parents

For my friends in Atlanta, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity coming up this weekend.

I'll be in Atlanta this weekend. With my mother.

Want to join us for a memorable dinner in which you get to sit at the table and threaten me by offering to tell her all the juicy, dirty stories we both know you know about me?

Saturday night, yo.

Dad -

I didn't really call you that while you were alive, and it feels strange to call you that now, but I didn't know any other way to start this letter.

I've become a person who grumbles at roadside memorials for victims of traffic accidents but who writes something about you every year on the anniversary of your death. I wondered about that for a number of years before I realized that I was closer to your death than I was to your life, and I've spent the years since trying to come to terms with your absence.

This entry covers it better than most:

I was sitting to the right of Geof, enjoying an Over the Rhine concert that he'd talked me into attending, when I saw my silenced phone light up. The number implied Arkansas, and I had the familiar lump of dread that always came when a number starting with 501 showed up on caller ID.

It was my mother, and thanks to the ongoing performance, I had no way of answering it before the phone would go to voice mail. I watched, and waited, and saw no new voicemail notification pop up. No message.

When the musicians took a break, I called my mother back, and Geof was the only witness to the look on my face, whose look he told me later was quite priceless. The news? My mother's engagement.

I don't have a pretty run-in for you here, or a way to lace together these words in a way that has meaning or resonance. In the end, they're just words, the words of someone who is up at one in the morning and who is thinking through keystrokes instead of being asleep, like she should be.

Father's Day.

I chose to keep my mother entertained this weekend by keeping her busy. The original plans for Saturday consisted of Kat and I taking Mom out to Boaz so that she could do some shopping at Boaz' outlet stores.

Just when I thought I was done—just got an email from my mother. My dad's got to go in for some more tests on his eye. Apparently he's been having problems with blurred vision, and the doctor can't tell if it's an infection affecting his optic nerve or if he's had a minor stroke that is impairing his vision.

Dammit. Not another health scare. [The enormous aneurysm discovered on November 1 and repaired on November 20, the spots on his lungs on December 12 that turned out to be pneumonia scars, and a few others that I didn't document.]

Hopefully, just an infection. More details as I learn them.