Father’s Day
Jun.21, 2015, filed under Planet Sam
It’s Solstice, which means I should have just finished riding from Kirkcaldy to Aberdeen, but a medial collateral ligament injury put paid to that. It’s also Father’s Day and my Dad’s birthday.
Last year was the first of his birthdays he missed, and things were so raw it was a speed bump in an ongoing road of sadness. This year it has been harder. The run up to Father’s Day, with the endless advertising to remind me of what we’ve lost, has been more difficult to handle than I predicted. There are all these things I want to share with him. My first pro sale as a writer. Our new house and my somewhat small dream of being able to host the family for Christmas in a home that we own and is big enough to accommodate them. His excitement and happiness on meeting my niece, his first grandchild.
I’m sad because we were only just starting to make up for all the years I was away and barely had opportunity to speak to him, never mind spend time with him; because I have scant few happy memories of him to treasure after the age of 16; because we had plans to do something about that which will forever remain plans.
I’ve cried a lot, at random, occasionally in awkward places, and hidden it not just out of that deep British reticence when it comes to expressing emotions or seeing them expressed, but because it’s deeply personal and he wouldn’t have wanted me to be sad.
This too shall pass.
A few years back we were riding the Dumb Run and it was his birthday on the Sunday, as it is this year. The route took us past my parents’ house and I made everyone stop so I could post a birthday card through the letterbox. In it was a nonsense poem about sorry to have missed him, but I didn’t want to wake him up because it was 6am and:
…we are just passing through
on a bicycle ride from Dumbarton to St Andrews
Missing you today, Dad. Missing you every day.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
