It’s like pulling teeth November 15, 2008

You cannot predict the way each first will feel.

Ten years ago was the first Thanksgiving since Dad died.  I know we went to someone’s home, but I do not remember whose.  I know we smiled without feeling warm.  We prayed without believing.  We ended up at a Waffle House because there is no correct thing to do when it is Thanksgiving and your father is dead by means that are both intimately familiar and disastrously mysterious.  

I remember details that are irrelevant.  The Waffle House was startlingly clean.  I ate a pecan waffle.  We sat at the bar, perhaps so that we didn’t have to look each other in the eye.  The man who sat next to me was bald.

I remember details that are bizarre.  One waiter sexually harassed a co-worker, or at least it seemed that way to me.  The co-worker’s tooth fell out.  She was bleeding everywhere and trying to keep up with orders for smothered and covered hash browns at the same time.  I wanted to tell her to put her tooth in a glass of milk.  Isn’t that what you are supposed to do with a tooth?  

You cannot predict the way each first will feel, but you might feel warm and almost spiritual when the bizarreness of the first Thanksgiving without your father is reflected in the oddity that is Waffle House waitresses.

On Believing in Gods and Monsters October 14, 2008

A year after and he hardly looks or sounds anything like my Dad. No voice except buzzing mechanical sounds from a machine that I often can’t understand or he’s too tired to use. He’s been working all morning at learning how to say our names.  My name is harder to say than my sister’s, I am told. More air sounds to her name’s throat sounds. The air sounds are harder because he’s not breathing through his mouth anymore, but through a hole in his throat and also because I know I’m often harder to say. This is not exaggerated. This is realistically me.

Something about the fluid and the tissue of his body, even with the packs they’ve been pumping in for 10 months now, makes it so that I can press my fingers into him and an impression stays there when I want it to spring back like healthy. My more than uncomfortable pile of prying fingers is pressing in, over communicating because I don’t know where else to go.  I am packing all of my words in before there is the chance of forever space and I won’t be able to tell him just how and where it hurts. Or just how and where I love.  I don’t know a place worth going without words- even the ones you wish would spring back like healthy.