Vinn's Journal
May 2009 |
Flowers arrayed as multi colors pointing toward me. Wind gusts braying for attention out the window of my hotel room. A gap of time and space journeys to ghostly giants, which pervade the room.
Happy Birthday Pop!
Today, May 4 is the anniversary of my father’s birthday. He would have been 91 years old if he had made it into his 60’s.
I wonder about the elder he would have become. There are many voids to jump into regarding this working class Cuban in America. Mostly there is vagueness associated with his memory.
Not much to go on except there is this image of him shuffling along the sidewalks of Manhattan from Murphy’s Bar n Grill toward our apartment on East 86th Street where he would climb into bed for his first of many daily naps before the noon hour.
He would enter the world of numbness for a few hours in hopes for the peace and quiet that would accompany his tuning out the realities of the everyday demands and expectations. He bore little allegiance to decision making and fearfully fretted the imminent wave of everyday life that continually roared upon the shores of his story.
Mostly I am grateful for his legacy of material, which provided countless hours of therapy and insight to personal destructive habits and reactivity to my everyday dance.
I tell this tale now with kindness and sympathetic tones. My wish upon the lamp of Genie is for he and I to talk honestly and intimately. The ideal setting is for he to open toward me and I to receive without attachment or expectation. I become a shining bodhisattva for my father.
His memory has now become a story I tell myself. I am the storyteller, editor, producer, director, and playwright. The ending is the ending I give it and it is ongoing and changeable, as I am.
Now this ending is sweet, brittle, hopeful and redemptive.
Sweet because there is little left of my youthful acrimony toward the ways in which I saw his actions as oppressive.
Brittle due to the fact that he left so early in life and I find my desire to know him as an elder shaking my view of reality.
Hopeful as a way of realizing that it is never not the right moment for forgiveness to appear in the guise of acceptance and understanding the ways of time and space.
Redemptive as a course of action because I walk the genetic footsteps of this soulful soldier and have been able for the most part to maneuver the minefields of apathy and anger that blew him to pieces.
Happy Birthday, Pop!
Celebrate all things, vinn