It's Your Month

It's your month, and I'm missing you as I move away from crowded quarters and lack of privacy.
It's your month as I sweat and swear and try to arrange life to my liking. (How can that happen without you?)
It's your month as we prepare for Hailey's birthday and back to school and the final fall festivals.

School starts on the 17th this year, almost a week before your birthday. Remember "celebrating" your birthday with Back to school?

Oscar and Veronica have been helping me with the move -- funny how  that has worked out. They were always right up there with help when we needed it, weren't they?

I have your chair, and its kind of been all over my house already. It will probably end up in the bedroom, but that will have to wait until the bed is moved in. It isn't a very big bedroom after all. Even after being in storage over a year, it still feels like you.

I want to go back three years.
I really want all this to have never happened; to be a bad dream. (That said, I'm tired of dreaming it's a dream and then waking up to find out it isn't. I hate waking up more than usual when that happens.)
I want it to not be; but I know that this is how it is.
I just wish it wasn't this way, that's all.

I miss you more these days, whether it's because August, or because of moving, or maybe just because. All I know is there's a hole in me where you aren't.

Numbers -- Always Frustrating

They say that "significant" numbers are a sign that our departed (dead) loved ones are around. The numbers can be anything or any combination -- some meaningful only to the two people involved in the relationship. Some can be more generic, like 11:11. Or same numbers repeated frequently. Or sequences. Or -- probably a couple hundred things I haven't thought of. Or times. Dates.

I work in  numbers, and have for many years, so I think I have a good feel for when there is something odd, unusual, and possibly meaningful about the numbers.

695 is one that recurs frequently some nights. As a total, as change, and once even as the amount of money handed to me (11.95 bill; wanted a five back.) 695 is the prefix for Winchester phone numbers; Winchester is where we last lived together.

More fun are sequential numbers. $12.13 or a total. A few customers later there will be a $13.14 bill, and even a $15.16. This pattern almost always goes up. I've never noticed it going the other way.


For a long time, I've enjoyed these numerical forays. I like the idea that they somehow symbolize your presence. (Maybe.)

But I am beginning to find them frustrating.
Numbers should mean something. Should have meaning. Beyond a presence, that is. They should be today's lottery, or how much my paycheck will be, or how many friends I have, or what time I'll wake up tomorrow. You get the idea.

So, if it is you making number magic -- and you were usually rather good at that -- please try to make the numbers have a magic beyond "hello."

Because I like numbers to have intent.

(on the other hand, don't stop saying hello because I'm being picky. Hello backatcha.)

Warren Will Be Three

Next week, Warren will be three.
Last week, Michael turned four.


As for Warren, we are having his party today, since we have money for it now. (Barely.)

Do you remember the year he was born? Do you remember waiting and worrying with Tammy throughout the pregnancy, the car trouble, (walking five miles to work in winter weather while seven, eight, and nine months pregnant!), David being in and out of court and jail. How many times did we help him only because it helped her? (Knowing that in the long run it wasn't really helping her, but for the short term she needed that.)

Well, the more things change the more they stay the same.

For a while, after having a son, David behaved himself in a better fashion. But his evil twin, or his self centered egotism (Is there any other kind?), or his allergy to thinking things ALL THE WAY through caught up with him, and here we are, three years later, living a slightly more intense version of the same way.

Poor kids.
Poor Tammy, although in her case it's a mess of her own making, so to speak.
Poor me, trying to keep my two cents out of it all.

Surely do wish you could be here for her; for them. Don't know if she'd listen to you any better than she did in the old days, but she'd have another refuge; another person to have her back and help her help herself.
A sounding board.
A mirror.
A daddy. (who knows how to BE a daddy.)

Some unconditional love.
(For herself, if not for her position, condition, contretemps)

You were so good at that.

getting worse

I don't know if it's winter, or the living in an open to-the-world-house , but I find I'm missing you more and more as the days go

I miss watching tv with you.
I miss sitting in the room with you while you watch tv and I write.

I miss talking to you, laughing with you, worrying with you, arguing (or debating) with you. I miss managing life and its turbulence with you.

Every day, even here with Tammy and the babies, it seems to me more and more that you are just NOT HERE.

NEVER HERE.

Never again.

How can that even be real?

How can it be two and a half years later and I'm still struggling daily with facing the knowledge and lack of presence ? Shouldn't I be "used to it" by now?
Shouldn't I at least know that this is how it is?

Why is it still so hard?
Why are you still so gone?

Our Car is dead. Like You.

It's been horrible. First it broke (got sick), then it got fixed (got better), and then it went out and up and died on us, too many miles away, five days before payday. (too far from home; too soon.)

Actually it isn't as dead as you are. It's motor will still run, just like your big ol' loving heart kept going, even when every other part of you was giving up.

But to me, it is. I'm done with it. What  good is a heart with no body or soul?

And that grieves me.

It's one more, one last thing that was mutually ours (outside of furniture and children).
One more shared-with-you that has Gone from my life.
One more step into Life Without You.

And I don't like it.

I don't like this life without you, and I sure as hell don't like the loss of things we shared.
I don't like things that seem to take me a step farther or further away from you.
I just don't like it.

And if I should cry for our car, I hope someone will know that it isn't the car.
It's still you I'm grieving for.

Thinking of You

Haven't posted lately, but it doesn't mean I don't think of you.
I think of you at random times.
I think of you in random ways.

I think of you, and Clyde, and Little Bit.

I think of you and Charlie and Cecil.

I see you in Warren's eyes . They are a grey blue in color, but the shine and the shape of the eyes and the sweep of the lashes are you.

Today I thought I would finally take the time to put my pictures of you into a new album  -- only to find the pictures aren't with the other picture. I must have put them away somewhere more special -- but I have no idea where that could be.
 I still try to tell you things that have happened at work.
Things the kids have said or done.
Our problem child and our children's problems.

And then I realize that you aren't there.

Sometimes I tell you anyway.
I wish I knew if you heard or care, but there are some things you have to take on faith, I guess.

Marking a Milestone Unmet

Yesterday would have been your 60th birthday.
If you had stuck around for 60 full years.                    

But you didn't, so it wasn't, and yet -- it WAS.

Yesterday was your 60th birthday, and we who love you remembered it and you for the day. Me, Tammy, Tracy-in-New York, Hailey, and Warren went to the cemetery and then I took them to the park in Bethel for cake and ice cream.
I invited others to join us, but casually, and you won't be surprised that no one did. Acting like they actually have their own lives and all, y'know.

I was going to get a German chocolate cake, one with the fuzzy frosting, because those were (at one time) your favorite, but neither Tammy nor Hailey liked the look of it. Tammy said the cake looked like something had pooped on it.
So we got a chocolate pudding cake. I think you would have liked it. It was flavorful without being rich. I was surprised.

 The kids had a blast at the park, which is vastly different from how it used to be. It's different from even when Tammy and Tracy were the young'uns.

Afterwards, I took them past the house where I grew up -- it is vastly different also, but I was glad to see the mini jungle in the front side yard has been cut down. But not the lilac bush. And I drove home so we went past where we lived in the trailer here in Mt Orab.

A pilgrimage of sorts, I suppose.

Anyway, we marked your day with remembrance of you