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Dear Diary

Evidence into the Void

Today would have been my dad’s 65th birthday and anniversaries are hard because I can expect to have a lot of hard conversations. His sister, my sister, my mom, my friends, his friends. It’s right and proper that there are formally appropriate moments for remembering him together.

There are some things I have, articles and objects in evidence that he was here. Besides the usual pictures, I have two voicemails from him on my phone still, emails, the only blog post he ever wrote.

Let me talk about my dad a little bit, eh?

When I was very little, he used to sing me songs before bed, including “Always,” here’s the Sinatra recording.

I remember him lying on his back on the floor, on the rug, with his head on a husband pillow, and me in my bed, listening to him sing. But as they tell me, he used to rock me to sleep with song as a baby, too, before my memory begins.

Later, in grade school, he made up a before-bed series of stories about a booger who lived in my left nostril. Yeah — really. The booger’s name is Harold T. Booger and The Harold T. Booger universe is well developed, in part because my sister grew into HtB stories right as I grew out of them. Harold never moved out of my nose, though. I like to think there’s a “Harold goes to dad’s funeral” story out there in the universe somewhere.

He and I also shared a love of bleeding edge technology. We were one of the first people I knew to have dial up internet, and then DSL. Both of us had an inexplicable faith in the power of technology; we liked Star Trek, Dr. Who, and related shows that depicted the moral use of machines for making the universe a better place. Maybe we were wrong, but on the other hand, maybe it was never about politics, but simply the power of social encounters to open up new vistas of experience, and the power of technology to exponentially expand the possibility of those connections.

I found this digging through my email today, I think it shows you what kind of guy my dad was:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lord only knows what I did that time, ha.

Other emails included instructions for getting gum off my purse and an over enthusiastic thank you for a lunch I made him.

This isn’t really another grand eulogy, just some stuff about my dad. I don’t miss him more than usual today; missing him is more like a condition than an event. But maybe you can see how out of this world lucky I was to have him as my dad. And if you knew him, I hope this makes you smile.