Yes, It's been a while since a new posting. My life and desk have always been in a state of disarray, but the added turmoil of my father's death- a concept I still can't quite grasp-has brought the usual chaos up to a new level. Yet in other ways life does go on if not as normal, but close to it. Spring and summer came. Everyone in the family still gets up, eats and sleeps. All the TV judge and dance shows that he loved to watch are still on at the same time. And Home Depot is still in business, despite a dip in sales at the store on Shady Grove Road.
But other things are very different. The county dump is still there, but my mother has hired a trash man for the first time in forty years. (Dad fell out with the last crew.) She is still living in the house, but she and my brother and sister got a bad case of the heaves-which in this case is an incurable urge to remove clutter. The basement work shop where Dad stored every toilet, toaster, stereo and telephone to pass his way - not to mention a frighteningly large inventory of screws, nails, electric cords, paint cans, plumbing, electric shavers and more has been cleaned out. (With all that new space, I thought we could at least set up the old ping pong table, but inexplicably only half of it seems to be in residence.) On the lighter side Mom was finally able to replace the aging dishwasher and refrigerator that Dad never failed to "fix"- at least just enough to put off buying a new one.
The beach house still stands, but the regular long weekends don't happen anymore. Instead Pat and Mom and Roger have become The Three Beachketeers- each leaning on the other as Roger is the only one who likes to drive; Pat likes to organize; and of course Mom does the cooking when they are not going out to eat. The beach place has also been de-clutterated; the neighbors were treated to the sight of all sorts of things being flung off of the deck. The garage was emptied of forty years worth of beach combed lumber. Besides the glaring absence of Father- the landscape literally has been radically changed. A man made protective dune was installed over the winter, and the ocean now seems a half a mile away. It's good to know that Dad approved this change even though he never got to see it.
I think we all try and avoid thinking about that big hole George P. Cokinos left here on Earth because it is still just too painful to realize life without him. But little things can sneak up and hit hard. It suddenly occurs me that I need to stop using the word parents - the singular parent doesn't usually work-as in my parent's beach house. Or I am in my car cresting the hill on Wisconsin Avenue in Tenleytown, and I start to cry as I remember how often my father drove this same route and saw the same view of the Cathedral. I am grateful when a day goes by, and I actually don't cry. F. Scott Fitzgerald put it best I think in his last line of The Great Gatsby:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I know as time goes on there will be fewer sad days and more days spent telling funny stories. At least he left us with a boat load of those.
