Only I Know

I know you are out there right now

"Solace"
Looking to the east

dark clouds congregate
a wait for storms
inspiring silence

the words dwindle out until
little to none remain but
bliss

writ across your face
-April 18, 2012

Why am I still awake? That's always an interesting question. By all means I should have passed out hours ago. I think I'm mostly just in that too exhausted to go to sleep kind of zombie-state that's just perfect for rambling about nothing. Hell, I'm surprised I was able to get out of bed this morning after getting home so late.

Right, I should back up.

Last night, I went to see Yo Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott and the Assad Brothers perform. My coworker offered her extra tickets up a few weeks ago, and I found out she gave them to me because I was one of the only people she asked who actually knew who she was talking about. This makes me kind of sad for whoever she asked, but hey, it meant I got to go hear some incredibly complex music, even if it meant being more tired than usual at work today.

Actually, it was a surreal experience, not just because my family life collided with my work life since I took my mom and we sat with my coworker and her husband (I generally stay fairly impersonal at work), but also due to the kind of otherworldly awe I have about Yo Yo Ma in general. I'm not exactly sure where this came from, especially since I largely forgot about it until Carrie mentioned going to see him.

Well, that's not entirely true.( Read more... )

I don't really think I'm going anywhere with this. I just wanted to write it down so I didn't forget. I feel like I'm forgetting so much these days, but I also refuse to give in. Where does it all end? Who's to say? Only I know it's not time to go. Not when there are still things to see. Not when there's still love left to give. Not when there are still words left to write. Not just yet.

"Your mother can't cook."

As you might have gathered from my previous post, I stayed up way too late last night despite being exhausted. This lead me to forget that my dad might stop by in the morning to pick up the portable coffee maker my mom left behind. Low and behold, I got a phone call from my dad at 9:45 asking me if I was awake. Ha, whoops?

Well, we ended up going to breakfast at a dinky restaurant down the street, which was actually pretty pleasant. The conversation didn't stray far into politics (thank bog) but rather stayed fairly consistent around Ireland and old family stories. Stuff about his childhood (catching razor clams), first being in America (how a kid who was bigger than him took an eye dropper full of ink and sprayed it on his khakis, "And I wasn't going to take that! So I challenged him, and he was bigger than me!"), and the path his dad (a plumber, welder, and boxing champion) took to immigrate to the U.S. (a much more complicated story than I had heard before; apparently, he could have ended up in Canada and never met my mom).

My dad told me this story:
"Yeah, I used to ride my bike everywhere. My car broke, so I had to. You know, on some days, my dad would take me to work because, well, they were staying with me at the time. Anyway, on most of those rides, we wouldn't really talk because I was never really all that close to my father. Well, one day when it was raining, we pulled up to a light, and out of the blue, you know, out of nowhere, he turned to me and said, 'You know, your mother can't cook.' Haha! So I feigned surprise and said, 'Oh?' Trying to elicit a response. He went on to tell me a little more. I mean, my mother was a very educated woman. She was educated as a secretary, so she never knew how to cook. After they came back from their honeymoon, you know, my aunts lived down the street from her. So after my father left for work, she went to my Auntie Kit and asked what he liked to eat. She said, 'Steak.' So they went and got a steak, you know, a roast that would last for a few days, and she told my mother how to make it. Well, we had a really old turkish stove, and my aunt forgot to tell her to open the flue, so you know, the heat could actually get into the stove. So my father comes home after a twelve hour day, ravenously hungry, and of course, she goes to pull it out of the stove, and the meat is completely raw. And here he was, fifty years later, still talking about it."

These are the times I wish I knew how to ask the right questions. I get so wrapped up in avoiding politics and other topics that I forget there's still so much I don't know about him. Oh well. Such is life, I suppose. I'll take what I can get.