The Best Third Sunday in June

I woke yesterday to realize that all the sorrow and self-pity that used to enshroud me around the subject of fathers had just suddenly …lifted, I think because just a few days ago I remembered a  conversation I had 20 years ago with the then-pastor of Pilgrim Church in the Upham’s Corner section of Boston. This man of the cloth was telling me that a curious ‘gift of vision’ had recently arisen in him, as perplexing to him as it was to those around him. I asked him how it manifested itself.“Well for example right now I see that there is a man standing behind you.”The little hairs on my arms stood up.“What does he look like?"“He’s older,” he said. “He has wavy white hair and really bright blue eyes.”“I know who that is.” I said. “I met him only once, when I was 19, and we spent an hour together in the bar of the DuPont Hotel in Wilmington Delaware.“He was your father?” said this man, who knew nothing whatever about me and my life story.“Yes,” I said.“He looks so sad,” he said glancing over my shoulder.“Well, he drank. He left us,” I said, feeling the old hard knot of anger for all my mother suffered as a woman alone in that era of the famously intact family“That being the case, maybe leaving was the kindest thing he could think to do for you all.”“Maybe,” I said but I didn’t believe it.But now with the return to my mind of this long-buried conversation I’m seeing things in a new, more forgiving light.Plus you know I look just like the man: Under the dye job, my colorist tells me my hair is now almost all white. God knows it’s really wavy. And just 16 weeks ago Nature served up to our entirely brown-eyed family a baby with eyes that same bright-blue as Hap Sheehy once had.‘Time to issue the man a welcome, Terry,' is what I thought waking up to Fathers Day yesterday.So welcome, my poor sad terrified dad. Pull up a chair and we’ll all scootch over. It isn't hard at all to make a circle bigger.

Account for Yourself

So what would I say I did this week if somebody asked?

Well it looks like I started the week with this picture of my family, which was NOT the picture that made it to the holiday card.

Now I seem to be finishing it with a second photo from that same day, the five-year-old still in violence-mode but everyone else looking pretty ‘prettied up' and ready for the shot.

In between week's beginning and week's end, I had my highs and my lows, as we all do:

I spilled a water bottle inside my bag, again, and was consequently taught how to do CPR on my device by plunging it in a big bowl of raw rice.

I skipped my Weight Watchers meeting, but caught that Zumba class.

I came out of the Post Office Friday to discover  that someone had managed to take out my left  tail light without dealing even so much as a scratch to the rest of the car.

“Maybe they stole it!” said David, as puzzled as I was when he saw it, but how would you do that, and WHY? Still, it does look pretty popped out, like poor King Lear’s eyes after the bad guy went at him with a grapefruit spoon.

 I had some island food from Singh’s Roti and that was awesome.

And while I was there, in the sweet old burg that is Dorchester, I drove past my first childhood home that, in my baby days was my universe entire with its oak wainscoting going up the front hall  stairs and that big stained-glass window at the landing.

Back in the 90s, it was a halfway house for women getting out of the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Framingham. I used to visit the women there and once I wrote about it for the Boston Globe.

Most of the houses on the street look great. Like Mrs. Kaposky's old place:

No so much mine.

It's no longer used by the state  but the fire escapes remain.  And the steps are sort of rotting. And somebody started to paint but only did as much as they could reach without a ladder and then gave up.

I got out of my car and looked at this house for a pretty good spell, remembering and remembering: my life there and my mom's life before me and the life of my grandfather before her who bought the place with such a sense of hope and joy in the spring before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand ushered in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen - until that next war broke out just two and a half decades later.

So I guess in short it was a week like any week, lived partly in anticipation and partly in memory. It’s our curse and our blessing, this ability to live however briefly in moments that are not the present moment.