intuition

I’m sorry that I held so much spite for my father in my heart. I wish I had taken advantage of our time more when I was younger and still at home. I miss him as though he’s gone because he is a different person now. I wish I could tell him all that, but I can’t bring myself to do it in person.

Recently my father’s begun turning junk into functional art as a hobby. He’ll take old coffee mate bottles or kool aid containers and decorate them with markers, turning them into coin holders and giving them to people as gifts. He’s taken to doodling again (he used to draw cartoons in his spare time when I was young). It’s by no means prodigious art, but it let’s his mind play and we appreciate that.

Unfortunately, I think it might be too late for him to learn about me.

The shared sentiment of a lot of friends seems to be “it’s not too late.” Most of me thinks it is. I try to soak up as much as I can from him when I’m around. I ask him about his family back East (I know next to nothing about his background). I try to ask him about his dad (he died of a massive heart attack when I was too young to understand, I have no memory of him). I try to learn about him, it’s the least I can do.

My Pops taught me how to throw when I was three (see the explanation to “Best Fool”

My father was from Leechburg, PA just outside of Pittsburg. Huge Pirates fan, Steelers Fan, Penguins fan. He bought me a Roberto Clemente card when I was probably 10 or 11 for Christmas and I started collecting his cards. Had this one that wasn’t worth any money and I kept it in the brim of my hat for every baseball game I played from 8th grade until i stopped playing when i was 21.

My father is the reason I make music. I was raised in a house where there was always music on. We had full access to massive record collection and my brother and I would often go to the basement and play video games or pool while listening to everything from the Temptations to The Clash on vinyl.

I felt terrible writing the last line. Telling someone they’ve let others down is a hurtful jab. But it was something I needed to say.

My folks have been together for something like 35 years now. They have had definitive ups and downs and before the diagnosis they were definitely in a down. My mom mistook my father’s disconnectedness, grumpiness, anger, and solitude as a sign of a growing rift between them. Instead of giving up, she got help. The diagnosis has humbled my father. He knows that he owes his world to my mother. She has been a rock through the whole thing, and he appreciates that inherently, even when he doesn’t recognize there’s anything wrong with him.

This Native American lady told me something about when you have a loved one dying and you see an eagle fly by it’s their way of saying their soul has left their body and they’re not in pain any longer. That always stuck with me. My father is not that fargone yet, but I’m sure at some point in the future that mythology will comfort me.

This goes back to him repeating himself often. His short term memory has been far more affected than his long term memory so far. He can tell you a story about his younger days with perfect clarity, but he might end up telling it again as if you’ve never heard it.