The Reaction

My Dearest Love,

They have both responded. That is good.

They both have said they need time to formulate a response. That is also good.

What they actually do is the most important, and that is yet unknown.

P.

Hand Cramps

My Dearest Love,

How is the weather where you are? Here it is cold with fitful bursts of snow. Not really enough to make us all satisfied that we are once again exhibiting survival characteristics in the frozen north, but enough to make for slushy roads that instantly coat the car with a brown-grey scum of frozen dirt and salt.

I have spent the better part of the last twenty-four hours slowly copying letters to your sisters from the original word.doc printed format to laboriously written, long-hand versions on nice paper with colored ink. One was four pages long, the other five. My hand hurts in ways that it has not since the days of sitting in a crowded auditorium, furiously taking notes while some professor or TA with English as a mangled third language held forth until the bell rang.

Now that they are written, I am having a spell of pre-delivery rejection. I feel bleak and depressed. My heart is not in the game any longer. I do this because I believe our children deserve better, but not because I really want healing with your sisters. I have bad thoughts about them at the moment. It is as though I used up all of my good thoughts in the writing of the letters - remembering better times when we laughed together, touched each other with easy familiarity, hugged each other and really meant it. Was all of that so easy for them to give up?

Never the less, I will deliver these hand written pleas to them, asking for forgiveness for whatever sins it is that they believe I have committed. The detailing of insane behaviour committed under the influence of grief, put forward for their inspection will be consumed for it's face value no doubt, instead of for it's true meaning which is that of a mirror, hung before them showing a strange apparition that blends their image with mine in duplicitous hell. For that's where we are right now - in hell. Tormenting each other because we cannot heal our pain of loss. We rend our own flesh in the frenzied attempt to scratch an itch that cannot be reached. I despair.

If you receive these letters and have some godlike view the web we are caught in, see that our plight is but a moment in time made small by eternity, spy a path free from the entanglement we have devised for ourselves - come to me in a dream that I may see it too. For now, I truly am blind to it and fear that we do not have the wisdom to find our way free.

Yours,

P.

The Letters

My Dearest Love,

I can't remember if I told you about seeing a therapist. I made the decision to do so last fall when things went so disastrously wrong with your sisters. Due to the holidays and one cancellation due to a sick child, I have only seen this person twice. My main goal is to see if she can help me resolve the family rift that festers like a canker in my everyday life. My secondary goals are to better understand the effect of grief on myself and to get some guidance and feedback relative to being a single parent.

I extended invitations to each of your sisters to talk to this therapist. The youngest said it "didn't feel right" and refused all contact. The other agreed to a phone call, which took place prior to my second meeting with the therapist.

Your sister, the one agreeing to the phone call, spent most of the conversation telling the therapist how I had abused her during the group meeting from hell that occurred last November. She didn't recall any activities on her part that might have been termed "incitement." The therapist had to question her on several levels before she remembered the "other issues" that had triggered the family feud in the first place. Those were waved off with dismissal when held up next to the mountain of verbal excrement that yours truly dumped on her in front of her sister and sister-in-law at the meeting.

Fortunately for me, there was a fifth person at there, a neutral facilitator who spoke with the therapist at length and basically said that yes, I had said some hurtful things, but only after being attacked by both of your sisters in tandem.

God, I can't believe I am sitting here writing this. This is so tawdry and sordid. I sound like some pimply-faced teenager in one of today's on-line chat rooms ranting away at perceived enemies, spewing spleen and vindictiveness with each bang on the keyboard. I feel dirty.

So be it, back to the therapist and a game plan. She suggested that I write to your sisters individually. Each letter should be personal and honest, expressing my gratitude for all of the things that they have done for our family. I should recall the ties that have bound us together, both in the past, and those that hold us still. I should express my desire for peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness. I should leave the ball in their court.

I spent much of yesterday working on the letter to your sister, B. It took me four clean starts and much editing and rewriting (how I miss your red pen, my dear), but I have a draft done now. I will give it a day or so before going back to see if it still feels right. Then I will copy it out long-hand for mailing. Today, I hope to draft a letter to your youngest sister, P.

To tell you the truth, I don't hold out much hope. They seem convinced that I am the anti-christ though they continue to love and spoil our children. Last night, they all gathered at your sister's house to lavish gifts on our son for his fourteenth birthday. I was not invited.

He came home lugging his loot. My solace is the knowledge that as much as he covets material things, he forgets them quite quickly. It is love he really wants and there is no shortage of that for him.

Perhaps I will post the letters I send for you to see. I am of two minds about that. Later then.

