Father of the Rain

All it really takes is a few words here and there. You can hang on to a few words for a long time. Fill in the rest with the fluff of your imagination.

“Some people you just have to love from afar,” Jonathan says.

I don’t know that I believe her, but I’ve missed him too. We missed each other. We aimed and we missed.

She wanted me to be someone else. They always want you to be someone else. Even you want me to be someone else.

As I pack up my few things and make the bed neat and tight, just as she taught me, I’m aware of how mercurial my emotions are, how last night my mother felt lost to me in a terrifyingly permanent way, and today she feels close by. Death is like that. Death is mercurial, too.

I like those grades, sixth through ninth, my students still open, willing to reveal their curiosity and imagination and humor to me, willing to allow me mine.

Patricia said that grace is accepting love, that we all spend so much more time resisting love than just taking love. It’s funny, isn’t it, to think of rejecting love. What a stupid thing to do. But I guess we do it all the time.

If I sleep, my dreams are a continuation of my thoughts and my thoughts are like muscles, flexing and twitching inadvertently and repetitively, squeezing but never quite hard enough.

I’ve never tried to control my father’s drinking, never suggested that he not have a drink when he wanted one. It would be like trying to separate a snake from a mouse.

Old people are much more trusting and have time to talk.