Tag Archives: family

What Momma says, goes

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“Check this out.  Wait, the cell phone connection’s really bad in here.  I’ll walk to the front of the building and get the rest of her message.

“Okay, here it is.  I had texted Mom to ask her if she has any plans for Thanksgiving.  This is what she said:

‘No, I do not have any plans for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or the New Year.  You children are grown up and it’s time you acted like it.  My father and I are old and tired and soon we’re going to be gone.  You need to start making the decision about what we’re going to do and what we’re going to eat for the holidays.'”

“There’s only one response for that one.  ‘Yes, Mom.'”

“Yes, Momma.  Yes, Momma.  That is so funny.  That’s just like her.”

“And it’s like you, too.”

“Huh?”

“‘I’ve taught you all the dance moves.  You know all the dance moves.  It’s time you need to dance them without me telling you how to dance the moves.'”

“Haha…but it’s true, isn’t it?  That’s me!  If only I didn’t have so much on my plate right now — moving to my new flat, packing the crate for my boyfriend’s return to France, getting ready for St. Louis, DJing…I can’t believe he’s going to be gone next week!  I think I’m going to cry.”

“Can you hold it together?”

“I have to.  I have to work.  My life is my job.  I don’t take a break.”

“We can come over and help you ‘fluff your nest.'”

“No, no.  I’m good.  Now you guys need to practice what I just taught you.  Full weight on one foot, the other leg straight, toes pointed to the floor and just pivot your upper body, keeping your weight on the same foot as your lower body follows around half a turn.  I’m so glad I came tonight.  You guys are like a rock for me.  Thanks!”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ll see you in St. Louis!”

Never back ’em in a corner without a bargaining chip

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“Here.  Here’s somebody new to write about.  Listen to what he has to say and analyse his life.  I need the spotlight off of me for a while. I’m gonna go see your wife, Karen, over there.”

“Okay, Guin.  Hi, I’m Lee.”

“I’m Kirby.”

“Yeah.  So we know each other already.”

“Or we think we do.  Nice outfit you got there.  I’m not much for wearing pinned-on jewelery myself, though.”

“It’s not jewelery.  It’s supposed to be part of the outfit…”

“Is that what they call ‘steampunk’?”

“Yeah.  Karen made it for me.  It’s supposed to look like I’m geared up.  See, this key winds.”

“Uh-huh.  Still looks like jewelery to me.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“Me, I don’t even wear a wedding band.  I don’t like rings or nothing like that.  Guin, see, she likes her ring but she says it keeps falling off and she’s afraid she’s going to lose it.  Looks like you’re wearing two rings.  Why’s that?”

“This one on my right hand is my real wedding band but my wedding finger knuckle is all swollen up, pre-arthritic, I think, so I bought this cheap fifty-dollar tungsten steel ring at Walmart.”

“Hey, works for me.  I think I got arthritis, too.”

“No kidding?  How old are you?”

“Thirty.”

“That’s awfully young.”

“Well, all the basketball I’m playing and all the other sports I played when I was younger, just about every joint in my lower body is torn up or was broken.”

“I heard you busted your ankle.”

“Yeah, I twisted it pretty bad three weeks ago.  It’s healing some, though.”

“Guin says you want her to choreograph a a rumba so you can do a dance showcase in November with her, as soon as the ankle heals.”

“She keeps saying that.  I don’t know.  My ankle may take a long time to heal.”

They nodded the guy nod together, which said, “I know what you mean.  We only go so far to accommodate our women and then we adopt a fallback position.  Theirs is ‘Sorry, honey, I have a headache,’ or ‘I’m too tired.’  Ours is ‘I’m the man of the house and when I say I don’t want to’ it means ‘I know you’re going to give me that look which means I’ll have to say I want to’ so we, instead, have our own set of chronic problems — backaches from too much heavy lifting around the house, ankle/knee sprains from sports outings with the guy,s or having to work strange/long hours.  We’re guys.  It’s what we do best.”

“Guin says you’re a member of the Club.”

“She did?”

“Yeah.”

“Looks like she keeps saying a lot of things.”