With love,

P.

Just Talk

My Dearest Love,

Sometimes my strongest need is just to talk to you. You know, about the small stuff, the quirky, off beat stuff, the family stuff. I need to continue to weave that web that tied us together within the larger fabric of the universe around us.

Here is an example that I have been sitting on for a whole week. Last Sunday, I started the day in my usual way by sitting down and slowly reading the Sunday paper after taking care of the dog, making coffee, and on this day, getting the bread making process underway. And as I worked my way through the political bullshit, the war bullshit, the gossip bullshit, I finally reached the section that dealt with local society bullshit. There was an article on the nasty insides of the local restaurant scene. You would have so loved it.

I was thinking of you as I read the juicy insider stories of who was suing who about deals gone bad along with the scraps thrown in the compost. I was thinking of that movie we watched, "Dinner Rush" where plotting and intrigue both in, and out of the kitchen steamed along with the gorgeous and creative gastronomic art that was laid before the unsuspecting diners. Well, I was almost to the end of the article when a name caught my eye. It was your restaurant, my love, making news in the most unwelcome way.

It appears that the current GM of your restaurant is being sued by a former head chef of a restaurant that he owned, but that's not all. The paper went on to repeat scandalous rumors of gay torture chambers in the basement, male strippers stalking the kitchen, sex in the corners, whooo-hoo. I was stunned. What would you have done had you been in your old spot across the table from me. What kind of shock waves were going to ripple out through the food biz strata? What were D and M going to do when they heard about it all. Your restaurant tarnished in the most tawdry way. It was luscious in a seamy sort of way and I HAD NO ONE TO TALK ABOUT IT WITH. I was so bummed.

It was almost a week until I could get up there and see for myself how the staff were responding. There were some grim faces and I can't imagine what all is happening. The timing of this was suspiciously terrible too. Your head chef had her last night there a day before the story broke. She is off to be a star in Hong Kong, a shining light in the gluttonous east. I haven't met her replacement, but the whole staffing situation must be in turmoil. If you were here, I would know the inside scoop and we could talk about it in all of its lovely, grimy, and smutty intricacy. How I miss you.

In other goings on, your son is about to turn fourteen. I fell into a panic last week when I realized the proximity of the event and the fact that I had done nothing really to prepare. Our family is still paralysed by this schism that was cleaved by your two sisters, so a family gathering is out, even though that is the one thing he wants most. Your sister is throwing a family party for him at her house, but seems to have lost my invitation.

Yesterday, I took him and his two long-time best buds to an indoor go kart race track and we inhaled poisonous fumes for a bit as we raced little low-slung rockets around a loopy track set up inside a large pole building way out in bum-fuck county, half way to St. Cloud. Your boy was brilliant. On our first race, the four of us were the only ones on the track and I proceeded to lap them all on my way to a victorious finish. It was exhilarating and surprisingly intense. These little carts could reach 30 or 40 miles per hour and had amazing grip. I felt pretty pleased with myself for arranging it on short notice.

After a break to breath slightly less toxic air in the lounge and to play some race games on video machines, we went back in for round two. I once again was last out of the starting gate (it was sequential) and had to corner aggressively to gain a leadership position when I became aware of someone hanging right on my tail and no matter how well I set my line in the hairpins, I couldn't shake him. Then, when forced to brake for a much slower driver ahead of me, I felt a punch as my follower rammed me into the boards and roared on by. Guess who. Yes, our son, and the chase was on.

I couldn't catch him. He is truly a gifted and skilled driver. He was laying down better, smoother lines through the corners and displayed a natural skill at dominating his position. It was not until several laps later when he had to slow for the same poky driver that I was able to return the favor he did me by edging him on the inside and forcing him out into the boards, allowing me to squirt ahead for the final lap. Little good it did me, for he turned in the fastest lap time of the four of us, beating his old man by a some thousandths of a second. He made me very proud.

From there, we were off to Sammy's Pizza for lunch and then home where the boys holed up in J's bedroom and played computer games until nightfall. He was a happy camper and celebrated by making cookies all by himself last night. They were good too. You would have been pleased at how he did it all without any assistance and left a sparkling clean kitchen when he was done. He is a good kid.

We would have talked about that too. Or maybe we are? I don't' know.

D.

Your Scent

My Dearest Love,

Tonight, I tried to find you. I opened a drawer that held your swimsuits, and pantyhose, and lingerie. There were pieces of our past in there and I hopefully inhaled, seeking bits of you, hoping that there was some hint of pheromone, some reminder of you.

