Good Days

The perfect day isn't perfect. It is instead good, very good perhaps. I too often overlook good in search of better and perfect. Good is good. It is contentment which ought to be my only goal because I can choose to feel content.

Since this is my blog, let's focus on me for a bit. Let me tell you about my perfectly good day.

It begins without the alarm but in the October dark. I get up from under a thick blanket and replace blanket with coffee, sleeping with living, dreaming with writing. I go downstairs, grind beans, and press a good cup of coffee. I take my pen and coffee to the basement to write three pages by hand. There's no way I would rather begin each day.

Morning Pages written, I make buttered toast with jam and eat on the couch while reading a book as the family wakes and comes down one by one to get ready for school and work. I offer to drive kids to school or walk the dog, whatever works for them and by eight o'clock the house is mine. I put on a record, boot the Chromebook, and get to work.

First I focus on developing things. Creating. Drafting. Typing. This is when a blog post likely comes to mind, goes to my fingers, appears on the screen, and eventually gets posted online. This is when I continue working on long essays, stories, and sections of a book. I work through a few records until about eleven or noon at which point I print some of that stuff and get out of the chair.

My body needs to move. I go for a walk or a run to work my mind in a different way. I may think about writing or maybe just move. A shower follows and maybe a load of laundry or some brief housework. I warm up leftovers or make somethings for lunch and eat while reading the web or my book.

Then maybe a nap. I set an alarm, read on the couch until I fall asleep and recharge. After that I probably go to the library, buy coffee beans, get cash, pick up something from the hardware store, or make a stop at the co-op. Much as I can, I run these errands on foot, preferably with the dog. Moving my body after the nap puts me back in the world.

The kids and my wife come home and I spend time with them, drive them where they need to go, attend to their needs. We cook dinner and eat together. After dinner we clean up.

The rest of the evening is unscheduled. We may catch the latest Doctor Who or Atypical together. I might would go out with a friend. Whatever the case, the day ends with Stephanie and me tucked into bed, the lights out, rain turning to light snow.

I drift into sleep thinking, I can't wait to do it again tomorrow.

That's a good day. Just about perfect, though I'm content with good. I could be content for years of days like that. Now I just have to make it happen.

Dialing Dad's Number

I just watched an old MASH episode in which Hawkeye is listed by the Army as dead. Hawkeye's dad tries to get through to B. J. Hunnicutt but the call fails. Hawkeye, once he figures out that he's dead and that his dad believes he's dead, is desperate to get in touch with his dad but the lines are down because Eisenhower is coming to Korea. Hawkeye can't get paid, can't get mail, and can't reach his dad, but in the end can't leave Korea and go home either.

The end of the episode has Hawkeye finally on the phone with his father, laughing and enjoying himself. Then he says, "Dad? Dad?" as if he's going to say something important, but it's the line gone dead again. Hawkeye tosses the handset and sits back satisfied that his dad knows he's alive but beyond sad to be so far away from his father, to be so disconnected.

On my phone I still have dad listed in my favorites. I always will. Every so often I place a call to him. It never goes through. I listen to the tones telling me the number is no longer active or valid or whatever the phone companies call it. The line is dead. There's no getting through. And I can't even blame it on Eisenhower.

Someday Dad's number will be assigned to someone else. I imagine that call. Me saying, hello? The other person asking, who is this? Do I tell that person this was my dad's number and that I miss him? If I do, I wonder how the other person will react. I know how I would answer that call from some stranger. I'd ask, how long has he been gone? I would say, tell me a story about him and you. Then I would listen.

Well, there was this one time. It was ordinary. Nothing special. He drove over to my house and parked his truck on the street. I went out to meet him. He asked, You ready? I said, I am. The night was cold and dry, clear all the way up to the heavens. We got in the car, me in the driver's seat, Dad lowering himself into the passenger's seat slowly, slamming the door.

I'd ask, Where were you going?

Up to the Carrier Dome. See, Dad and I had season tickets to the Syracuse Women's Basketball games. We sat in row G, mid court, and Dad talked with the ticket takers, the fans who sat nearby, and me. We cheeredas when the women won and even if they lost because it wasn't about the games. It was about Dad and me.

I'd say, that sounds good.

It was good. It really was.

Then we'd both listen to the sounds of memory, the silence of our dead fathers.

Maybe the person at the other end would ask if I was still there.

And I would say, yeah, I'm still here. We're both still here. It's okay. We're both still here.

Monday Morning, Cold Dryer

The dryer isn't working. It has been in trouble for weeks. We run a load while we sleep and sometimes wake to cold, wet clothes. The heating element isn't working, but each time I think it's shot, I send the laundry around for another tumble and it works. Last night though, things stayed cold right through.

