remember the inspiration post? you never know what’s going to inspire you. i just found a new blog that i’m going to try and follow, written by a venture capitalist in new york, and his blog entry for today was very short:
i just called my dad. got voice mail. wished him a happy father’s day. hope everyone out there called their dads if that’s possible.
“hope everyone out there called their dads if that’s possible.”
neither fido nor rogers can make it possible, i think, to call my dad directly – he’s left this particular time-and-space universe almost 11 years ago. but that doesn’t need to prevent me from calling out to him, or maybe calling out about him.
my dad was this amazing guy. an impoverished aristocrat, an arrogant intellectual, an avant-garde artist, a hopeless addict, a genius painter, a highly skilled manipulator, an incredibly compassionate man, a philosopher and writer, a man with a dark side that frightened some, a man with enough charisma for a whole city block.
the first thing that comes up for me when i remember him are his hands. big, a bit meaty yet delicate and mostly – warm. full of oceans of energy. nothing’s a problem when these hands are there.
another close memory is how he made me laugh. so hard! sometimes i literally peed my pants. but so often it went way beyond “making” someone laugh – these occasions of uproarious guffawing were more often than not a creative improv free-for-all – not so much laughing “about” something or someone but laughing with.
i wasn’t there for his funeral in germany. his death was somewhat sudden, three days before glenn’s and my wedding here in canada. i had tears streaming down my face as i unveiled his wedding present – one of his luminous abstract paintings.
his funeral was a good party, from all i’ve heard. lots of people at the grave. when they lowered the coffin, the first thing that was thrown on it, before any flowers, was one of his beloved “roth haendle” cigarettes. as soon as it made it there, a toad appeared and slowly jumped toward the cigarette, paused beside it for a while, and hopped away.
hi, dad.