I moved from there to the closet and slowly touched one hanger after the other. Such memories. Each piece of cloth bearing ghostly presence as they moved in front of me. I gently pulled an item from time to time and drew my lungs full as I held the garment to my nose, but you were gone - truly.

All that remains of you now is in my head, and in the box on the closet shelf. Your organic parts have faded and I don't know if that is good or sad. I must let you go, but it is hard. It is at times like this that I hurt still. Mostly, I am good. We are good. But when the kids are gone and I am here alone, I pine for you. My solitude hangs heavy around my neck.

I hope that you see the stars and galaxies just as I do when I look at the NASA pics of the day. I think about such beauty as is portrayed there and how you must be out there somewhere. That is my peace - thinking that we go to some beautiful place when we die. Not heaven, as in a biblical sense, but among the stars themselves.

I miss you.

P.

Passing on Memories

My Dearest Love,

Last week, I took our children west to share with them some of our favorite places. Do you remember when we were young (well, relatively anyway) and we first went to San Francisco? For the first, and last time, you rented the car and we wound up with a little shit box that had one and a half cylinders and a slushbox transmission. It took two hours to get up to cruising speed. Forget about passing.

It was our first "driving" vacation and I wanted to show you the bit of coast between San Francisco and my cousin's place a bit north. I didn't know that you were so susceptible to motion sickness. I love a twisty mountain road and drove that POS rental like it was the finest hot Italian, zillion cylinder stud rocket. You turned an evil shade of green before we hit the third curve out of Sausalito. By the time we got to my cousin's, you were unconscious in my lap, dosed to the gills on Dramamine. What a pair we were.

Well, this Christmas break, I didn't want to hang around this place, haunted by memories of happier times, so I forced the kids to go with me to California to impose on my cousin once more. The original plan was to gather in Lake Tahoe and ski the light fantastic, but torrential downpours put the skids on that idea and we had to go to Plan B. And that was to do a couple of days in SF followed by a punt and hope for the best.

We landed in previously mentioned torrential monsoon rainfall to be met by cousin B and transported in his hysterically powered RS-car through the coastal mountains to his home and hearth, were we were met with a bone-warming fire and great Mexican food. He and T proceeded to spoil us with all means of good things, starting with a trip down the coast to SF.

There, we hiked through Chinatown and found that little hole-in-the-wall dive place we ate at a couple of times before. You remember the one where the owner took the order and refused to give us menus, simply saying, "I take care of you?" Same place.

The look on our children's faces was extremely dubious. Due to previous conversations between the adults, they were anticipating mystery dishes that would include unidentifiable items, many with tentacles still wriggling around. We started with strange tea (see picture) that defeated all of our attempts to drink it without ingesting flowery bits. As it turned out, anyone leaving the table for a bathroom break came back to find "their" tea containing their neighbor's herbal flotation.

When the food did come, it came in torrents and it was soooo delicious. Even K and J found bits and pieces that they liked.

We did the cable cars of course. J hung off the side like an old native, always at the front, as if he were captaining his own hilly vessel.

We went to Alcatraz prison for a tour which creeped the shit out of me. I don't know, but those walls saw such human degradation that they whispered to me the whole time I was inside the building. I followed J around as he listened to an audio presentation. I don't know what he heard. The unit they handed me was speaking in Croatian.

We had dinner at an old, family style Italian restaurant that was a few blocks off the beaten path down by the waterfront. K was secretly pleased when she received a wine glass from the waiter and was able to sip a little Montepulciano red along with the rest of us.

There was the fancy hotel, more of Fisherman's wharf, Irish coffee's at the Monte Crisco (remember those?). When we finally left to return to B and T's house, the kids were sated and satisfied.

The whole trip was like that. I had a wonderful moment in the kitchen while the family swirled around me as we slowly prepared the evening meal, drinking wine and beer, dancing in place to the music pumped up loud, and I felt the embrace of family. That feeling of being held and supported by presence of those loved ones close to you. I haven't felt that since you went away. I missed it and felt drunk on it that night.

Then we flew home to a wintry scene of snow and slush. Both kids bolted from my presence as soon as we got home, but I didn't mind. They had been in close contact with me for a week and they were not running away from me as much as they were running to another place that they lusted after. I spent my New Year's Eve alone and not minding that too much.

Midnight passed without my noticing it. So much for the much hyped celebration.

Well, I must go. We have a guest coming for dinner on his annual migration from up north to his winter home in Colorado. Dinner needs to be put together and I think I will dose him up on garlic shrimp and pasta. We will raise a glass in memory of you.

With love,

D.