Go Your Own Way

We all grieve differently. We all observe the major changes --marriage, birth, death, the bar being out of Jamison's -- in our own unique ways. Some of us **cough, me** more uniquely than most.

Just visited with my father, Daddy. We fell into our old conversational habits immediately. It's tag team DaDa-esque theater. It's poetry slam duets. It's who we are. We riff on each other like two old jazz men breathing wild new life into Lazy River on a Wednesday night in some small ass juke joint in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania. There's nobody but us, the bartender and one bored waitress in the place so we're playing for the full on joy of it. We ARE the cheap seats and we're playing to us.

Yeah, that's me and the old man.

One of Daddy's best and longest term buds, Jim Buechler, said to me that I have my father's humor and his way of coping. The harder things get, the more hurdles to clear, the higher our irony levels go.

Before I left for the hotel, I let his nurses know -- the Old Man and I are slow, emotionally speaking. We have, generally, a two week delay in our emotional responses. He's OK now but, a fortnight from now, he'll need more support. Me too.