“You said it, not me.  But are you a member?”

“Naw.  But I’ll tell you something funny.  I went back to my hometown a couple of months ago and the barber whose been cutting my hair since I was six — that’s 45 years now — he told me that with my father gone, it’s my turn to join the Club and pick up where Dad left off.”

“Uh-huh.  Sounds like my family.  So, you gonna join?”

“I might.”

“There’s a local chapter that has my application.  All I’ve got to do is finish the interview process and pay my dues.”

“‘Pay your dues.’  Yeah, I know what you mean.”

They stood in silence for a few minutes, watching the crowd around them, satisfied their silence had no meaning or subtextual reference.

Lee looked up at Kirby’s head.  “You got a lot more gray hair than I remember.”

“It’s from my days at the Rocket Center.  That place’ll make anybody turn gray.  But I’m leaving it just the way it is.”

“I normally do, too.  I dyed my hair tonight for the show.”

“Uh-huh.  You gotta do what you gotta do.  So Guin says you’re connected.”

“She says what she’s gotta say.”

“Uh-huh.  I understand.”

“However, if there’s anything you need…”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“Your dues have already been paid.”

“I see.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you’re family.”

“‘Family?’  Like in…”

“Anything.  Anything at all.  If you want to join the Club, join the Club.  But your membership’s good, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Yeah?”

“We got your back covered.”

“Is that so?”

“Hey, why do you think we arranged the dance showcase with Guin?”

“You tell her this?”

“Nope.  And I’m not telling you ‘this,’ either.”

“Hey, I’m cool.”

“We know.  Oh, hi, Guin.  I was just talking with your man here about his joining the Club.  Sounds like maybe both of us are gonna join.”

“That’s good.  I wasn’t sure if you were already a member since you’d talked about it before.”

“No, it was never a requirement in my book.  But now that my father’s gone, I figure I owe it to the family to keep my legacy intact.”

“I thought so.”  She linked an arm through Kirby’s.  “Lee’s got friends.  He’s like my family back home.”

“Yeah, I get the drift.  Lee, good to see you, man.  Let’s do this Club thing.”

“All right, Kirby.  Talk to you soon.”  They shook hands.

Heard on my phone while jogging

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Just the two of us:

Songwriters: BILL WITHERS, WILLIAM SALTER, RALPH MACDONALD

(Now dad, this is a very sensitive subject)

Just the two of us (Just the two of us)

From the first time the doctor placed you in my arms
I knew I’d meet death before I’d let you meet harm
Although questions arose in my mind, would I be man enough
Against wrong, choose right and be standing up
From the hospital that first night
Took a hour just ta get the car seat in right
People driving all fast, got me kinda upset
Got you home safe, placed you in your bassinette
That night I don’t think one wink I slept
As I slipped out my bed, to your crib I crept
Touched your head gently, felt my heart melt
Cause I knew I loved you more than life itself (life itself)
Then to my knees, and I begged the Lord please
Let me be a good daddy, all he needs
Love, knowledge, discipline too
I pledge my life to you

Just the two of us, we can make it if we try
Just the two of us, (Just the two of us)
Just the two of us, building castles in the sky
Just the two of us, you and I

Five years old, bringing comedy
Every time I look at you I think man, a little me
Just like me
Wait and see gonna be tall
Makes me laugh cause you got your dads ears an all
Sometimes I wonder, what you gonna be
A General, a Doctor, maybe a MC
Ha ha I wanna kiss you all the time
But I will test that butt when you cut out of line, tru dat
Uh ah why you do that
I try to be a tough dad, but you be making me laugh
Crazy joy, when I see the eyes of my baby boy
I pledge to you, I will always do
Everything I can
Show you how to be a man
Dignity, integrity, honor and
And I don’t mind if you lose, long as you came with it
And you can cry, ain’t no shame in it
It didn’t work out with me an your mom
But yo push come to shove
You was conceived in love
So if the world attacks, and you slide off track
Remember one fact, I got your back

Just the two of us, we can make it if we try
Just the two of us, (Just the two of us)
Just the two of us, building castles in the sky
Just the two of us, you and I

