Paring and shedding

As my time of working from home drags on, I continue to make progress in trimming down the contents of my office. I've been working through a pile of stuff on my desk. Graham shredded a big stack of paper that had been waiting for him, then I dug into my cabinet and got out old tax returns and whatnot.

Amongst the stacks of stuff to be attended to is a pile of issues of The Urban Hiker, a literary zine published by my dad's friend Jill Cotter back in the early oughts. Pretty sure she was/is married to Bill Cotter, who helped me manage through my second DUI back in '91, but that's a story for another day. (Actually, it's not much of a story, but he's a very nice guy).

I think I got this stack of zines from Laura, my dad's second wife. There's a story by my dad in each of them, accompanied by a poem or two. I've been making an effort to read each story by dad, and even the poems, though they're particularly hard to read because they're so suffused by his redneck-Buddhist didacticism.

As I read them I am reminded of how, when I started this blog 18 years ago, somebody made the comment either here on the blog that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," and there is some truth to that, in that the Grouse and my dad's writings each chronicle us trying to process shit that goes on in life. I should probably just let that sit rather than expatiating at length about how much better my writings are than his, but I will say that as I read my dad's canoodlings about exploring the world and delighting in its simplicity, I am reminded that as he wrote them, Natalie had just been born and I was transitioning into parenthood and having a career, a time of life that was at once marvelous and had many challenges, during which I was very grateful to have a mother and a sister who were present, engaged and helpful.

So I am reading dad's writings now then scanning them (I will send the whole set of pdfs to Leslie when they're done) before tossing them in the recycling bin. It will be nice when this little project is done.