E-mailing Marie

About a month ago I wrote a letter to Marie, my old girlfriend from college, using an address that Schmidt gave me. I heard nothing back. It's possible she simply doesn't want to hear from me -- there's a story behind that, which I should tell you one of these days -- but I keep thinking it has been a long time. We must both of us be in very different places than we used to be, right? Ancient history is ancient history, ... right?

So today I sent her an e-mail, ... again, to an address that Schmidt gave me. Maybe she'll reply. Maybe not. Maybe I'll get an auto-reply back that there is no such address ....

Dear Marie,

 

About a month ago I sent a note snail-mail to what might have been your address. (I got the address from Schmidt, who confessed that maybe it was out of date.) Up till now I haven't heard back, which could mean almost anything: the address was wrong, you've been out of town, you've been busy, or you can't quite remember who I am. :-)

 

So I'm trying this e-mail address (and this, too, Schmidt admitted might be out of date). My only questions are whether this is in fact a good address and whether you are at the other end of the line. After that, maybe how you've been doing over the past ... ummm ... many years?

 

I'll keep this note short -- like the earlier letter -- in case it miscarries and ends up pestering some innocent third party. And I don't have any third addresses to try, so if this one misses I'll let it drop. But if you are indeed at the other end of the line, and if you feel like saying hello -- why then, Hello! And how have you been? And the conversation can find its own path from there ....

 

Hosea Tanatu

 

Workshop abroad, 3

The workshop was cancelled, just a little over a week before I was due to fly to Europe. The stated reason was "cost savings". Of course, all of us who were travelling internationally had already bought our tickets, and the tickets are non-refundable. But I guess they saved a couple of euros on our meals, so maybe that makes up for it.

Or not.

Supposedly it will be rescheduled to next March. We'll see.

At my parents' house

Lots of tidbits. I don't know if any of them can grow into a full post.

Brother and his girlfriend finally married last month ... the same day, as it turns out, that I talked to Father on the phone about what it would mean if he were to leave the hospital. But I found out only when I got here. Apparently they told Mother only when they got here Sunday to comfort her after Father's death. Her first thought, she said, was "Oh what great news! I have to tell Father. Oh ... right ...." I don't remember whether I've coined a name for her yet, but now I can always call her Sister-in-Law. Maybe SIL.

I slept here last night, on a sofa. In the early morning, I dreamed that Father came into the room while I was there, turning on the lights and opening the windows and generally paying no attention to me. I objected that I'd been sleeping, but that seemed inconsequential: he wanted to open the room up, so what was I bitching about? Of course it was just a dream.

This afternoon I went down to the mortuary to view the body. Mother, Brother, and SIL had gone yesterday. He was lying in a room by himself, cold to the touch but otherwise looking pretty good. Whether it was the light or the makeup, he looked alive and resting. There was a faint smile on his lips. Even more unnerving, the blanket draped over his body looked like it was swaying ever so slightly -- in fact, like it was gently rising and falling with subtle breath. Whenever I looked closely at it, I could see it was motionless. But when I looked away I could almost swear I glimpsed it move out of the corner of my eye. I had the overpowering sense that Father was about to sit up with a hearty laugh and shout "Surprise!" But he didn't.

Last night Mother said that she felt lost without him. The irony is that she was always the practical one of them. I'm sure she knows, at a practical level, how to do all the things she has to do. Still, I get it. When you have lived 56 years with somebody, every act you do, every decision you make, every thought you think -- all these take shape around that other person. Now that he's gone, how is she supposed to know which way is north? I would have been at sea without Wife for many years; the only reason I wasn't more at sea after moving out was that I had started distancing myself a few years earlier. Well, that and I had a full-time job that gave my life some structure. Well, that and Debbie. Still, I understand how she feels, at least a bit.

Odds and ends. Maybe more later.

29,048 days

My father died this morning. He was 79 years old.

It wasn't really a surprise. His health has been failing recently -- failing fast. See, e.g., this post and this one and even this one.

And really it was less of a surprise than that. Three weeks ago (while I was out with Son 2 on this trip) I got a phone call from my mother. She was at the hospital. Father had had another spell where he started retaining fluids so fast they got into his lungs and he couldn't breathe. Now the hospital had drained his lungs and he was agitating to go home. His doctor said No, he's not well enough to go home yet. If he leaves now, it's against medical advice.

At this point I was feeling pretty unsympathetic. Sure, I understand that hospitals are no fun, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do. But then my mother went on to say that the doctor had told her Father really was never going to get better.

Wait, what? Then what's the point of keeping him? If the outcome is going to be the same either way, why not let him go home where he feels comfortable? My mother confirmed that yes, they had started to talk to her about hospice care and then asked what was my opinion? (She was going to call Brother next and ask him the same thing.)

At that I slowed down. I told her there was no way I could make the decision for Father, but I was willing to explain my understanding of what the decision really meant. I said that really the choice was between two alternatives:

1. Father still wants to get well. In that case, he should suck it up and accept being in the hospital. He should obey all their silly rules and eat their lousy food because that's part of the price of getting well.
2. Or not. In that case he can go home, where he is far more comfortable. He can be in familiar surroundings, doing whatever he wants to do. Also, the hospice nurses will come by from time to time to make sure he is comfortable. But in that case he has to understand that some time -- maybe sooner, maybe later -- he will have another one of these spells. And when he does, it will kill him.

