It certainly was cathartic for me tonight to think about my parents and what was hoary history (World War II) to me growing up in the 1950s. I thought little back then about the German officer's field binoculars that my dad brought back from the ancient war and which I destroyed to see how they worked. (I now have the prisms perched on my window sill and a poem I wrote.) And, I thought nothing about the broken piece of purplish, marble paving stone--now sadly lost--that dad said was collected from a strange-sounding place called Berchtesgaden, and on which Herr Hitler could have watched Bavarian village children perform their folk dances. (I did write a blog about it.)
What I do think about is how much I NOW (is it too late?) love my parents, notwithstanding their imperfections. I take that back: my mom was nearly angelic, so much so that I couldn't much relate to her anchoritic, ethereal otherworldliness. In contradistinction, my dad's all-too-obvious earthly flaws were a source of considerable irritation. We did not speak for a full decade.
But, guess who I miss the most? My dad, by far. And, it should be obvious who I probably hurt the most. I recently wrote a note to myself--in an autodidactic fit--about my peevishly informing him he was dying, after I realized no one else in the family had bothered to tell him. I realize now I was existentially vexed at that moment, both that he was soon to leave and that I was incapable of communicating little except an egocentric and irked passing on of cold medical information. I had only past communication style to fall back on.
Imagine how much I would like to retrieve that moment to rectify my lack of filial humaneness. I now finally know what I would like to say.
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