t really been a big production in my family since my brother and I were little kids, and even then it was more of an opportunity for him and I to eat blueberry pancakes in our parents’ big bed, the two of us hunkered down on either side of dad, our faces sticky with syrup. It was my mom who suggested I should be prepared to be emotional. That even when we think, intellectually, that an occasion like this is more an excuse to sell greeting cards than anything meaningful, something could rear up inside us that we aren’t expecting. And that unlike Thanksgiving, Christmas and his birthday, all of which fall in a single month-long period and during which I expect to be a wreck this year, this pseudo-holiday could pop up in my psyche and broadside me if I wasn’t prepared for it.

She was right, as usual. I was on the elliptical trainer at the gym and up popped some interstitial Father’s Day thing during the sporting event that was playing just over my head and to the left. (Golf, maybe? That would be appropriate.) And with that, my mind was off to the races. Nothing like a charged emotion during a vast expanse of mind-numbing cardio to get my subconscious to let me know how she really feels.

I miss him. I get the urge to talk to him, out loud, in the middle of the day sometimes, when something comes into my mind. I thought this was a sign of a kind of madness (Joan Didion is right – grief is akin to madness), but justified that I often pray, and there’s only one word different between “Our Father” and “my father.” But then I heard that my brother has whole conversations with him sometimes, which made me feel slightly more sane, at least by comparison. So I tell him things. What I’m troubled by. What I’m working to get right. The parts of my life I’m happy with and the parts where I just thought I’d be farther along by 32. And I feel better having told him.

I regret things we didn’t do. That I didn’t do, mostly. Not things left unsaid. When he became really sick at the end, and I was summoned home to Chicago from Brooklyn, my mom made a comment about not needing to say the things I hadn’t said because I’d said those things, and that was true. But there were things I had always meant to do that I hadn’t. I’d always meant to read that biography that he’d read and then given to me, because he thought I’d like it, even though I’ve never made it through a biography in my life. During my two years in Tucson and my yearly trips there before and since, I’d always meant to visit Anthony, New Mexico, a town where he spent several years teaching English as a Second Language. I’d always meant to make him a CD of alt-country bands I liked, a direct result of his influence on my musical taste, raising me playing Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. I wonder if he’d have liked Kasey Chambers, Neko Case and Bright Eyes. I wonder where he’d have told me to
go check out in Anthony, to see if it was still there. I wonder if, when I finally read that biography, I’ll know why he wanted me to read it, what he thought would speak to me the way it spoke to him.

I’ve always thought I’ve lived as if keenly aware that life is fleeting and short. I’ve certainly jumped on planes, quit jobs, moved or otherwise uprooted my life at a moment’s notice when the “big” life events have happened. But since my dad died, I’ve realized that doing the little things is important too. I’m growing herbs in a window box this year, something I’ve wanted to do since moving back to New York. I’ve started a real writing habit, getting to the page nearly every day and generating some serious output. I’m picking up the phone and calling my friends to talk and catch-up, something I’ve never been comfortable with, seeing the phone as a tool you use to figure out when you can meet in person. And today I decided: as soon as I’m done with the book I’m reading, I’m going to dig that biography out of storage and give it a read.

I miss you dad. Happy Father’s Day.