Just the two of us, we can make it if we try
Just the two of us, (Just the two of us)
Just the two of us, building castles in the sky
Just the two of us, you and I

It’s a full-time job to be a good dad
You got so much more stuff than I had
I gotta study just to keep with the changing times
101 Dalmations on your CD-ROM
See me I’m
Trying to pretend I know
On my PC where that CD go
But yo, ain’t nothing promised, one day I’ll be gone
Feel the strife, but trust life does go wrong (life goes on)
But just in case
It’s my place
To impart
One day some girl’s gonna break your heart
And ooh ain’t no pain like from the opposite sex
Gonna hurt bad, but don’t take it out on the next, son
Throughout life people will make you mad
Disrespect you and treat you bad
Let God deal with the things they do (things they do)
Cause hate in your heart will consume you too
Always tell the truth, say your prayers (prayers)
Hold doors, pull out chairs, easy on the swears
You’re living proof that dreams do come true
I love you and I’m here for you

Just the two of us, we can make it if we try
Just the two of us, (Just the two of us)
Just the two of us, building castles in the sky
Just the two of us, you and I
-repeat-

Taking on the world taking on the world
(I’m always here for you)
Look over your shoulder I’ll be there
(Whatever you need just call on me)
We gonna rise we gonna shine
(Whatever you need I’ll be there for you any time)

Just the two of us, we can make it if we try
Just the two of us, (Just the two of us)
Just the two of us, building castles in the sky
Just the two of us, you and I
Daddy loves you daddy loves you for the rest of your life
(This is a really good song , how much am I getting paid for this dad)
Send “Just The Two Of Us” Ringtone to your Cell
Just The Two Of Us lyrics © BLEUNIG MUSIC, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC

OOBE

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Although the image of me as an 85-year old man standing on the front steps of a church after Sunday services handing chewing gum to children who adore me as a wise elder is as strong as ever, I still can’t believe I have lived into the second 50 years of my life.

Thirty-three or more years have passed since the last time I remember standing in the green room surrounded by beautiful women and handsome men changing costumes without worrying about modesty, waiting for their cue, their scene change, their chance to shine on the stage, under the spotlight, the scripts memorised, live.

So how do I explain to you, the faithful reader, that we are actually 200 years into the future?

Can time have passed so quickly that we’ve forgotten that we’ve built Moon bases and Martian colonies?

Mesmerising as the past can be, nostalgic even, we clean up the main meeting hall, the tourists returning to their guest quarters, making last-minute changes to their allotted space for clothing and souvenirs before their habitation modules will be trucked over to the launch site for their return trip to the Moon or Mars, depending on their travel agendas.

Tonight was exciting, wasn’t it?

All the performers, including some of the tourists who wanted the chance to say they danced in front of a live audience on the Martian surface, displayed their best talents.

Every one of them can recall a skipped step or miscue but the audience didn’t know and didn’t care — they were entertained and that’s all that matters to them, their last evening on the planet a memorable experience shared between scientists, tour guides and tourists alike, broadcast on the ISSA Net for all to see, reinterpret and create viral video neural implants.

Tomorrow, normality returns to the Red Planet as researchers go back to their laboratories, tourist modules are sent back to their home planet and new patterns of living are applied to the bot net monitoring and terraforming Mars.

A package lay in the corner of Lee’s room, a single acronym adorning the outside: OOBE.

Out-of-box experience or out-of-body experience?

Lee didn’t know.

It was addressed from both Guin and Bai, undated.

Lee’s years of meditation training had allowed him to exist outside of time.

He looked at the package from 100 years later.

It was the collective memories of Guin and Bai’s marriages, woven into a mass media blanket, the fibers containing electroneurochemical memory traces that intersected at perpendicular and diagonal angles, every crossing point a mixed memory that canceled out or magnified similarities, doing the same for precise differences.

Lee saw that he carried the blanket with him for decades, having shared and created some of the memories before the blanket was made.

After hundreds of years of life, time was meaningless to those with perpetually-rejuvenated circuitry, body parts replacing old ones causing joint pain memories to fade from disuse.

