Facebook pals and kids, you rarely like to be reminded of death. "Oh good grief", you say, "...please show us your latest lunch or dinner plate pix or whatever..."
Thirteen years ago, my Dad died. I will always remember those hours after I arrived at the hospital. All those memories, for good and bad. On both sides. I often wander into the corridors of my mind about what interesting conversations we would have had about the Bush/Obama regimes. "Oh, Rod!", the reader might think, "why must you always draw politics into such a...bla...bla...bla....". Well, it was politics which we often conversed about. For, how could we not?
This was a man who sat me down at the tender age of 13 and said I needed to watch these Watergate hearings on TV (ya know, back when government was actually a bit transparent). Not because it was so much historic, but because it was the exercising of Constitutional government, and he thought that was damn important and I should be a witness to it. And he was right! Although we talked years later about how Watergate was just a cover-up of the bigger cover-up (shhhh, JFK), I never really knew if he felt the same way. The point is, I wouldn't be such a rabble-rouser if it wasn't because of my Dad, even though if some you met him you'd think he be a bit conservative.
I was the third boy in the family he had to deal with and so my memories of him, today, deal mostly in that cloudy young adulthood and onto the later parts of my adulthood. As a writer, he was critical of a particular work, I recall. "Why must there be so many cuss words?", he asked. I said, "That's how people talk". And you know...I do not quite remember the rest of that conversation. And because I don't think it matters. He asked a question and that made me think, I remember that. Miss you Dad.
