Personal Liberation

It was eight years ago, Thanksgiving, Christina and I visited Columbus spending the holiday with Lawrence and Atticus. This was my first visit to the city, less than a year since Christina and I had married and long before Lawrence and Atticus would do the same. Before baby Maireade. I walked through the city while the ladies cooked the feast with a camera in hand, wearing the polyester suit my father and I were married in. I saw graffiti and trash. The students were gone but the mansions they reside in and the waste from their parties was plain to see. I was impressed by the poor segments and photographed one brick apartment building where graffiti said, "Not a Northside Nigger." Someone tried to sell me a carton of cigarettes, but I kept my distance and declined. These days amongst the waste and decay of the city sealed my decision to move here.

The next autumn, my father came to visit Columbus. Christina and I had our store, the Blushing Pixie. My father visited the store, my first big entrepreneurial endeavor. He walked around downtown and explored the landmarks. No one else from my family has visited us here in eight years.

The day after Thankgiving, three years ago, my friends Amanda Kauppila and Joey Brinkmeier met and fell in love. I hope that next time that I see her there will be a big stone on her finger.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, this year, my sister, Elizabeth Coumo, notified our father that she became engaged to her fiance John. They are a beautiful couple and my father was very proud.

November 22, 2009 anno domini, at 8:45 ante meridian, four days before Thanksgiving, this year, my father, Raymond Charles Mosher died. He will never see his daughter marry, he will never visit his son and daughter-in-law again. But we are not defined by what we are not. The memories of us are not tarnished by their finiteness. On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, my father was buried in the Fishkill Rural Cemetery, Veteran's section. On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, I returned to Columbus, an emptiness in my heart that can never be filled.

My father is dying, the cancer has spread to his lower organs and threatens his liver. Talking with him lately has been strange. While acknowledging the gravity of his condition I have continually tried to incorporate humor into our conversations. I am sure that this mirth is still appreciated, however, when it comes to salutations he falters and delays the "goodbye"'s. My father keeps trying to tell me something and only says, "its so strange, things have gotten so strange."

On Tuesday when our conversation had come to an end he told me that he didn't know if he would ever get out of the hospital, if he would ever see me again, but that he hoped he would. I am trying to not let the minutiae of what is essentially his last days bring me to tears, to sob over the inevitable, and all so commonplace to be trite, death of someone who isn't even a regular part of my life.

Now it gets sadder, he shakes, he shakes so badly that he cannot answer the phone without assistance. Even with assistance while he attempts to hold the phone to his ear his shaking hand strikes the phone against his head. This is reaching out to someone you love for sponsoring and tolerating and intimately sharing your first twenty years and physically harming them in the process. This is the fruits of not going to college right after High School and thus not having the financial resources to be by his side, where a phone call would not be necessary. This is failure manifest.

I've noticed the recent destruction/construction (restructuring?) that took place on High Street North of Lane elicited an archway. On this archway is the declaration "Old North Side." This is top-down designation which has certain authority. Authority bequeathed via the credibility the citizenry give the City Council, but also the more subtle authority of text. There is also a bottom-up penchant for declarations and proclamations. There is a bit of graffiti on 4th Street, between 6th and 7th, that I am fond of. "Short North Jungle" says so much about the way the proverbial "man on the street" feels about that area. I am not so certain such an inference could be made about "Old North Side."

It is the hopes of representative governance that by having the direct actors in policy making be chosen by the adult citizenry the end results would be "bottom-up." While with lowest-common-denominator legislation designed to make our environs livable I do feel this is basically true, with culture it can never be.

I miss Christina, I miss our cats, I miss Strongbow Ale, Chipotle, and dancing. I've been living the good life so long it has made me soft, only a short time away but I'm a big moosh ball.

I love my father, but it can be hard being around him. It must be frustrating being him, time must be his greatest enemy. It appears he is constantly in a fog, it isn't the drugs, he has always been like this. Talking incessantly on tangents, forgetting things, being tardy. I daydream, I have inertia towards fantasy over action, but I do act and do not complain about past slights and wrongs. He is obsessed with what could have been or what could be, but not in the here and now.

This house is amazing. It is part the worst of a bachellor's pad, part some self-reliant survivalist camp. My uncle Bill is stealing this Internet connection with a satellite dish from some distant neighbor who didn't follow the directions on their Linksys wireless router setup CD. There aren't any bars of soap here, you use either shampoo or dish detergent, depending on the sink. One bathroom doesn't have a working sink. Gross, no? You don't have to pay for a phone service because they use amateur radios.

More on my uncle later. Now time to take my father to Wal-Mart.

nostalgia from Ancient Greek *νοσταλγία (nostalgia), from νόστος (nostos), “‘a return home’”) + ἄλγος (algos), “‘pain, suffering’”).

I'm visiting my father, who is living in a Veteran's Administration hospital due to Lymphoma, in Fishkill, NY. This is where I grew-up, born, childhood, first kiss, first love, first sexual experience, graduated high school. I proposed to my wife and married her only an hours drive away. My father's life is all in this corner of Dutchess county. He only left when the U.S. military drafted him, otherwise all of his memories are here. What this equates to in practical terms is there is a lot of time being spent recollecting. My father loves to tell stories, not fictions, but long dissertations of past occurrences, and I'm not very good at interrupting him.

With that said, I am quite glad I don't live here anymore. This morning we went to a big grocery store for eggs and other sundries (I forgot my toothbrush and paste). Let me set the seen, my father is able to walk, but slowly, I'm walking closely behind him looking down the aisles for tasty vitals, there is an army of New Yorker women with their hair bleached and cut short and coiffed to look like some variation of Hillary Clinton circa '92. These people are armed with their shopping carts and they are doing battle, meanwhile these two artifacts of pre-industrial, nay Netherlander colonial America, are calmly meandering like the waters of the Fishkill.

The old IBM factories in East Fishkill are fenced in, the research park of Texaco is overgrown and abandoned. However, this town has become some kind suburban dream, or nightmare as the case may be. As such, I am sitting in a Panera Bread establishment where George Washington had an encampment of revolutionaries escaping North, away from the British onslaught. Truly progress.