Perspective changed as lifetimes had no statistically-expected endings.

Lee saw the night of a dance showcase on Earth as if it had just happened a few hours ago.

He knew his dance partners wanted him to take control of the dance floor but he relished the small feeling of chaos, the hint of uncertainty that felt like having a random number generator built into every one of the changes to his set of states of energy, his partners unsure of his next move, no matter how many times they had practiced them and anticipated what he was supposed to do rather than what he wanted to do or might do just to mix things up.

He was consistent, inserting chaos in order to test theories in realtime, keeping separate the body in motion from the theoretical responses he calculated to regenerate the out-of-body experience he called life.

The OOBE — the soul, the Übermensch, the god within.

Thriving on chaos is the only way to live.

Living inside and outside the labels, letting our fear and misunderstanding of chaos melt away.

Embracing change because nothing is in our control despite the illusion of conditions at the local level.

For instance, move your finger.  Now, think about all the aspects of the universe that existed and the changes that occurred in the moment your finger moved that effected you and your finger — statistically, you had no control of the universe’s influence upon your finger, let alone in or on the finger itself.

It is good to remind ourselves of our place in the universe, even on nights with the simple pleasure of social engagement with fellow dancers, their friends and family.

A new adventure awaits our Martian colonists, bred and designed to withstand the brutal cosmic radiation that bombards our inner solar system constantly, ironically protecting us against the random radiation outside our solar system.

Let us look forward to what we’ll read about the colonists next!

The difference between fun and work, if there is any

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In this moment, looking at the internal vocabulary, searching for new ways to express myself without resorting to a thesaurus, listening to the replay of conversations, realising how many details I’ve forgotten that make stories more real, feeling my face and neck break out with small infected pores that are commonly called acne…

“Learning never ends.”  [from a 15-cent stamp on an envelope dated 15 Sep 1980 sent from my father to his mother containing the following poem]

Lineage [for Evelyn]

Only moments agoOur only son
Gave his oath
To his country
As his grandfather
Did fifty-one years ago
As his father
Did twenty-six years ago next month
Ah, tears well in my eyes
A lump is in my throat
For him, for we three
Grandfather, father, son
For the why we each serve our country
For patriotism, love of country

For ____ why —-?

— RLH 9/15/80

A line whispered into my ear from a dance partner. “I flew to New York for the weekend.  I walked 10 miles a day, wearing poor shoes for walking the first day, and my flats for the second day.  This dancing tonight, bending my knees…phew!  it’s killing me!”

Multiple storylines begging to be continued — the Martian tales, the Mad Hatter chronicles, the Wondering Wanderer, the Wandering Wondering, the thinker, the doer, the tinkerer, the inventor, the investor, the Kickstarter campaign…

If I don’t write them down, they don’t get lost, they simply never exist except in the vast universe of my imagination which entertains me for as long as I live with this stimuli-driven central nervous system of mine.

I finalised the West Coast Swing routine with Abi today — enough so that we can play with the routine and keep it in time with the music — that in itself would be celebration enough for a lifetime.

But a second routine, with Jenn, has not been finalised less than two days before our premiere performance on Saturday, with scant time to polish our moves.

There is much I have learned in the past two years of dance lessons with my wife.  In our 27-plus years of marriage and 40 years of knowing each other we have aged together, aligning our storylines so that one of us cannot tell the tale of our lives without including the other.

In the past few months of dance lessons with Jenn and Abi, the learning has changed pace.

I could never have imagined that I would once again know a person whose physicality was without bounds, but that tangent will wait until another day…soon.

Tonight, as I prep my thoughts for trippy dreams, I look at the faces of my two dance partners and see their futures written in features that change with aging skin and graying hair.

When I danced with one, our connection running from her big toe through her foot, calf, thigh, ribs, shoulder, upper arm, forearm, wrist, and fingers, down through my fingers all the way to the floor, I felt the warmth of a loving mother, a powerful lover and an equal dance partner that, although we have danced untold times, I had never felt deep within myself like I did today, willing to share with my wife that I took on Abi as a new lover today but in a way that surpasses sex, in the way that Monica and I, who never kissed, could say we were lovers the night we melded our thought patterns and saw how our differences made us one an evening in Knoxville during the early 1980s.  I felt Abi simultaneously as a child, a young adult, a middle-aged mother and an elderly grandmother fighting for every last breath before she dies.