I write three morning pages every day. They are practice, therapy, and the beginnings of ideas. This morning I wrote of things breaking down, holes in my life, and dreams that keep me from sleep. It was all connected.

My basement writing nook isn't far from the dryer. This morning I ran the dryer hoping for luck. Towels tumbled while I wrote page one but, but the machine stayed cold. Midway through page two I left a message for service, thinking, okay what now?

It wasn't a reasoned question so much as a cry, like there weren't any good choices and life is difficult. My life can be difficult but not very. I mean, big deal, the dryer is broken. I started page three thinking, I'll go to the laundromat. That's where I am now, typing this. The clothes are drying. The whole thing cost a couple of quarters. Real big deal.

Thursday a guy will look at the dryer. He'll fix it or tell me to buy a new one. My mother will come over to let the guy in since I'll be at work. By Thursday afternoon I'll know the shape of this problem. Right now, I only know the vague outline. The dryer doesn't work is all I know.

Well, no, I also understand that I've called for service, asked Mom for help, and I have survived worse things than a broken dryer. There are holes in my life and reasons why I have trouble sleeping, but the dryer is easy. I might as well savor this whole experience from problem through solution, and everything in between. As far as I can see, stuff like this, well, that's life.

Ready For Oliver Sacks

I've been looking for a way into reading Oliver Sacks.

When his last essays were published in The New York Times I was still learning to live with the sudden, abrupt death of my father. I knew that Sacks had been diagnosed, sentenced really, and that his death was imminent. My father's death was so recent, as if it was still happening again and again, I couldn't imagine delving into the last days of another man. There's a line in Hayden Carruth's great and wise poem "Regarding Chainsaws" that expressed all this better than I can:

...About then
I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I
don't feel so good about that neither. But my mother
was having her strokes then. I figured
one person coming apart was as much
as a man can stand. Then Stan was taken away
to the nursing home, and then he died.

My father had come apart and that was more than I could stand. Then Oliver Sacks was diagnosed, and then he died. His auto-biography On The Move came out and I heard all about it but couldn't get myself to read it. Through proximity on the calendar, his life and death had become too connected with the life and too soon death of my father.

All my life I've been around death. Dad was a funeral director and when I was ten he bought the funeral home in which I mostly grew up. That is, I spent most of my childhood there and I mostly, but not totally, grew up. The dead lay in their boxes in the funeral home which was connected by three separate doors to our house. The living were there too, both my family and the families of those who had lost their mother, father, and God help us their children. I helped Dad in the funeral home and sometimes closed the lids on the caskets before they were taken to the cemetery and buried or to the crematorium and incinerated.

That contact provided me with far less understanding of death than might be expected. I accepted the logic of it, but death lives mostly beyond the bounds of logic. My only real experience with the fullness of death was when, as a young man, I held my dog while the veterinarian put her down. It took far too long for her breathing to stop and her eyes never did close. Only when the vet said that she was gone did I allow myself to break down, staring into her brown eyes. Even then it was a halting and broken kind of grief that didn't heal me. It left me wanting, needing really, some way to get through.

When my father died, I never really cried or got to any release of all that terrible pressure, much as I tried. Grief didn't consume me so much as rise up around my body like a black fog, an almost liquid through which I found it difficult but not impossible to move. I wanted it to be worse. I wanted to break down, but grief didn't disable me other than when I was alone at Wegmans. There, for some reason, I pushed the cart haphazardly, walking across the whole store to frozen foods for one item, remembering something I needed to get in produce all the way back. I walked the length and breadth of that store in a tunneled fog, the periphery of my vision lost, my way forward clouded. It was as if Wegmans was a kind of purgatory.

It became the space where I was no longer in a world without my father but neither was I gone from the world of my wife, children, and family. I was between. For months I visited Wegmans by myself to be lost there for an hour, crossing and recrossing the store as if looking for something or mapping it for some kind of crossing. I visited Dad. I wondered about the nature of life. I bought bananas, frozen pizza, and six-packs of beer.

It's been almost a year since Wegmans has felt like anything but a grocery store. It has been three and a half years since my father died. It's just three years since Oliver Sacks died, and today I borrowed a slim library book containing four of his essays. Gratitude it is called and I am grateful for having read it, for still thinking of my father dearly but no longer with such a burden of sorrow and loss, and for the idea that I may finally be ready to hear more from Oliver Sacks. I'm ready to hear what he might have to tell me about living, a business in which I'm still occupied even as he and Dad have moved on from that into what I can't even begin to imagine.