2006-11-23 - 11:46 a.m.
I hope in yesterday's entry that I didn't make my father out to be some kind of mean hard-ass about people in his house, because that's not the case at all. He is very generous with his hospitality and loves having people around. He's the best bartender ever and all the neighbors, even people more than a generation younger, love to come over and give him bottles of rare and unusual bourbons and other liquors to try out, so he's got more liquor in that house than a well-stocked cocktail lounge. And he'll offer a drink to anybody, including the UPS man, the "Meals on Wheels" delivery volunteers, or the guy who brings the Chinese food (all of whom, by the way, except for the UPS man, will periodically take him up on the offer).
I think I've written in other entries that it seems that everybody in town knows him. I was amazed to discover that any one of us "kids" could go to the grocery store and buy several grocery carts of food for Christmas dinner or whatever with his check...all the grocery clerks know his checks, and name, by sight, the sight of which always brings a chuckle or a twinkle to their eye.
Mom and Dad didn't have a normal bank account for years. Instead, they had a stock investment management account which carried with it a checkbook (i.e., Merrill Lynch in Dad's case, and something else in Mom's, I forget which one, because she'd change it every time she got mad at each particular broker--it was dangerous business having her as a client, because she knew stocks better than they did), and when they wanted cash, Dad would simply cash a check at the grocery store. So the clerks not only all knew Dad, they also didn't blanche at checks written for huge sums of money. To me, this is just yet another aspect underscoring the charm of my father. No snobbish high finance for him, Platinum American Express cards, blah blah blah, but cashing checks at Albertson's with "personal bankers" named "Suzie" or "Mike".
But now with metastasized cancer (according to the doctor) riddling the inside of his body, things have to be a little different. As I wrote before, he's still the same old charming, fun-loving character (if you can refer to a genius rocket scientist as a "character"), but he likes it one person at a time. This way his hard-of-hearing hearing and short-term-memory-fading-mind can keep up with the conversation and the visitor can be flexible to Dad's momentary needs, which a large crowd, by definition, cannot and will not be.
Maybe because I am the oldest child and therefore know the most of Dad's history (but, let me underscore this, I KNOW Dad's history, i.e., I've absorbed, questioned, explored, and remembered it all my life, which isn't really true of the others), I can carry on deep conversations with him without having to involve the recent present at all. With the concept of "when you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes," this can be a long, on-going thing that happens months before the actual moment of death, what Dad would call a "serious life-time review", and that is mostly what Dad is doing, now. According to him, he started this with Mom months before she died, so while he was the one most affected by her death, he was also the one most prepared for it, which, in contrast, we were not at all, which I, at least, take as a personal failing on my part in that I think I should have understood this was happening all along, but did not...and so I do not want to repeat the same mistake with Dad.
Two nights ago, I had the most bizarre, and somewhat creepy dream I have had in a long time, if ever. I was in a Hieronymus Bosch type of world, although "carnival" or "amusement park" based, or so it seemed to me, perhaps in atmosphere representing something "The Pike," an old rotting, leaky, drippy, salty, rusty amusement park in Long Beach that fell apart, or maybe a "Coney Island" that was barely held together with duct tape, full of dangers and horrifying people and traps and challenges. This was a very real place in that alternative reality, so much so, that after I woke up, I took quite a while trying to figure out where in reality that place was, when had I been there before, and finally concluded that there wasn't such a place in THIS world.
What I was trying to do in that carnival or amusement park was "find" Mom, who apparently was "there"...maybe like I was a kid who had somehow gotten separated from her, or lost in the crowd or atmosphere and was now trying to reconnect with her? It's hard to describe, because it was so alien, and yet so very real in accordance with its own rules of reality.
But instead of looking for her, I spent most of the day being distracted by the offerings of the place, until finally I got pissed at myself at succumbing to these distractions and focused entirely on this search for her. This focus got me out of the amusement park and into some suburb or apartment complex, where I guess I understood I could find her. (This, too, was a place I had never seen in real life but I think I have some understanding of what it means.)
Finally, I found myself standing outside in some kind of yard in front of an apartment and I called for Mom to come outside. The apartment door opened and what came out were two tiny "recumbent pedaled wheelchairs" (something else that doesn't exist in real life), and a dark, lumpen, shadowy mass riding in each one. Somehow I understood these to be Mom and Dad. Well, since Dad is still alive and it was Mom I was looking for in the dream, I asked Mom to "show herself" to me, so the dark, shadowy mass stood up and it was her as a much younger woman, tall and lean, elegant and well-dressed and able to walk, all the way she used to be. She was wearing make-up and had dark reddish-brown hair, which is the color she used to dye her hair in the years before she got sick and became an invalid.
This wasn't the Mom I wanted to see or was missing; it was going backwards instead of forwards. I think the Mom that all of us miss is the sweet, soft, loving, unmade-up and gray-haired Mom. However, I made an attempt at being friendly and loving with this "Mom" and asked her if I could give her a hug and a kiss. She allowed this unsmilingly, wrapping stiff arms that felt only like skeleton bones around me and offered an unsmiling cheek, which, when I kissed its cold, immobile surface, made me viscerally understand that this wasn't her at all, but only an animated and somehow resurrected dead body.
I left that scene and woke up, thinking, "Do I really miss her THAT much, that what I am wanting is an animation of her dead body?" I wouldn't have thought so, but maybe there is something in there that I still need to resolve.
I know that my brother and sisters are going through a lot of desperate holiday feelings, an attempt at trying to recreate or keep going something that IS dead...because these holidays were when we saw and enjoyed Mom the most, and for me, for almost the entire past decade, I ONLY saw her on the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. And I do feel guilty about that, in retrospect (but we separated adults all have busy, independent lives), although I can take credit for talking with her on the phone for hours once a week, every week.
So maybe this dream was to help me NOT be hard on my siblings for what they impose on Dad, because I know that what they are trying to do is hold onto the past and don't know how else to do it (and would we keep on doing it until these poor people end up as compressed shadows still attempting to be animated in this world?). These holidays have the potential of making them so incredibly miserable. All three of them have said that they CAN'T celebrate Christmas without Mom, but I know when the time comes, they will do the same thing they are trying to do with Thanksgiving (unless they learn something from the experience, which remains to be seen).
I had actually planned to go to North Carolina for Christmas and New Years (I continue to say that Asheville is the only place I have ever lived that I still miss), so I'm on my own nostalgic track, I guess. Again, this is based on Dad's saying that he did not want to celebrate Christmas with a big family gathering, so I planned on seeing him independently, as we have been doing, and I can skip the siblings, since they were the ones who said they didn't want to celebrate Christmas at all. But now Dad seems to want us all there to start dividing up stuff that is in the house. He'd rather see this distributiion while he is still alive instead of having it happen after he is dead. And so I remain at his "beck and call" and didn't make air, hotel, and rental car reservations for Asheville.
I think what happens with the rest of them this Thanksgiving will go a long way toward bringing our Christmas into focus. Meanwhile, I guess I still have some stuff I have to work out, myself; doing a much better of job of putting away the past and looking toward a more golden future.
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