Jenn, with whom how many dance partners can easily brag how much better they dance than I, our connection is like…being a kid all over again for the very first time.

I want to have fun all the time — Jenn is more willing to let me just be crazy with my dance moves when I shouldn’t be than Abi — I do them both a disservice by not taking our dance practice more seriously.

I know the two of them are not the same even if our goals for this week are.

Jenn and I are not lovers on the dance floor and I cannot predict a future where we will or will not be.  I have not set a goal for such an event.

Instead, it is within the pure bubble of unadulterated fun that I want to place the memorised routine with Jenn.

She was willing to come to the studio tonight, tired after a trip out-of-town, to nail down our moves but I was outside myself with mirth, unable to concentrate but wanting to make her visit not be a total waste.

When I held Jenn in my arms, I felt an older woman and saw gray streaks in her hair — I heard the voice of her husband, Gilley, speaking through her, wondering if I also heard her father and mother, maybe even her grandparents find their way to me through her.

I used to keep these observations to myself, thinking I was crazy, sensing different personalities in the sight, sound and touch of other people, wondering how much mass media representations of ghost stories, ESP and other paranormal phenomena were imprinted in my thoughts as fuzzy labels upon my irrationally-explainable emotional states rather than scientifically-testable experiences.

But I remember I am a storyteller, a tall tale spinner, exaggeration my best feature rather than my facial profile or wishful hunk of a body.

Jenn sensed a mouse in me when we first started dancing, my feeling intimidated by the laughter welling up from inside my thoughts at the silliness I felt, unable to justify why I was standing with my childlike friend trying to take ourselves seriously as adults with little time for fun before our showcase routine in two days.

Abi demands that I first treat myself as a strong dance leader seriously, putting fun second after I’ve shown my dance partner, the follower, that she is the only connection I feel with the universe, the rhythm of the dance music our source of energy.  Her demands I have given into reluctantly but willingly like a latent masochist, a glutton for punishment.

Jenn asks that I take command of the dance floor.

Every leader and follower is different.

Tonight, the older woman in Jenn needed her strong, lifelong male partner to hold her up and I failed to match that need.

My distraction was the leftover euphoria of discovering what a West Coast Swing connection with Abi truly means.

The world will not end because I was unable to settle myself down and concentrate on Jenn in a dance studio dominated by my wife, Abi, Chris and his dance partner.

Jenn and I have another hour, maybe two, three at the most, before we dance our Lindy Hop routine together.

For two years I wondered what dancing with Jenn would be like, seeing how well she matched up with other guys, some better skilled than I and some less skilled.

I have learned that Jenn’s strengths come from her deep knowledge of physical skills, including track-and-field events for which she spent long hours training.

I can neither compete against her dance partners nor against her years of physical training, or more recently, her hours of physical therapy recovering from car smashups.

I will dance with Jenn and Abi again after this weekend’s showcase.  Of that I am certain.

What I have before me, in the next 40-plus hours and the next 40-plus years, is a challenge to discover what this 51-year old body can do as it gets older that it never learned to do at a younger age over many days, weeks and months of arduous practice, both for the sake of my wife and for the sake of any dance partner I walk out onto the floor.

The challenge for me with Abi is how fast can I learn from her the years of training she’s had with the best dancing instructors on this planet.

The challenge for me with Jenn is how fast can I learn from her the years of the aforesaid physical training, minus the pain and physical rehabilitation, if I can help it, and training she’s had with some of the best dancing instructors on this planet, including Abi.

The challenge for me with my wife is how patient I can be to help her improve her physical stamina to be just as much fun as Abi, Jenn or any number of dance partners that I encounter in this adventure that started what seems like yesterday.

How can I convince myself that focusing my attention on the art of dance moves is fun, rather than mundane work that I abhor in any endeavour?

What is life without challenges?

