Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Wild Moon<\/p>\n
The year moves forward, sun higher in the sky, temperatures inching upward, some snow melting, though\u00a0 piles of slowly melting hard pack, driven to curbs and driveway ends, darkens and begrimes the landscape.\u00a0 A bright February sun catches a light snowfall, refracts it in mid-air, giving the day a sparkle, as if a glitter queen shook her hair in the heavens.<\/p>\n
The winter olympics continues, too, with this sport and that.\u00a0 I liked ski cross.\u00a0 It looked fun.<\/p>\n
Today is the anniversary of my father’s death in 2003.\u00a0 The dead, to paraphrase somebody, are not in the past;\u00a0 they’re not even dead.\u00a0 No, nothing metaphysical here, I’m referring to the fact that those important to us take up lodging in our memories, in our inflections and in our perspectives.\u00a0 We sometimes see the world literally through their eyes, hear things with their ears, interpret something with their sensibilities.\u00a0 This happens during their lives, of course, but it also continues on past their temporal death.<\/p>\n
(The Woolworth Building.\u00a0 It opened twelve days after dad’s birth.\u00a0 It was the tallest building in the world until 1930.)<\/p>\n
If I see a\u00a0 person with too much flab (me, these days, for instance), I can hear Dad say, “He likes his groceries.”\u00a0 In quick train there is, too, his advise about weight loss, “Push-ups.\u00a0 Push ups away from the table.”\u00a0 I can feel his scowl when pictures from the sixties appear in the newspaper or on tv.\u00a0 He didn’t think much of the politics or the movement persons of those days.\u00a0 Unfortunately for our relationship, I was one.<\/p>\n
When I sit down to write, especially here, I feel the ghost of my father, Curtis, hovering over my shoulder.\u00a0 He is a benign angel in this case.\u00a0 I fancy my writing style here takes a certain amount of its defnition from his frequent\u00a0 column, “Small Town, USA.”\u00a0 When I’m in the other room, working on the novel, I’m reminded of his ambition to charter a boat, sail the coast of Mexico, then write a book about the trip.\u00a0 He never made it, WW II got in the way.\u00a0 He never wrote a book either.<\/p>\n
So, according to one school of Jungian thought, I write books to fulfill my father’s dream.<\/p>\n
He was a man of his times, liberal in his\u00a0 social politics, virulently anti-communist and suspicious of both patriotic zealots like the John Birch Society and the anti-patriots like myself of the 60’s and 70’s.\u00a0 His father abandoned his family, Dad never did.\u00a0 He was there, day in day out.<\/p>\n
So, his body no longer walks the earth, but his mind, his dreams, his biases and his humor still does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Wild Moon The year moves forward, sun higher in the sky, temperatures inching upward, some snow melting, though\u00a0 piles of slowly melting hard pack, driven to curbs and driveway ends, darkens and begrimes the landscape.\u00a0 A bright February sun catches a light snowfall, refracts it in mid-air, giving the day a sparkle, as … Continue reading Remembering Dad<\/span>