Dad has gone away

Similar to my dad's

My dad died several years ago, about five, I believe. It was strange when he died, because it was totally unexpected. But making it even worse was the fact that they had him cremated. There was no viewing and the funeral felt more like a party for Dad that he just failed to show up to. There was no burial. It was odd.

For five years following his death I have had dreams about him. In each dream he grew younger and younger, until he appeared to be the age that I am now.

When he died my mother wasn't sure what to do with his things. She hated his car, a banana yellow hearse, and she didn't know anything about selling cars. So it fell to me to take his car and do something with it. I was supposed to just get rid of it, but it was my dad's so I kept it and fixed it up. I spent $1000 fixing various things in a short amount of time. Dad only paid $750 for the thing at a garage sale and used it like a truck. I think it was nicer after I fixed it up than it had ever been while he drove it.

I have been living in Memphis hell since 1995, and not happy about it. Five years ago I had a chance to escape and move back to my hometown to work. I was there for four years, before forces I won't go into persuaded me to return to Memphis despite the misery this town fills me with. To reward myself for returning here, or more realistically, to make it more  bearable, I bought a $50,000 musclecar to drive to and from my highly stressful job in the heart of the city. Buying this car meant my driveway was now overflowing with vehicles. Something had to go.

I reluctantly sold my father's bananawagon, apparently asking far too little money for it, as it sold within 24 hours of taking out the ad. I hated to let go of it. I truly did not want to. But there was no justification for keeping it. I wasn't using it. I wasn't planning on using it. I couldn't think of a good reason for not selling it.

Except that it was my dad's and it reminded me of him. I guess I felt like taking care of his car was in some way taking care of something important to him.

Since selling my father's car I have not had a single dream about my dad. I can't remember a one. I know he didn't leave with the car. He was already gone. But somehow all of my dreams about my father went away with that car. I can't explain it.

I suppose its possible that every time I came home and saw the car it reminded me of him. But then that wouldn't explain all the dreams I had about him while I was in my hometown working. The car wasn't there. Perhaps other things reminded me?

My nephew still dreams about him. He doesn't have my dad's car. I don't know if he has anything of my dad's to remind him. But he has had as many dreams about my father as I have. So how to explain the sudden loss of dreams for me then?

My mom had a bad fall recently. The way it was described to me it really didn't sound like a big deal. I thought she'd be fine in no time. But it's been weeks and she's still not fine. I had meant to go home to see her for Easter, but I had to make a trip to Nashville that same week and by the time I got home on Friday I was too exhausted to go back out on the road again. I keep meaning to call her. But I keep forgetting.

Lately, I find myself worrying that the day after I intend to call her and forget, I'll get a call that she's been rushed to the hospital and died. And I won't ever get a chance to talk to her again.

I don't know why this is on my mind. I find myself thinking about it a lot lately.

Customized version of my dad's

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Fatherly Dreams and Life Changes


It seems that whenever I'm under extreme stress or facing some major life-changing event, I have a dream about my father. To say that I'm under stress right now would be an understatement along the lines of saying that Obama is less than truthful in his speeches.

Last night I dreamed that I was back at home, on the street where I grew up. Not only was my father there, but my entire family was there. And so were many of my old neighbors. For some reason, we were mostly all outside. Many of us were carrying junk out of our houses and piling it up in the street to be hauled away. I've been trying to declutter my office at work in order to get better focused on the major project ahead of me so this is probably where this part of the dream came from.

My father was dressed in his ugly old khaki pants with the high waist and belt that he wore, I think, for my entire life. I almost can't picture him wearing anything else. He was also wearing a light blue button down shirt, like many of the guys I work with do. Dad never wore shirts of color. Every shirt he owned prior to retirement was white. Anyway, Dad was wearing the modern professional white man's uniform, khaki pants and light blue button down, and his old black framed glasses. He wasn't all that old, maybe 50, and in excellent health. That's the way I remember him, I guess, since he didn't have any real health problems until he was well into his '70s. Dad was strong like an ox for most of his life.

For some reason, there was another man there that I have never seen before. He was dressed exactly like Dad and spent most of his time standing around in our driveway talking to Dad. I was hauling stuff out the back door of our house and out to the street, throwing it on the curb in a big pile for the trash men to pick up. We actually did this when my dad died, so it was weird to be reliving the experience while Dad stood and supervised.

Across the street, my best friend and his family were outside doing something very similar. I went over to see them and spent some time talking to them. In reality, I haven't seen most of them in several years, but in my dream it was as if we all still lived together on that street and had never left. I was glad to see them again.