Of all the visual stimuli in this room

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Two dance practice videos slowly transfer from the notebook PC to the place called YouTube.

Not content to sit and wait for CPU cycles dedicated solely to blogging, my left forefinger types inefficiently but effectively passing electrochemical signals through me and the smartphone screen to the e-ink splotches here.

As I fell asleep last night, before dreams bestirred me consciousness into confusion, I wondered if dying today would be okay now that my wife’s dream of a financially-secure future is set in motion, my task as a quasiresponsible husband completed.

I have enjoyed rewinding myself 15-20 years lately, participating in activities that my current body finds taxing but my younger body enjoyed just as spastically — dancing about like a flailing two-year old running through the house in pure abandonment.

In a few days, the dance lessons will cease, my wife’s only activity she looks forward to no longer fundable (or fungible?), returning the two of us to our lives over two years ago, back when caring for her mother was more mentally than physically demanding.

Saturday morning I woke up to find the house empty of my wife, taking over an hour to see the note she’d posted on our bathroom mirror that she’d gone to get her toenails repainted.

In that hour I let myself feel the pain, fear and loss of abandonment, wondering what I’d done wrong, what I could have done right to have kept my nearly lifelong companion I call my wife.

For my wife, life next week will feel the same way when she no longer has weekly dance practice to look forward to.

My diversions from waiting to die that I call my creative moments sitting in front of this blog are not providing financial means to alleviate my wife’s pending depression, dampening both our moods.

At this moment I don’t know what to do.

She wants to keep going to see UT football games, which she enjoys and which takes up much of our fall budget; I chose a largely unfunded midlife retirement from corporate life (it was partially funded the first year) that has lasted six years now, thanks to my wife’s reluctant generosity and patience.

What do either one of us have to look forward to after this week is over?

I don’t know.

What hope do we plan to lean upon in our relatively comfortable middle class suburban lifestyle, free from but the most minor of worries?

Bridging the gap between generations

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One day not so long ago my father and I took a trip through the country of our ancestors — the mountains and tidal basins of Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina.

Standing on a bridge overlooking a body of water I can’t remember, Dad asked me if I knew much about our family.

Being the smart-ass teenager that I was, I mumbled some remark that almost made my father keep his mouth shut.

Instead, determined to make me see how serious he was, that this moment, more than any of the others, was his reason for taking us hundreds of miles from home, Dad began to talk while the sun set behind us, the dark purple horizon over the water rising up into the sky as stars blinked into life.

We could not see each other’s faces so we both leaned against the railing of the bridge, our hands hanging over.

The details of the conversation have faded.  Being a determined writer who likes catching conversation on paper, I wrote a few snippets down after we talked but lost or rather, threw away, a large portion of my writing sometime after that trip and don’t have a single note to reference, depending on my middle-aged memory to capture now what he said then.

We talked about the girls I was interested in at the time, including Monica, with whom I had attended several proms and spent a lot of time in various groups such as Sing Out Kingsport; Janeil, who I had stopped dating before the trip with Dad; Alice Ray Knapp, a girl from my calculus (or was it Accounting?) class; one or two others whose names escape me.

Dad told me that he had no issues with the girls I dated and figured I was smart enough to choose a woman with whom I would spend the rest of my life — he could give my approval if I asked but didn’t think it was absolutely necessary; in other words, if I wanted to elope with someone, he would support my decision.

But he was interested in more than my love life.

He used my dating scene as a kicking off point, leading us to imagery of why to have a family at all.

I was noncommittal about having children at that time.  Dad didn’t push me to name a number of children but wanted me to think about the purpose of marriage in all its social context, including responsibility to go to church, belonging to the right social organisations, climbing the corporate ladder wherever I worked and devoting quality time/money toward family.

That, too, was still the opening act of our conversation.

With the sky pitch-black, the Milky Way galaxy clearly visible, Dad decided we had better find a restaurant in the seaside town we were in, wanting to avoid seafood because of his shellfish allergies.

We found a place that served burgers and steaks and settled into a corner booth so Dad could continue the conversation.

He let me order a beer to show he was treating me like a man.

