via https://ift.tt/3rm3JK0
It’s all so fragile. I don’t know. There’s no meaning to be found. You just
have to do what you can, I guess.
Anyway. I spent today at a bit of a loss– I almost went in to work, because
I’d been ready to go out the door when I’d picked up my phone and seen my
sister’s text and missed call and voicemail. But then I thought about it
more and was like, no, I am– no. No, because I can’t not talk about it,
but i also can’t— talk about it– anyway.
So, well. For Christmas I’d planned to make truffles and piragi (Latvian
bacon buns), and I had already mixed up the truffles and just needed to
roll them.
So I proofed the yeast and started the dough for the piragi, and rolled the
truffles, and so Dude and I embarked upon the several-hour affair of making
the piragi. He had to go out and buy more ham for the filling, as he’d
misread the recipe and was severely short, so he did that while the dough
was rising.
I spent that time going through my photos on Flickr, all the albums of
family stuff, and finding every photo of my Dad. At first I was just
finding the good ones, but then I thought, no, someone can comb through
these for the best of them, i’m putting them all in. So there’s an album,
now, on Flickr,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/albums/72157717458225128/with/5303595939/
that’s just my photos of my dad from about 2006 to the present. (The
very-most recent ones aren’t up there, they’re just on my hard drive still,
but they overlap with the phone ones.) (I don’t expect anyone to find them
interesting outside of my family, I’m just noting the location.)
[cut for length]
I paused to roll out the piragi and bake them, and then came back and let
Google Photos be creepy and sort my pictures by face, to only show me the
ones with Dad in them. I then downloaded the good ones of those– it found
videos too– so creepy, but, well, there’s one person I know that
surveillance can no longer harm, because wherever he is, he’s safe now– and
reuploaded them, and now those are in the same album on Flickr.
The album has several themes, and most of those themes are that Dad was
absofuckinglutely delighted to be a family man; in most of the photos he’s
either sitting at one end of the table watching the shenanigans in open
amusement, or he’s instructing someone (possibly children, possibly
grandchildren) in some technical thing, or he’s holding onto a child as
they do some difficult thing.
Here’s the thing: he had everything he ever wanted, which is both
comforting and bitter, because he had everything he wanted, and there is
no eternal reward or promise that would really be worth taking him away
from this, a life he’d made for himself and was in the midst of heartily
delighting in. He wasn’t sick, it wasn’t a kindness, he hadn’t even really
slowed down that much– he was being slightly more careful on ladders and
was paying heed to the fact that he didn’t heal like a thirty-year-old, but
he’d also made arrangements so he could keep doing all the difficult and
demanding shit he enjoyed. And he was enjoying his grandchildren, so
much. It’s not fair.
Sigh. Anyway.
I also baked a loaf of bread, because, well, I have sourdough starter, and
the jar was getting full, and I was baking. It turned out to be a teeny
little loaf, but it’ll do for toast.
My older sister is going to wait and come up after Christmas, so
Middle-Little suggested I wait and come then too so we can all be present
together. But I want to go to my mother. I don’t want to be so far away, I
want to go home.
Dude’s mother has immediately volunteered to watch our cat for as long as
we’re gone. i could just go now, and be there– however long it takes– and
stay either with mom or with Farmsister. It doesn’t matter, it’s all one
isolation pod.
(I’m weirdly sad to miss seeing MM and family, we’d arranged to see them
just after Christmas? I’d see them this week but then I’ve broken
isolation. Dad was the one who was most at risk but I still would feel like
an asshole to give my grieving 70-year-old mother the fucking coronavirus
because I wanted to sit in my best friend’s house and cuddle her kids and
drink and watch her husband play a video game. I won’t be able to see them
until after– whatever the fuck happens, happens. Which is fine! But I’m
faintly sad to delay further.)
Anyway. Now I have a lot of piragi and some truffles, and this weekend I
baked two big macaroni and cheese casseroles I was planning to bring to
MM’s house this coming weekend, so. I should freeze those, now I don’t know
when we’ll eat them. I don’t have a ton of freezer space, though.
Anyway. I looked at a lot of great photos of my dad and this one, I think,
from 2011, featuring the two oldest grandchildren, is one of my favorites.
(They were repairing a Jeep exhaust system I think.) (It was followed by
many photos of the younger one holding a pair of needle-nose pliers and
sitting inside the Jeep randomly poking the pliers at things. He was so
goddamned cute. He’s still cute; he’s about to hit his awkward phase but
that’s okay he’ll always be cute to me.)
[img desc: an adult man’s bootsoles, crossed one over the other, face the
camera; the man is lying on a piece of cardboard under a car that is on
little riser ramps. Next to him two small boys (about two and four) are
lying with their feet toward the camera, looking up at the underside of the
car, though one of them seems more enamored of climbing on the adult man
than paying attention. In the shadow, the man’s arm is reaching up to wrap
a piece of wire around the muffler of the car.]
It still doesn’t seem real though, and I don’t think it will until I go
home, but I want to go home because it feels like cheating not to really
understand it.
ok ok ONE more:
[img desc: in a green field at sunset, a little girl (blurred by her fast
motion and the camera’s slow shutter) in a frilly ivory/pink dress is
shrieking with laughter as she falls down from a fence, supported by a
blurry man who is visibly also laughing.]
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