Thanks to social websites like Facebook, I have recently reconnected with neighbors from that street whom I haven't seen face-to-face since I was maybe 6 years old or so. One family moved away to California. I'm sure I was no older than 6 when they left. Talking with the only girl in their family on Facebook, I was surprised when she said "if we could get everyone together for a reunion I would gladly fly in from California just to see everyone." I talked to some people who had graduated high school while I was still in elementary school, but who knew me as the younger brother of someone they were close friends with way back in the dark ages. I was surprised that they would talk to me and glad to hear how things were going in their lives. In my mind I pictured them looking exactly as they had the last time I saw them in person, a very long time ago. The neighborhood reunion is a very real possibility.

I don't dream often, or don't remember them, but I always remember the dreams with my father in them. I know they're only dreams, but they have a huge effect on me. It's weird that I can never hear his voice in them, yet don't notice this until after I have awakened and had time to think about it. My dad keeps getting younger in my dreams. Soon we'll be the same age.

And eventually, I'm going to die, and see him again. Hopefully then I'll be able to talk to him and actually hear what he's saying.

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A Visit From The Past

I had a dream about my dad the other night. It's been awhile. I was in my mom and dad's house upstairs in the kitchen. I was facing the sink looking out the window when my dad walked in. He was looking for something, a screwdriver or something.

I don't know what it was.

I turned to look at him and said, "Hi Dad, I haven't seen you in a long time. How'd it going?"

He didn't turn to me, I suppose because he rarely did when he was doing something. Dad had a one track mind. Plus, he was an engineer. So when his one-track-mind was being applied to working on a problem, well, good luck in distracting him.

So I was looking at my dad. His hair on top was black with gray on the sides. And he was wearing his old horn-rimmed glasses. He must have been in his late forties or so. I don't know why I dreamed him at that stage of his life, but there he was, late forties, pulling a screwdriver out of the drawer in the kitchen.

He found the screwdriver and said something to me about trying to fix something, or being busy. Then he headed out of the kitchen. So I followed him, wanting to talk to him.

"I haven't seen you in a long time," I said. "What are you working on?"

"I'm kind of busy," he said, as he started down the stairs. So I went with him.

In all my previous dreams about my dad, he was about the age he was when he died. And he was walking along with me, trying to talk to me while I carried boxes and boxes of stuff to my car, or from my car into my new house which I had just bought in my dream. He was trying to give me advice, like he so enjoyed doing. Only I couldn't hear him. I could see him speaking and I was aware that I was listening, but I couldn't hear any words. I don't know what he was saying. I only know that it seemed important to him to talk to me, perhaps to say "goodbye."

The house I dreamed about moving into, I dreamed long before we found the house we live in now. And when I bought this house, I realized that it was almost the identical house from my dream. It was as if my dad helped me find it and wanted to make sure I bought it. Or perhaps he was warning me not to? I don't know.

Once I bought my new house and moved in, all dreams of my dad stopped. He was just gone. And I began to become increasingly aware of how many things I only ever talked about with him. I had so many things I wanted to tell him, or show him, but he was gone and now I have no one to talk with about any of it.

2 years later and I dream about my dad again, but he's 30 years younger and obviously too busy to talk with me. I'm following him, wanting desperately to talk with him. I can hear him this time. I can hear every word he's saying.

I don't know what my dad was working on. It seemed mighty important to him. If there's anything to dreams and people who have died appearing in your dreams then I'm wondering what was so important that he needed tools and had to run downstairs.

But the main thing I remember from that dream was how everything had gone back to the way it was before, when I was a little kid and he was still a relatively young and healthy man, back when I would follow after him trying to get his attention. It never occurred to me how things had switched around before he died, how he wanted to talk to me, wanted a few minutes of my time to talk, and how I was always so busy and impatient and irritated when he couldn't hear me or understand me because his hearing was going.

I don't know if there's anything to dreams. I don't know if dead people showing up in my dreams has any significance or is simply my memories and imagination combining to make images that make some kind of sense to my brain. I just know it was nice to see my dad again. And I wonder what he was doing that was so important.

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Dreaming My Life Away

Dreaming
I dreamed about my dad again last Monday night. I was lifting weights with my old workout partner from college. My dad showed up and was showing me something he thought I should try. I can't remember hearing his voice at all, but I remember talking to him and working out with him. It just seemed perfectly normal that we were bench pressing in the middle of the driveway, and that I was somewhere between 18 and 25 years old and so was my friend (which was how old we were when I knew him.) My dad must have been about 55 or so. It hadn't occurred to me until now, but I apparently don't dream of my dad as being as old and thin as he was around the time he died. I dream of him as looking the way he did when I was in high school and college. And judging from this dream, apparently I dream of myself that way sometimes, too.