At that point, I told Dad my opinion about having kids with the various girls we had discussed, the whys and why-nots.

He nodded his head the whole time, not once interrupting me or criticising my opinions, a rarity for conversations between us, so I knew there was more in his thoughts he wanted to share.

I remember the waiter giving us strange looks because Dad sort of shooed him away whenever he came up, a friendly guy who seemed to want to tell us what was going on in the area over the next few days.

After I finished talking, Dad sat back in the bench seat and paused for a minute or two.

I wasn’t sure what he was going to say.  I had grown used to Dad’s passive-aggressive personality, attuned to changes in his emotional state but didn’t sense any buildup of anger about to explode, another rarity.

Dad leaned forward and told me about his childhood.  I sure wish I had a copy of what he said — summarizing it does not do either one of us justice but it’s all I’ve got.

Basically, Dad tried to get me to see the difference between his childhood and mine, as well as what he understood about the difference between his mother’s childhood and his, knowing nothing about his father’s childhood nor wanting to.

He then told me about various ancestors of ours he knew or had been told about, putting together family stories as well as personality sketches that would fill more than a novel’s worth of interest to the general reader.

Seeing that I still looked interested, Dad talked about where we were, somewhere near the Virginia/North Carolina border, not far from the ocean, and asked me to mentally picture what this place must have been like 200 or so years ago.

There were no fast-food joints, no highways, no street lights or hotels.

There were villages, wild animals, deadly diseases, ports of call that might or might not have been friendly to our ancestors and living pretty close to whatever you could kill or grow yourself.

Dad wished that I could see his and my mother’s family weren’t that far removed from living off the land, meaning that they were closer to understanding what our ancestors were like than I, having grown up in the comfortable surroundings of suburbia.

He didn’t know what my kids would be like but he wanted me to know that I would probably have a conversation like this with my children and feel frustrated sometimes that a generation gap is not just a catchy phrase in mass media but also a real difference of opinion and priorities between parents and their offspring.

I have few regrets in life, this being one of them: after Dad finished talking, he asked if I had any questions.  I really wanted to know more about the ancestors he’d described but, for some reason, my teenage self felt the question was stupid because I knew that he and I were tired and had to get up in the morning for a long drive to our next stop, my feeling like an adult making me choose the responsible adult path of saying “Naw.  I’m getting tired,” and turning Dad off from any more discussion of this type for the rest of the trip; another regret is not asking Dad’s father (or stepfather, really — Lee Bruce Hill; Dad’s biological father was named James Horace Capps) about his adventures during 29 years in the U.S. Navy between 1929 and 1959.

Knowing what I know now, that my father is no longer here to be asked questions, I might have made a different decision or many of them.

I might have chosen to have kids so that I and them could ask Dad more questions.

But it didn’t happen that way.

So, here I am, again, writing to you, the invisible reader, closely related to the eternal nature, the omniscient, able-to-do-anything god figure unable to be described or pinned down.

These words are my children, my gifts to the world I give freely, unconditionally.

I have given more hugs and kissy-face time to our cats than to people but that has been changing lately as I learn to let go of old habits, good and bad, and allow myself to learn what actual human interaction is like, good and bad, opening myself up to falling in love with people again, exposing my emotions to the joys and sorrows of daily life.

It is good to discover I can love people without feeling that I have to owe them anything.

It is even better to discover that people love me back without expecting anything in return, willing to learn from me despite my internally-magnified flaws that come out as odd behaviour.

It was good to jog out to the greenway bridge over the Flint River tonight, looking at the stars in the darkness, surrounded by the sounds of nature and spark the memory of a trip with Dad sometime in the early 1980s.

I am not just a biological product of my father, which is weird enough in itself when men my father’s age who haven’t seen him in a while and don’t know he’s dead mistake me for my father.  I am also a product of our ancestral history — it’s up to me to keep our history alive, uncensored, readily-available to our living descendants, relatives and friends.

The words and images of my novels, short stories, poems, journals, blog entries and online videos are all I’ve got to record the history.

It’s also reflected in my view of the future, detailed in short stories or chapters of the ongoing saga of Martian colonisation taking place in this blog.