{"id":4684,"date":"2009-06-04T07:45:56","date_gmt":"2009-06-04T11:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=4684"},"modified":"2018-10-20T12:06:26","modified_gmt":"2018-10-20T16:06:26","slug":"crossing-the-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/crossing-the-line\/","title":{"rendered":"Crossing the Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\nF<\/span>or me, the last few days of May and the first few of June, in most years, are veined with ambivalence.<\/p>\n

First, there’s May 29<\/a>. As you may have put together by your own clever self, that’s The Missus’s and my anniversary. This has always been an easy date for me to remember, because it was also my Dad’s birthday. Somewhere around here was also my maternal grandmother’s birthday. And finally, because I have many happy childhood memories of Memorial Day — which used to fall every year on May 31 — the very end of the month always seems to carry with it an assertive whiff of celebration and commemoration.<\/p>\n

But then we come to the small matter of June 4, 1988…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\nD<\/span>ad had just passed his 64th birthday when he died, that day, of cancer. He’d been sick from it for a couple years at that point, and that he finally died of it was not (in retrospect, and forcing myself to be objective) more or less tragic than the great majority of such deaths. He was a good man who died much too young for his family, and (thanks, oh thanks for morphine) he died as comfortably as possible under the circumstances. It is both true and not true that not a day goes by that I don’t miss him: I do not consciously think of him every day, yet a part of what I do<\/em> think of every day is tinged — even if I don’t notice it — with his absence.<\/p>\n

But again, about that day:<\/p>\n

For some time, the four of us “kids” had been in rotation, supporting Mom — so we hoped — with the workload of caring for Dad and giving her some down time. On the morning in question (it was a Saturday), I left my apartment for the 40- to 50-mile drive to the house (THE house; the only one Mom and Dad and the four of us had lived in while we were growing up).<\/p>\n

I’d long aspired to be not just a writer, but a photographer, and in those pre-digital-camera days it wasn’t uncommon for me to have my 35mm Minolta close at hand. Just in case, you know.<\/p>\n

So as I drove down to the house that day, while my mind was cast forward to the weekend just beginning, I also had one eye sort of half-aware of photographic opportunities en route<\/em>. And I found one — of all places, at a cemetery. (This one<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I pulled off the road and into the driveway. What had caught my eye that morning was not just the white of the tombstones and the clapboard church, but also the sky; huge puffy cumulus pillows on a deep-blue field. I knew these pictures would be especially effective, because (a) my camera was loaded with black-and-white film, and (b) the lens was fitted with an orange filter, which would further deepen the tones of anything in the blue and green ranges: the sky, the trees and grass, the dark-green shutters on the church windows. The contrast would be stunning<\/em>, I told myself.<\/p>\n

So I shut off the engine, got out of my car, and took my pictures. Got back in the car and drove the rest of the way to the house without further stopping or incident of any kind.<\/p>\n

My memory of what happened when I opened the front door is murky. I heard somebody say my name, preceded by the single “Oh” vowel-word which never presages good news. And then I was in the bedroom with Dad, or with the soul of what — until just about the exact moment I got out of the car to take my pictures at the church — had been<\/em> Dad…<\/p>\n

I<\/span> don’t want to melodramatize this all too much. Too many people have lost well-loved fathers, and — much as I’d like to — I honestly can’t think of my<\/em> Dad’s death in operatic terms. (Dad himself would be horrified by the prospect, I’m pretty sure.)<\/p>\n

But, well, Dad, listen: by now you know what you were, and you know what I am, and you know what we were (and weren’t, never could<\/em> have been) to each other. From what I can see of it through the wrong end of a twenty-one-year telescope, it looks okay to me. Part of me kinda wishes we’d had more time than we did, but the rest of me is grateful for what we did have, and grateful too that our good-bye was no more than what it was: straightforward, however foreshortened, and not played out over decades.<\/p>\n

And although I’m never sure, really, what I mean by this, I’ll just close with the phrase I always, silently, recite to myself when I remember 6\/4\/88:<\/p>\n

I’ll be seeing you<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Dad,<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

or me, the last few days of May and the first few of June, in most years, are veined with ambivalence. First, there’s May 29. As you may have put together by your own clever self, that’s The Missus’s and my anniversary. This has always been an easy date for me to remember, because it […]<\/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":[183,14,38,15,247,94,74,250,50],"tags":[110,1061],"class_list":{"0":"post-4684","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-01_intheblood","8":"category-backwards","9":"category-family","10":"category-ruminations","11":"category-02_in-the-news","12":"category-music","13":"category-art","14":"category-language-writing_cat","15":"tag-dad","16":"tag-death","17":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1dy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4684","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=4684"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20639,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4684\/revisions\/20639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}