ow

[dragonlady7]

with a tag for my dad but idk if i'm willing to figure that out, ugh i'm a wuss about headaches

via https://ift.tt/3phwhT7

today’s headache was NOT cured by food, OR by ibuprofen, OR by water, so this is exciting new territory behind my left eye and I for one am not excited about that! No thanks.

I was thinking about going in to work, to see if there were any projects I should tidy up, but I am so scatterbrained. They’re used to me disappearing. I’ll text my supervisor later today and maybe I’ll go in briefly tomorrow morning to tidy things, especially if there’s anything urgent, so that I can vanish for a while in clear conscience.

A coworker I no longer work directly with texted and asked if he could bring food by later. I remember now that he’s patrilineally Jewish (and by that i mean, he doesn’t identify that way but he was raised adjacent, y’know?).

hanging out with Dude’s mom last night was lovely. She wept on me a bit, which I hadn’t expected, but then, she has known me a long time, and met my parents many times. She had just sent a card to my parents, taking the occasion to compliment my dad on his hair-cutting skills for Dave’s haircut from Thanksgiving.

Mom texted us all this morning. “I had my first John would have done this,” she said, and it was clear from context that she’d said that in a tone of exasperation. Their house has two levels of roof, where the lower storey extends out beyond the upper, and I do remember at one point in my childhood she was up there painting the siding and had a ladder go out from under her and mildly injured herself and was quite upset. She really doesn’t like being on ladders or roofs. But, she’d gone out onto that lower roof to shovel the snow off, which was left there from an over two-foot snowfall they’d had last week; it’s supposed to rain a lot, later, but not be warm enough for the snow to melt quickly, and that’s a perfect recipe for roof damage, when you have heavy heavy snow sitting there getting soaked with water. “Of course,” she went on, “he would have shoveled every flake off the roof, and then gone and cleared the patio too.” [where all the snow landed] Then she said, “I’m not shoveling the barn roof though,” and when Farmsister said “oh just like Dad, you didn’t tell us you were going on the roof” mom merrily threw Middle-Little under the bus by saying she’d mentioned it to her. Farmsister then offered to come shovel the barn roof, and mom said, “No! Que sera sera.” Which does neatly, I think, sum up the attitude she’s pretty much always had to that barn, which is, if it falls, it falls. There are something like thirteen Jeeps in there, mostly partial ones, we’re going to have to get out of there and find takers for, some of them valuable but most of them not…

The secret of my family is that Dad was the sentimental one and Mom very much is not, so. I can’t really imagine what would happen had things gone the other way and somehow he outlived her, but it would all be unfolding very differently just now, I rather suspect.

(Maybe that’s the worst part, though; you could know Dad very well and he’d still surprise you by the conclusions he drew or the opinions he held. He had a lot of deep currents, that one, and many of his surface identities and such were not in fact the totality of the situation. Some of it was performance and some of it was just that he knew more stuff than you’d expect. Re: performance, though, most notably, he always professed disdain for pets, but understood cats very well and tended to form quite good relationships with all the cats we had, and if you were around long enough you’d catch him being quite affectionate with them. All of our cats have always loved him best, of course. He’s the only person who has ever touched the feral cat, Ghost, who has lived in and around the house for fifteen years now; mostly, their relationship was that she would talk to him and he’d answer, and after a while of that she’d feel safe enough to come and eat.) (Your picture was not posted)