september 11th

1991
it's an unusual experience when a family day of remembrance
becomes a national day of memorial.
i woke up this morning and thought of you immediately
which is odd, because over the years your presence in my thoughts has
become quiet.

14 years later
i find myself only older, not much wiser
i drink my tea and stare into the unseen distance often just like you taught me
occasionally i remember our arguments on matters of taste and aesthetics. is it too late to tell you that i find i agree with you on many things? and that fact is unsettling?
i must say i still try to outdo you. i still try to outlive you, though you're quite dead.

once, you were a good man.

you loved poetry, and laughed more when it rained.

i learned more about life on long car rides to tent meetings than anyone has taught me since. i would look out the window while we passed miles and miles of grass and leaves and rocks and small towns and listen to the seamless harmonies saturating the air of our car by your favorite barbershop quartet, being recounted by your 8-track. endlessly winding and unwinding the lace of my sunday best around my finger, i would listen and often interject as you and mom would debate whether i'd be a soprano or an alto.

you taught me long division one night as we drove to Baskin Robbins, where i was still astounded they could have 31 flavors of anything. i remember thinking that i should get you to teach me algebra before you died... you were a much better teacher than my school system could afford.

the first computer i ever owned was inheirited... a texas instruments beast of a thing, with a 7 inch monochrome monitor. as my memory of you faded, i would spend hours willing my mind to recall the instructions you gave me to turn it on. i could never remember, but i got it on. my mother gave it away two years later without asking. don't worry, i did eventually forgive her.

i suppose my need for absolute fairness and my opportunistic nature are qualities you passed to me as well. i find that the harder i'm pushed down, the more fervently i bounced back.

i think you would have bounced back eventually.

my son asks me all the time where you went, and why you had to die. he doesn't understand words like "cancer", but he understands that you went far away, to a place we can't fly an airplane to, and you're not coming back. he tells me he loves me more often now. i think he's afraid i'll leave. but i told him that you had most likely convinced god to put in a golf course and an ice cream shop. i'm sure you spend quite a bit of time traveling faster than light... how many stars have you counted? i think we got up to 53 once, before i fell asleep. when you carried me in and put me to bed i remember thinking that i was lucky i had a strong father, or i would have to wake up and walk to bed myself.

words, words, words.

in the beginning, God created heaven and earth. out of nothing. and he saw that it was good,
and called it good, and so it was good.

i can still see you, in my mind. in my mind i still only come up to your waist, and i have to walk really really really fast to keep up with you, though the fact that my pace makes me slightly out of breath does not slow down my speech. 'audra, take a break from questions and just listen," you say. "you'd be surprised at how much you can learn by listening."

i am still surprised.

here's to the good times. 14 years is long enough penance to pay, in the purgatory in my mind. from here on out, you're Grandpa Almond. and you're far away, and it will be a long time before i see you. or maybe not. but i tell my son i love him as often as i can, just in case.

i've decided that i'm going to remember you from my favorite times. like watching the kite you made me, probably the most carefully engineered kite in the neighborhood, plummet gracefully to earth time and time again. we got it in the air for a good 15 seconds while you ran down the street.

carefully sculpting the nose and ears on our very first snowman, and then listening to mom gripe at us while we warmed our hands as it's much easier to sculpt a snowman without mittens.

lying in the grass for an hour, trying to ignore the ants, as you kept promising me that if we waited just a bit longer the leaf would catch fire. it did.

grilled cheese sandwiches with grape jelly, learning to read with 1 kings, watching bad sci-fi that i always claimed to hate but didn't really, because it was one thing we had in common.

caramel popcorn.

repeatedly questioning you about common sense. "it's common sense because it's common, audra. everyone knows it."

"well, i don't, so it must not be that common."

you told such horrible jokes. but your eyes crinkled when you laughed, and though i always rolled my eyes i would laugh too. and once you got sick, and stopped telling bad jokes, i learned as many as a could. you never laughed. but you would look at me and occasionally smile.

i still save you the orange popsicles. until i remember that i don't need to. but then i have a whole bunch of orange popsicles, and no one else in the house likes them, so they're all mine.

words.
i hope they mean something.