That was my mother's understanding too. Then she said, "Oh look, he's waking up. Can I put him on the phone so you can explain this to him the way you did to me?" Uh, sure.

So I talked to Father. I started by chit-chatting, asking how he was doing. He said he wanted to go home. So I said, "Yeah, ... about that," and went on to explain exactly the choice I had explained to my mom.

I didn't expect him to be paying attention. Even when he was well, Father didn't do a very good job of listening to others; and I've already described how his sickness seemed to make him more likely to let his mind wander. So I was unprepared for what he said next. He said, "Let me make sure I've understood you. I think what you are saying is ..." and then repeated back what I had just told him, in his own words, lucidly and letter-perfect.

"Yes, that's it. That's exactly what I said."

"OK, I understand. Thank you for your support."

My support? Wait, I didn't say I agreed with him about going home. No, that's true. But clearly he figured that -- if the terms of the decision really were what I spelled out -- then the decision itself was a slam-dunk. He went home later that day, while Son 2 and I went on with our trip.

That phone call was twenty-three days ago.

I saw him once after that -- two weeks ago today, when I drove the three hours to their town to spend the afternoon visiting. Father was weak and stayed in his wheelchair the whole time. But he was lucid and in good humor. I joked with him a lot -- I have always found it easier and safer to joke with him than to discuss anything serious -- and he had a good humor. Later my mother said that he really appreciated the visit.

And this morning he died.

I had thought to use this blog at least partly as a place to talk through elements of my relationship with Father, the way I used to use it to talk through my relationship with Wife. I can still do that, of course, but it will all have to be retrospective: things I could have said or should have said, or new ways to understand what went before. There is no more living relationship to think about fixing.

Of course that makes things simpler. I'll still think about him to try to understand the parts of our relationship that didn't work ... hell, I've been doing that already for decades. And I suppose I'll get around to writing some of it down. We'll see how it goes.

I inherited a lot from him. The "Talks loud, laughs louder" in my motto at the top of the page comes straight from my dad. And I inherited behaviors that didn't serve me nearly so well, behaviors I then had to unlearn over long years.

I'll talk about this, but there's no rush.

"Diary of a Teenage Girl"

I just saw "Diary of a Teenage Girl". It's an excellent film, but I'm not exactly sure what to say about it.

You probably know the basic premise: Minnie, a fifteen-year-old girl living with her younger sister and divorced mother in 1970's San Francisco, has sex with her mother's boyfriend. That's not a spoiler, because that part is set up in the first five minutes of the movie. The rest of it is what happens after.

Part of what I like about the movie is all the things it isn't:

• It's not a drama about victimization. Minnie is underage, so as viewers we might expect her to be exploited by the boyfriend in a movie about the abuses of adult power. But no. Minnie is a strong character and an independent agent. Some of her choices are bad ones, but that can be said about all the adults around her too.
• It's not a romance. Yes, there is plenty of sex (shown in a way that is consistent with an R rating) but it's not in gauzy soft-focus. Yes, Minnie wants love, and is clear about that; but she also wants sex -- and then more sex, and right now please!
• It's not porn.
• It's not a fantasy -- I'm thinking of the kind of situation comedy where the child turns out more mature than the adults around her. For all that Minnie is an independent agent and the driving power in the movie, she's also still a kid. She plays like a kid. She cries like a kid.
• It's not a sermon. You remember those bad decisions I mentioned? None of them is handled as a sin, to be followed by repentance and redemption. They are all just stuff that happens. What makes them "bad" is not that any moral code is being violated, but just that Minnie isn't happy with the consequences. The movie is unflinching about showing a lot of behavior which -- in less skillful hands -- would have been portrayed with scowling judgment.

I think what I am saying is that Minnie seems real. And all the reviews I've read say the same thing: that this is what it is like to struggle with sexuality as a teenage girl. Certainly that's the way the movie feels to me. (Though I was never a teenage girl so what do I know?)

There are so many tropes in the movies about women's sexuality, about coming of age, about adults and teenagers, that this movie could easily have degenerated into a string of clichés. But it avoids all of them.

• Minnie wants sex, but not just as a side-effect of romance: she wants it because it is sex. And then after a while she starts to know something about sex, and to like it.
• She makes some bad decisions, but not because she is childish or innocent or blinkered: she makes them because sometimes people make bad decisions. All of us do. And then afterwards she feels creepy or weird at what she's done and decides not to do it again.
• She is an autonomous, independent agent, but not because she is really an adult playing at being a child. She's a child all right. But I haven't seen a lot of movies that show children who can make their own decisions and still look like real children. Not sure why, because real children can and do want things of their own. But adults often forget that, and so we don't see it in the movies adults make.

I think I'm repeating myself, and I'm not sure I'm really getting at the heart of what I want to say. Suffice it to say that it is a really good movie; and Bel Powley, the actress who plays Minnie, is letter-perfect as a horny fifteen-year-old. Go see it.

Workshop abroad, 2

Yes, in fact I was able to book a flight through the UK on my return leg. I will be able to see Elly for the first time in ... gosh, I forget, but well over a decade.

There's nothing romantic about it. We were never a couple. Back when we worked together we were both married to other people. And then for a while I worked for her. Yes, I had several highly-unprofessional thoughts about her over the years, but nothing in the real world.

Still, it will be nice to see her in person (instead of just by e-mail) and maybe toodle around town for a bit. We'll see.