{"id":13944,"date":"2013-06-04T10:15:17","date_gmt":"2013-06-04T14:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=13944"},"modified":"2013-06-04T09:45:24","modified_gmt":"2013-06-04T13:45:24","slug":"june-4th-twenty-five-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/june-4th-twenty-five-years-on\/","title":{"rendered":"June 4th: Twenty-Five Years On"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inadequate words, scraps of memories, images…<\/p>\n

\"Dad,After a pause, a bigger boy — a teenager — appears. On his head is a ridiculous bolero hat, on his upper body a flashy silk shirt, on his upper lip a patently false pencil-thin mustache; tucked into the hat is what seems to be a bushel of thick black hair. He’s leaning over, striking a would-be “artistic” pose, something he picked up from dancing school, and he’s grinning — grinning, crookedly, for all he’s worth.<\/p>\n

The older boy executes a sweeping bow, almost a curtsy, and sashays back into the trees…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

\"Dad,I don’t have real pictures of my Dad to correspond to all these memories. But if I could keep only one of the real ones, I know which it would be: any of three or four taken at about the mid-point of his life. He’s got a Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette (a Tareyton: he hadn’t switched yet) in the other… He’s grinning, of course, and why not? His life is in place: he’s happily married, all four of us kids are on the scene, we’re living in the first and only house he and Mom would ever own or ever need.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\"Dad,Dad could be a lively conversationalist. When he talked, I loved his facial expressions, especially: the goggle eyes and slackened jaw of bogus shock; the steep, steep, steeply-angled furrows of his brow (we joked he could hold pencils there) that seemed to say, “What in the hell<\/em> are you talking about?!?”; the fake teeth-gnashing as he pretended to bite his tongue at someone else’s idiotic remark that he’d only get in trouble for responding to… Dad was, in short, a great mugger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…when Dad wanted you to pass him something, he’d just sort of look in its direction until someone finally asked, “Is this what you want?” (Our first guess was invariably wrong, and then he would say, all exasperation, “No, the salt!” or whatever. Few things annoyed him more profoundly than our failure to know when he wanted the salt.) …I hope we passed him whatever it was he wanted this time, although now (of course) we’ll never know for sure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of these years, I may get through an entire June 4th without thinking there’s anything special about the day — even without feeling foolish or sentimental otherwise. I will say, though, that over the years the fact or manner of his death seems ever less significant: we all die, after all, and the varieties of death are countless. But the fact that he lived, and how he dealt with it all (or didn’t) — yes, that. That<\/em>.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Quotations in this post come from an unpublished essay,
\n“Crossing the Line,” first written in 1989 or 1990.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inadequate words, scraps of memories, images… After a pause, a bigger boy — a teenager — appears. On his head is a ridiculous bolero hat, on his upper body a flashy silk shirt, on his upper lip a patently false pencil-thin mustache; tucked into the hat is what seems to be a bushel of thick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,38,15],"tags":[110,1061],"class_list":{"0":"post-13944","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-01_intheblood","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-family","9":"tag-dad","10":"tag-death","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-3CU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13944"}],"version-history":[{"count":36,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13962,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13944\/revisions\/13962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}