"Soul" (Why I Don't Miss My Dad So Much)

Many of my fairly regular readers know that my dad passed away in December of 2013. Ever since then, I have been very much aware of people online and in life posting and talking about missing their deceased parents, every day -- even parents who have been gone for decades.  I see memes about the "hole" in the lives of children who lost their fathers and mothers and I feel a mix of guilt and puzzlement, because I don't feel that way.

Our view. A little bit of loss of the strings'
presence, at times, but a visual feast for the
boys' impressionable minds -- and mine.

Should I feel slightly emptier without my dad in the world? Strangely, I feel just the opposite.

I have long thought that people who have an extremely hard time with life after the normally-timed and non-tragic loss of their parents (that is, excluding those who lost their parents way too early or whose parents were eaten by escaped zoo animals) might be wrestling with regrets. I do miss my dad from time to time, but that is all. I sometimes miss his presence. For us, there was nothing left unsaid; there was no movie-plot father and son headbutting or dark competition between us. He loved and respected me and I knew it; I loved and respected him and he knew it.

So, there's that.

Corny as it may sound, though, real connections cannot be broken even by death. I think of Donne's great poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and though his poem refers to romantic love (and even makes some bawdy references) the general idea can apply to familial love, too, especially when the speaker says:

A Path to Lifelong Happiness?

Olivier and Yorick

On Wednesday, I wrote about the fact that -- to cram things into a nutshell -- I seem to keep wanting to improve myself, musically, even though no one cares or is likely to reward me. Through a gradual series of thoughts since then, I realized that this kind of attitude might just be the secret to lifelong happiness.

Here's how the thoughts went. I saw a picture on Twitter of a French author who tried to kill herself (the tweet said) twice. I turned to my wife and said, as I have before -- which must be very comforting to her -- that I fully understand why people kill themselves. There have been days in especially long strings of mundane days, during which I thought: "This is it? This is my life?" I then imagine a person who feels trapped in these sorts of days; a person who sees no change coming; who has nothing to look forward to. I see, in short, Hamlet:

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Taking One's Self Seriously

At some point, I became aware that people don't take things as seriously as I do. Taking everything seriously never stopped me from being a complete clown, but, I have always taken what I do seriously. As a kid, I remember being baffled by people who bragged about "not taking themselves too seriously." If one doesn't take one's self --one's self -- seriously, what does he take seriously? I used to think.

Music, for instance...

I've watched my musical friends fall away...the ones who were musicians in high school, who smile fondly back at those days and sort of see me as a quaint reminder of the past because, as one former schoolmate put it when he ran across me at a gig, "[I] still do this nonsense." Most of them gave it up when they realized that people weren't really impressed that they walked around with drum sticks in their pockets of guitars strung across their backs. Some of them just went down different life paths.

I also have friends who kept doing the music thing, but only as a sort of casual diversion. They play for their kids; they sit with the acoustic on the back porch; they play for themselves -- which is great. To me, that is a sincere loyalty to the greatest art.

Then, there are the guys I work with: still willing to work hard; stay up late; load the car up; unload the car; practice all week; play their hearts out for three hours a night and then go back to their day job and their houses and kids and keep working hard. These are the guys who need music as an ongoing past of their lives, no matter how much it complicates things -- the guys who never got to the point where they thought that playing in a band is something one should "outgrow." In short: they still do it and they mean it.

The LAUREL SPRINGS NATIONAL BANK: My Hero

When I am gone, I want to be like an old bank building.

In my area, there are a few old bank buildings, and, true the financial scenario, they have had many different names: TD Bank, Citizen's Bank, Wachovia, Susquehanna, Bill's Bank, Fred's Bank, The First Bank of Louise...you name it.

...etched in stone. 

Each of these banks has had a parade of plastic, internally-lighted signs. Each of them has been emblazoned on the face with a hundred logos and slogans. It seems as if their names change every week as the phony, surreal financial tides of the world and of the country shift.

But a mile or two away from me, there is a bank in a "downtown" area that hearkens back to earlier days. There is a pizza place that looks like it might have been a general store; a building that was obviously once a saloon or hotel is now a hairdresser's. A railroad track that runs through the heart of the downtown area passes a small train station building (which no longer operates, since the trains that come through now are only freight) that Walt Whitman once used to get from Camden, NJ to his summer digs, a short walk away from the station.

Praise Addiction

"When you get into the end zone, act like you've been there before."

-- attributed to Vince Lombardi

Lombardi

This one falls into the category of "getting older." I write about that sometimes, because, like everyone on the planet, I, after all, am.

And, as I do age, I watch concepts that used to be ubiquitous become rare and then turn into complete non-entities.

Somewhere along the line, it became okay to blatantly ask for attention. That used to be considered desperate. It used to seem pathetic. Now, there's style in it. Consider the football player doing that backward bird-flap to get the stadium to cheer louder for what he has done. Consider the rock star or the rap star telling the audience, "I can't heeeeear you..."

Somewhere, in the settling historical storm that is electronic media and communication, it became okay to post memes and statements about the fact that people in certain professions get less recognition than they deserve. In my mind, it would be fine for a teacher to post how nurses get less recognition than they deserve, but it's tacky for a nurse to do it. (The fact that I need even to say this is proof that the proverbial carpet has been pulled out from under me.)

It has always seemed to me that the less recognition one requires, the cooler one is. I have always respected people who do something well for the reward of having done it well and real confidence is knowing one has done that without having to be told and without having to tell. Sure, it feels good to get external recognition, but to require that recognition just seems childish. One should appreciate praise (after, of course, considering the source) but one should not crave it or -- worse -- beg for it after, say, the age of six.