Today was fun, exhausting but fun. I actually did get some work done too which was amazing. My co workers are all so geeked for me, which is great fun. Jenny stopped by and brought me a card from her family - with a baby rattle on the front!! ha. It was the only congratulations card in the box she said.
I read something yesterday that I liked.
from Robert Fulghum's Maybe (Maybe Not) He was referring to a friend of his who's father had died at age 82. He respected his father but they had a distant relationship not an intimate one. He went through his things and he found his father's "junk drawer" ---> "And in a flat cigar tin, wrapped in tissue paper, there were tiny teeth neatly glued to a card, with a date under each one in the father's handwriting. Human teeth.
This find was a bit of a shock.
His father was the Tooth Fairy.
All these years he'd thought it was his mom.
Not all the family secrets are bad news."
I really liked that. Because we tend to talk about the bad news but there is good stuff there too. And everyone is full of suprises. It's a sad story, but it's also happy.
My dad and I had a pretty rocky history - not an especially close relationship but as I started to grow up a little more and learn that he was human and that I could let him off the hook of my judgement a little bit we started finding ways to connect. One of the things we did was with a golf ball. I don't remember how this started but we began hiding a bright yellow golf ball places where the other one would be sure to find it -- eventually. Once I put it in the back of his pickup truck so that when he drove around corners it would roll around back there and make lots of noise! I also knew he was just like me and that he'd get annoyed with the rattle in the back of the truck. And I knew that once he parked the truck he'd forget about it again until he was driving around the next corner and heard that irritating sound of something rolling around loose in the back of the truck! I would find it all sorts of places too. Once he even left it in a plant in my apartment when he was visiting, another time he duct taped it to the back of one of my dresser drawers so that I couldn't shut the drawer all the way. It was quite a puzzle until I took the drawer out to investigate! We mostly didn't say anything to each other about it. We talked to my mom about it though, so she got to hear it from both sides and enjoyed our game too. It was an unspoken conversation, a quiet game we had for maybe three years or more. Sometimes one or the other of us would have it for a good long time, trying to think up an even more creative place to hide it. When he died we found the golf ball in his desk drawer and I still have it. He was probably scheming up another great place to suprise me with it! I kept it because it's a reminder that we were trying, we had found a little thing to make each other smile and we were trying to connect. It was a great start.
I read something yesterday that I liked.
from Robert Fulghum's Maybe (Maybe Not) He was referring to a friend of his who's father had died at age 82. He respected his father but they had a distant relationship not an intimate one. He went through his things and he found his father's "junk drawer" ---> "And in a flat cigar tin, wrapped in tissue paper, there were tiny teeth neatly glued to a card, with a date under each one in the father's handwriting. Human teeth.
This find was a bit of a shock.
His father was the Tooth Fairy.
All these years he'd thought it was his mom.
Not all the family secrets are bad news."
I really liked that. Because we tend to talk about the bad news but there is good stuff there too. And everyone is full of suprises. It's a sad story, but it's also happy.
My dad and I had a pretty rocky history - not an especially close relationship but as I started to grow up a little more and learn that he was human and that I could let him off the hook of my judgement a little bit we started finding ways to connect. One of the things we did was with a golf ball. I don't remember how this started but we began hiding a bright yellow golf ball places where the other one would be sure to find it -- eventually. Once I put it in the back of his pickup truck so that when he drove around corners it would roll around back there and make lots of noise! I also knew he was just like me and that he'd get annoyed with the rattle in the back of the truck. And I knew that once he parked the truck he'd forget about it again until he was driving around the next corner and heard that irritating sound of something rolling around loose in the back of the truck! I would find it all sorts of places too. Once he even left it in a plant in my apartment when he was visiting, another time he duct taped it to the back of one of my dresser drawers so that I couldn't shut the drawer all the way. It was quite a puzzle until I took the drawer out to investigate! We mostly didn't say anything to each other about it. We talked to my mom about it though, so she got to hear it from both sides and enjoyed our game too. It was an unspoken conversation, a quiet game we had for maybe three years or more. Sometimes one or the other of us would have it for a good long time, trying to think up an even more creative place to hide it. When he died we found the golf ball in his desk drawer and I still have it. He was probably scheming up another great place to suprise me with it! I kept it because it's a reminder that we were trying, we had found a little thing to make each other smile and we were trying to connect. It was a great start.
posted by Captainwow on
9/22/2003
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