I’ve been thinking about my father. The real one. As in the one who was there, with the best of intention.

As opposed to the sperm splatterer, without intention. His only communication with me was 3 decades into my life; “I neither confirm nor deny, but I have no desire to change my lifestyle at this point in time”. As if there ever was that desire, there was not, at least not in the sequence of time and place that resulted in me.

My father, that I’ve been thinking about, the one that was there and is still (in “spirit”) sometimes I think of in terms of modern American tragedy.

A good person. I’m not aware of anything malicious or mal intended EVER, in my body of recollections, only love, the best of intent, and likely from what I saw as a child, unresolved, unspoken regret.

Frustration, anger, withdrawal?

All of the above.

This morning I was alternating between reading and resting in a living room chair. From where I was sitting, the sunlight was bothering me. I covered up my head with a light blanket to curb the disruption of sunlight, before I was ready to embrace the day.

Memory trigger; their early fights. On weekends after the work week, he would not get out of bed, till at least noon.

At times she would encourage my brother and I to jump into the bed to wrestle and play with excitement to take a drive or do some kind of weekend family fun. He remained covered up, rolled in the blankets, enough to block the sunlight, in what I heard her refer to as mummified. On occasion there were afternoon outings. One of the good trips was going to Fred Meyer and buying an Osterizer blender with similar seriousness to buying a house.

“Good Morning” he would say, quite cheerful. “You mean good afternoon” she would say. “OK, that’s how you want to start the day?” he would say, and barring a more than occasional loud verbal yelling sparring, subsequently remove himself to the basement bathroom for a couple hours, come up to make scrambled eggs with toast, butter and coffee for himself and quite often re retreat to the basement “office”. After the big Seattle Boeing layoff in the 70’s, along with approximately 60K other mostly men from the previously 100K workforce, that pattern continued throughout the week as well.

Neither appeared to have gotten what they expected in the relationship, or life as whole.

She lived the emotion of most of the day to day responsibilities of children. He lived the financial responsibility and appearance of failure, as the first child in his immigrant family to achieve a college degree, in the shadow of lost relatives in Europe in the late 30’s and 40’s, and a father in law who had set the tone of success having retired in his 50’s after having built a sportswear company that at one time did business with Montgomery Wards. “He did well”, my grandmother once told me, “not like the Diors, but well”. On a failed visit from LA at our home in Seattle, she caught my father one morning to discuss the problem of our family finances and asked him about his weight. He’d been successful with the new “Atkins” diet at the time. “I just lost 80 pounds” he told her, “You must of been really gross” she apparently responded. My mother was appropriately supportive of him in that instance. It was a rare moment of bonding between the two of them. There was also a freeze in the communication with her parents that year, something that surfaced more than once throughout my childhood.

I’ve been working on conditioning myself to rise earlier, both physically as well as mentally. More significantly, moving forward with natural engagement earlier in the lifecycle of the day.

The memory of the mummification and the big purchase of the Osterizer blender reminds me of the importance of choice.

I’m finding “happiness” is best facilitated with tangible plans and steps. Sometimes it starts with good coffee. Other times a smoothie from the Magic Bullet Blender will suffice. (FYI, Magic Bullet Blender is a real thing, not a coded reference to a real bullet).