Home alone

With Mary out of town, and the kids off to school, I'm in the rare position of being in the house 100% alone.  It's quiet and very nice outside.

Organizing to get up with Josh and Niklaus, I was reminded of what my dad did when I told him that Sophie had cancer.  He started crying instantaneously.  There was no pause, tears just rolled down his cheeks.  I was heartened by that.

It's difficult at times, hell, all the time, to reconcile my dad's public and private personae. Ellie K--d, our state senator, noted at the end of a recent note she sent out to everybody who's email address she has that dad "spread joy to everyone he met," or something like that.  But he never really listened to people.  He candidly admitted to Leslie that he was going to address some school group, but that he wasn't interested in hearing what the students had to say or even ask them, he wanted to tell them things.  At least he admitted it.

It was this extreme, heavy-handedness didacticism and self-righteousness that hid behind the ambling jokester that we his kids got to see over the years, and was one of the things that made him difficult.