Bummer Blog

Eight days ago it was the 20^th 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.