I also dreamed about my mom and 2 of my sisters. In the dream, they were all 3 ganging up on me, doing things to annoy me just for the fun of it, while pretending they hadn't done anything at all. I had forgotten how they used to do that. The dream seemed very real. It was a strong reminder of how things were. And it was unpleasant.

But it was good to see my dad again.

So anyway, some of you seem to have noticed that I'm not able to be around as often as I normally am. Well, there's a good reason. When we began preparing to close on our new house we had a schedule that we expected to follow. As part of that schedule, we assumed that we'd both be in the new house within a month of closing. So we set the phone to be shut off at the old house for that time frame. As it happens, I am still living in the old house. Only now I have no phone service there, beyond my cell phone. Along with the phone went the internet connection.

Shit!

So, I can't access the internet when I am at home. And that's a big damned deal.

This weekend I learned that it takes exactly 2 1/2 hours to mow 1 acre of overgrown yard with a 21 inch pushmower. Yay!

My allergies are punishing me for mowing the new yard by all ganging up on me at once. I feel as if I have the flu and my head is trying to explode. I suppose it would explode if not for all the pressure being released through my nose in the form of a constant stream of snot.

If I was a sexy man before, you should see me know. I am bringing sexy back! Yeah, Justin Timberlake brought back the grandpa hat. I am bringing back the grandpa handkerchief.

I am a trendsetter, bitches! Word!

My new neighbor was trying to have a party on his back deck while I was out mowing. There are no fences in my new neighborhood, so there I was in all my shirtless glory, pushing this loud old lawnmower, kicking up tons of dust because everything is dry and dead, and he was trying to have a beer with his friends and be cool in the midst of it all. I hope my great sexiness didn't upset any of the envious men or cause their women to drool too much. Yeah, my hotness is legendary. I'm surprised they didn't put down their beers and take pictures. It isn't every day you see a body like this, ladies. Don't be shy.

Well, OK, so it probably is every day that you see a body like this. But I did talk to the owner of my new gym about getting a trainer. So hopefully my actual physique will catch up with my imaginary physique at some point. But you know, I'll never be 25 again. Not that my abs were so awesome even then, but I did have a rock solid chest that got me some action. And a runner's ass.

I'll pause while you all think about that.

Well shit, that didn't take long. I was hoping to distract you while I went to take a pee. You're all still thinking about that amazing girl with the gigantic breasts in my previous post, aren't you? Yeah, me too.

So anyway, our cat apparently loves the new house with its hardwood floors and sliding potential. She runs from one end of the house to the other and then slides around the corner into the kitchen. Then she'll run around and slide somewhere else. We can hear her everywhere she goes. I'd swear she was a dog if I didn't know better. She sure acts like one. Her claws are so long and sharp that they click on the floors, just like a dog does. So we hear every step she takes. And she seems oblivious to this. Still, it's entertaining as hell.

We have an interesting situation with our 2 houses. I'm staying in the old one, sans internet. My Wife is staying in the new one, sans cable/satellite TV and sans computer. The new house should be internet ready, but I haven't gotten the computers over there to set it up yet. Even when I have set them up, My Wife won't care a thing about it. But she does miss the extra TV channels. I really wouldn't care about them if I had internet. I could find plenty of other ways to entertain myself. Ironically, we have each found other ways to entertain ourselves. We're both reading a lot.

My Wife has been reading these books about a female private eye who gets her car blown up a lot. I think they're by Janet Evanovich? You can correct me if I'm wrong and you know what books I'm talking about. Apparently, despite the lack of referrals from Queen Mother Oprah, these books are highly popular with women. Anyway, My Wife swears that this woman writes exactly like I do and that I could write these same stories myself because it's just the sort of thing I'd come up with. I haven't read any of them, so I have no idea. But blowing up cars and having Grandma shoot a pistol throw a dining room table does sound like something I'd write. Still, I've almost given up on my idea of being a writer and started looking into another business I might like to try to start (i.e. Get a huge-assed loan to start.) It's far, FAR less exciting or glamorous than writing, but even so, it just might be worthwhile. Still, it's not interesting enough to blog about, so that's pretty much all I'll say about it.

Our office flooded over the holiday weekend, and is still halfway underwater as I write this, so that is adding to my already free-flowing allergic response to the world as we know it. Yay allergies!

