Eight days ago it was the 20th anniversary of my
father passing away.
From what I understand, he had been shovelling snow and
clearing snow off of some bushes when he died. The end of October is pretty
early for a heavy snow dump, but you are never going to win an argument with
Mother Nature. Mean bitch! Dad was a diabetic and it turned out that a blood
clot stopped his heart. I blame Mother Nature and with snow on the horizon I
plan on being very careful.
I have been careful for the past twenty years and as each
year passes I become just a little more cautious when I have to clear the
sidewalks. I have been trying to win a lottery so that I could fly away from the
snow, but so far Lady Luck hasn’t favoured me. There is a good chance that Lady
Luck and Mother Nature are sisters. Evil witches tend to hang out together.
I remember that we were having unseasonably warm weather in Calgary
on that day. I am sure that I was planning on calling dad and bragging about
how much nicer our Alberta
weather was than what they had in Ontario .
We don’t often have nicer weather so I took every opportunity to rub it in. Dad
was too nice to point out that our weather was shitty for the most part. My
boss came out to my walk and told me to go home and that he would see that the
rest of the mail got delivered. He wouldn’t tell me why, he just told me to go
home.
Arwen took the call from Mom. She was too young, but she was
also the only one at home. I still feel bad that she had to handle that
particular situation. Maybe she is the stronger for it, but I am sure she would
rather I took the call. Me too.
I remember being at Mom and Dad’s place for the funeral and
I kept finding myself in his tiny workroom in the basement. That was where he
kept the things that meant something to him. I have a room like that too. When
I die, the kids may find themselves down in my tiny, crowded workroom and if
they look around they will see all of the things that keep a part of my being.
Most of the stuff is and will be just crap to anyone but me. I hope they take
the time to look at the stuff down there and touch those things that I touched.
I hope that the grandkids find something in that workroom that they can take
for themselves as a memory of “Poppa”.
No matter what happens, the memories will be with them at
all times, the good ones and the bad ones. I feel closest to dad when I am in
Home Depot just walking up and down the aisles looking at ‘possibilities’. I
did that with dad a few times, not as many as I would have liked, but enough
times to be permanently imprinted on my mind.
This is kind of a bummer blog for the first one in a long
time, but it is what I am thinking of tonight. Hopefully they will get more
upbeat in the future.
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