Processing
I am living in New York NY again, with my husband and two children.
What, two?!
Yes, dear reader, I guess it really has been a while. Child number 2 (Mia) is a healthy lovely 2 1/2 year old, born here in Manhattan. We moved for my husband's work, he was transferred for a multi-year stint. Ray is a thriving kindergartener, and he fits perfectly among all the other children, being a cosmopolitan international bilingual handsome young man. ;) Not that I am biased or anything.
The years have been very full. I have a lot of things to write about.
But before that, I will try to write a little about Dad, as I remember him.
Dad was
(blanking here, give me a minute)
I can hear the jingle of keys as he removes them from his fanny pack on the other side of the door of the apartment, mom and dad's apartment in mountain view. He's about to come in, and everything will be normal again, and the last three years will have been a dream, he was never gone. It will all be exactly like this, my last memory of my father.
We're going to go to Rancho San Antonio. It's August. He has his trademark look, khakis and a sweater. Under the sweater is a T-Shirt, preferably black, with a logo of a radio station (he is the engineer that gets shit done at radio stations), or 'Still Plays with Trains' (he's a train lover) or, maybe an anime shirt that I got him from an anime convention long ago.
He will give a breathy 'Hi!' and give mom a smooch through his mustache, that when smooching, pokes out kind of like a walrus. Then he will plop down, a little bit heavily, into his office chair / geek space set up in the living room with his linux desktop, an ancient version of chrome that some hacker got to work on debian 3 because he is not a fan of standard OSes. There's the latest panel of Megatokyo on the background, which I used to love in 2003 but haven't read in ages, and I feel just a little bit happy and weird that he still reads it after I introduced him to it a decade ago. He has a microphone set up and it's a really nice mic, for capturing his beautiful deep voice that he has a right to be proud of. He started a cool hobby as a narrator for Audible books, and he's in the middle of three different narration projects at the moment, which you can tell the second he opens his email there in the living room on a giant monitor for all to see. There are also recruiter emails, because he is a systems engineer in high demand in silicon valley. He was always good at computers, anything technical really. But I digress.
He has to do a couple of maintenance type tasks for work, because his position has shifts where you have to be on-call in case shit goes down and you need a guy to call. He is the guy, the technical guy, that people call to fix things when things go south.
For a while after his death I blamed his work for the stress on his heart. The doctor said the cause of death was a hypertensive heart attack, I read that as being his work's fault. He gave his heart strain because he was in pretty stressful work situations, like all the time, probably. But I think he probably thrived on that, got thrill and meaning out of a series of normal jobs at regular companies, because when he was needed, he was really goddamn needed.
Ray is running around in my parent's apartment, literally gleefully running around and around the circle of the kitchen, hallway, living room, and dizzy, glomps on to Dad's leg. Dad catches him and picks him up. "Come here, you", he says, and bounces him on his knees, humming, maybe a bit out of breath as he types one-handed server commands into the terminal. Ray grabs on to his face for support and gives him playful slaps while managing to drool on him. I think he's two in this memory, so maybe no drool. But definitely face grabs while staring soulfully into Dad's eyes, which Dad is not meeting, because he's trying to get that last letter in. But their eyes meet, and his expression softens, and they laugh. We are off to Rancho San Antonio, where the dust is flying and the air smells like bay leaves. We run after Ray for a mile, and then feed hay to some barnyard goats. Dad has a halo of dust and light, and he is full of love, and that is how I will always remember him.
What, two?!
Yes, dear reader, I guess it really has been a while. Child number 2 (Mia) is a healthy lovely 2 1/2 year old, born here in Manhattan. We moved for my husband's work, he was transferred for a multi-year stint. Ray is a thriving kindergartener, and he fits perfectly among all the other children, being a cosmopolitan international bilingual handsome young man. ;) Not that I am biased or anything.
The years have been very full. I have a lot of things to write about.
But before that, I will try to write a little about Dad, as I remember him.
Dad was
(blanking here, give me a minute)
I can hear the jingle of keys as he removes them from his fanny pack on the other side of the door of the apartment, mom and dad's apartment in mountain view. He's about to come in, and everything will be normal again, and the last three years will have been a dream, he was never gone. It will all be exactly like this, my last memory of my father.
We're going to go to Rancho San Antonio. It's August. He has his trademark look, khakis and a sweater. Under the sweater is a T-Shirt, preferably black, with a logo of a radio station (he is the engineer that gets shit done at radio stations), or 'Still Plays with Trains' (he's a train lover) or, maybe an anime shirt that I got him from an anime convention long ago.
He will give a breathy 'Hi!' and give mom a smooch through his mustache, that when smooching, pokes out kind of like a walrus. Then he will plop down, a little bit heavily, into his office chair / geek space set up in the living room with his linux desktop, an ancient version of chrome that some hacker got to work on debian 3 because he is not a fan of standard OSes. There's the latest panel of Megatokyo on the background, which I used to love in 2003 but haven't read in ages, and I feel just a little bit happy and weird that he still reads it after I introduced him to it a decade ago. He has a microphone set up and it's a really nice mic, for capturing his beautiful deep voice that he has a right to be proud of. He started a cool hobby as a narrator for Audible books, and he's in the middle of three different narration projects at the moment, which you can tell the second he opens his email there in the living room on a giant monitor for all to see. There are also recruiter emails, because he is a systems engineer in high demand in silicon valley. He was always good at computers, anything technical really. But I digress.
He has to do a couple of maintenance type tasks for work, because his position has shifts where you have to be on-call in case shit goes down and you need a guy to call. He is the guy, the technical guy, that people call to fix things when things go south.
For a while after his death I blamed his work for the stress on his heart. The doctor said the cause of death was a hypertensive heart attack, I read that as being his work's fault. He gave his heart strain because he was in pretty stressful work situations, like all the time, probably. But I think he probably thrived on that, got thrill and meaning out of a series of normal jobs at regular companies, because when he was needed, he was really goddamn needed.
Ray is running around in my parent's apartment, literally gleefully running around and around the circle of the kitchen, hallway, living room, and dizzy, glomps on to Dad's leg. Dad catches him and picks him up. "Come here, you", he says, and bounces him on his knees, humming, maybe a bit out of breath as he types one-handed server commands into the terminal. Ray grabs on to his face for support and gives him playful slaps while managing to drool on him. I think he's two in this memory, so maybe no drool. But definitely face grabs while staring soulfully into Dad's eyes, which Dad is not meeting, because he's trying to get that last letter in. But their eyes meet, and his expression softens, and they laugh. We are off to Rancho San Antonio, where the dust is flying and the air smells like bay leaves. We run after Ray for a mile, and then feed hay to some barnyard goats. Dad has a halo of dust and light, and he is full of love, and that is how I will always remember him.
posted by Kyra at 9:57 PM
1 Comments:
Every few months I check of my favorite (semi-lapsed) blogs to see if there's anything new, and lo and behold, you posted less than two weeks ago. What timing!
Thank you for the beautiful memories of your dad. I hope you are making wonderful new memories with your family in Manhattan; please write about them if you get a chance.
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