The Little Girl ate a lizard's tail yesterday. Apparently the lizard itself got away, leaving only the tail behind. Not one to admit defeat, the cat swallowed the tail in one gulp and then went looking for something else to torture. I never knew that cats would eat lizards and frogs. In fact, until she carried a frog up to our back step, still very much alive and kicking, I was under the impression that frogs were so nasty that no cat or dog could stand to have them in their mouth for more than a few seconds. I remember the dog we had when I was a kid picking one up and quickly spitting it out once he'd had a taste of it. He'd eat anything and anyone. He even chomped bumble bees out of midair and swallowed them. But he never picked up another frog again after the first one. I guess carrying them with your teeth, but not letting them sit on your tongue is the trick to it? She has apparently mastered this.

I have a lot to do. I should have come into work yesterday even though it was a holiday, but I was feeling rotten all day. So I need to stop here and get back to it. I'm just sitting here thinking about what Steph in Sydney, Australia blogged today.

Apparently some world leaders are there in Sydney today and the city has gone into lockdown mode to make sure no terrorists or Cindy Sheehan show up and attack one of them. This has been somewhat annoying for Steph, as the police insisted on dumping her purse on the sidewalk, and even played with her very expensive shoes, but refused to strip search her.

I thought this was odd, not because the offer to strip search her is so incredibly tempting that only a very, very gay man could say no, but because whenever President Bush or former President Clinton or Al Gore or some other flatulent political bigwig comes to Memphis, we don't go into lockdown mode at all. Oh sure, there is a big Secret Service motorcade surrounding them, and Memphis cops get redirected to make sure they don't get caught up in any random drive-by shootings, but aside from the very localized protection, life here goes on pretty much as always. We have the same number of gang attacks and random shootings and crazed ex-wives of former state senator Ford crashing their Jaguars through various living room windows of random people's homes and all that. The number of attacks on white people by screaming racists doesn't decrease any. The traffic in the Cordova area kills just as many people as on any other day. There are just as many escaped criminals running around hiding in their family's apartments and trailer homes as ever. Someone is going to get their SUV stolen just like every other day, except that when the Feds are in town it usually turns out to be one of theirs, complete with machine guns inside. But that's because they are so arrogant as to assume no one would have the nerve to rob them - WRONG! In short, nothing changes in Memphis when any world leader, including our own President, comes to town. We kill and rob and rape as many men as any other day. And the women don't get treated any better, either. I guess the only real difference is that with the cops all being so distracted, there are less incidents of people getting tasered or pepper sprayed than normal.

It occurs to me that Sydney must be a much more civilized place than Memphis. The fact that they can spare the police for random sidewalk searches and near-molestations shows that they have things basically under control there. Whereas here, in the land of The Memphis Blues, every day is Iraq. Not to make light of it, but several times in the news they have featured stories of soldiers who survived Iraq only to come home to Memphis and get killed within the week. I shit you not.

So on that note, and for no other particular reason besides my stream-of-conciousness writing habits, I need to get back to work.

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Dreaming

Last night, as I was carrying boxes up the stairs to the room that will be my new home office, I realized something.

Months ago, in one of the dreams I've had about My Dad in which he's walking along with me and talking to me, I dreamed this house.

I hadn't seen this house and I hadn't been inside this house. I just had a dream that I was moving boxes from my car into a house I didn't recognize, and it was my house. I was carrying them up some stairs and I remember the walls were blue. Dad was walking with me, talking to me.

Last night I was carrying my stuff up the stairs to my new office. I bashed the wall by accident and put a slight dent and scratch in the blue paint. I looked at it and said "dammit!" And then I remembered the dream.

I dreamed this house. And Dad was there. He would have loved this house.

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Father's Day and he is gone

Father's Day came and went and instead of blogging about my father, I blogged about my concerns with the infamous Taser. It was burning on my mind and would not leave me alone. But I feel bad that I wrote about that instead of about my dad.

I guess part of me didn't want to concentrate on my dad on Fathers Day. I didn't want to think about why I didn't need to send a card this year and why I wasn't driving down to my hometown to see him. I didn't want to think about why I have been dreaming about him walking along talking to me night after night. I didn't want to be this upset.

My dad was never what anyone would call the sensitive type. He was raised in circumstances and fought through situations that required a hardened and uncaring outlook in order to make it to the other side. He was in both the Air Force and the Army. He graduated from West Point. He worked 30 years for a branch of the U.S. Government whose only purpose was to create weapons to defend against annihilation by the Soviet Union. He took his job very seriously. He had a top secret clearance. He would never talk about what he did, even after he retired, and even when he had to bring work home and struggle with it right in front of us.

