It did not escape me that the computer went black just as I went to hit send on an email scheduling a mass for the one-year anniversary of your death.
Your sense of humor was always a touch . . . little brother poking the bear?
And your infinite wisdom / innate annoyance of computer devices that should work a certain way certainly fits.
I also notice how often you order up a Paul Simon song (with or without Garfunkel), sometimes just at the moment I turn onto your and Mom’s street.
I could not and would not forget you lived there too and think of you each time I visit anyway.
I think of you each time one of the girls knows some random cultural touchpoint because you explained the archaic origin of it. I thought of how unfair it was that I learned my most recent one from a book and not from you, even though I heard it in your voice.
You are everywhere and nowhere.
And that is both comforting and irritating – just the way one of your factual and deeply researched pontifications were.
The same book that taught me that the “slang phrase, up shit’s creek, [is] from [the] Pawnee Indians, [a] reference to the Republican River which was polluted with buffalo manure, [meaning] in deep trouble” is also the one that offered this description of GRIEF:
The state of mind brought about when love, having lost to death, learns to breathe beside it. See also love.
Kayak Morning / Roger Rosenblatt
The way I found this book was coincidental – if you believe in those.
It was sitting kitty-corner atop the stack of memoirs at the edge of the stairs to the children’s section. I saw it as my foot hovered above the top step preparing to leave.
Had the librarian, whom I know personally, pulled it from the shelf and let it float there like flotsam in the hopes that I would see and read it? Did she know I needed stream-of-consciousness, nature-inspired writerly reflections on grief?
Did you know?
I would have made the connection anyway.
Chopping Potatoes 