At one point I recall him buying a bunch of model airplanes and flying them all over the yard. His sudden interest in these noisy plastic planes was fun for me, but he never seemed interested in playing with me or my brother while he flew them. And then, just as suddenly as his interest in those planes arose, it was gone again, and the planes were thrown into a box in his workshop. I had no idea at the time that he was working on the very first design for an unmanned drone spyplane for the Army. He didn't care at all about flying model planes.

I do recall him complaining about how they had a perfectly good design for a plane with a camera that would allow the infantry to fly over the enemy's position and see what they had and how they were forming without risking any men. He said the damn generals wanted to "gold plate" the plane until it was so expensive that our men would never get it. And as it turned out, that is exactly what happened. Today those planes are in production, but they would have been available a good ten years sooner if not for all the extras that the generals tried to load onto them, extras which they have gotten in many cases, but in a very different and much larger version.

Dad was the sort of man who would laugh at other men's pain. He felt that compassion was for the weak and was something that needed to be beaten out of a man. He loved a cold heart. It wasn't until after he had retired and gone back to church that his views on this began to change. It had not really occurred to me that my own father had had no use for God all those years when I was growing up. And it hadn't occurred to me that perhaps God was the reason that I was so different from him.

My father was a smart man. My middle sister's husband is probably the most intelligent person to ever become a part of our family. He once said that my dad could teach himself absolutely anything just from reading it in a book. That was true. Dad read more books than any human being I have ever known. He would read ANYTHING. He had stacks of old used textbooks that he had read cover to cover just for the hell of it.

Despite my dad's high intelligence and wide spectrum of knowledge, still he had some wild ideas about things. He once tried to fill his own cavity when a filling came out, simply because he hated going to the doctor or dentist for any reason. He was acutely aware of the statistics for people dying in hospitals and such. He could justify his avoidance, but couldn't make the extremes he would often go to seem less outrageous even so.

My dad did alright with money. He was never hurting. Yet he took great pleasure in fixing things in odd ways, just to make them last longer than any human being might ever want them to. He would cut out pieces of rubber from old innertubes and attach them to the bottoms of his worn out tennis shoes. He had done this with his leather dress shoes for many years and apparently saw no reason to stop doing it when he retired and switched to garage sale tennis shoes, for which I'm sure he had paid no more than $5 per pair. It wasn't about the money. It was about the challenge.

Unfortunately, that challenge sometimes backfired, as it did with the shoes. His soles would flip and flop around when the metal tacks came loose from the rubber pieces he had used. Several times he tripped from the flapping rubber patches. One time he fell down a large concrete step and injured his knee.

I know he tore some cartilage in that knee when he fell, but I couldn't convince him to go to an orthopedic surgeon to have it looked at. He limped for several years without ever allowing any doctor to find out for sure what was wrong.

Despite his pain and limping, he went for long, rapid walks every day, except when his knee was hurting him too much. On his very last walk, a neighbor saw him holding his leg tightly and grimacing as he raced by. The neighbor yelled to my dad, but my dad didn't respond and kept racing towards home. Later that afternoon, my mother found Dad lying in the floor of the downstairs bathroom, barely concious. He had thrown up in the tub and fallen between the tub and toilet. He was in an awkward, mangled position and had been there for a long time.

At the hospital they diagnosed him as having had a stroke. A bloodclot had gone to his brain. They did surgery and it appeared that he might recover. By the time I arrived from Memphis, he was in the ICU and didn't look well. Still, my dad had been an indestructible man all my life and not one of us ever doubted that he would recover. He was a lifetime weightlifter and would have no trouble with all the rehab exercises. He was always stronger than anyone else. He could not possibly die.

It appears, although we have no way of knowing for certain, that his knee injury finally caused a blood clot to form and go to his brain, lodging at the base, which is a most deadly place for it to be. The doctors likely knew that he would not recover, but they couldn't tell us that.

Dad was recovering at a rapid pace when he suddenly died in his hospital bed one night. We were all taken completely by surprise.

Since then my life has changed. Although I did not rely on him for money or shelter or food or any of the things he gave me when I was a child, suddenly losing him made me realize that for as long as he was there I would always feel as if I had a safety net. I had a place to fall if disaster ever struck. And of course, whenever I needed advice that no one else could give, I would ask him. I didn't always take his advice, but I listened to it even so.

This past week I have been dreaming about my dad again. He is walking along with me while I'm working. He's talking to me, yet I can't hear what he's saying. It doesn't bother me that I can't hear him. It just feels good to know that he's there.

And then I wake up.

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