She’ll be droppin’ her new album in a couple of weeks, featuring her badass self with a few of the tunes featuring the hot new artist Li’l P. (We will get photos of Li’l P at some point; she’s been busy doing her Dogly Duty patrolling the perimeter and keeping the homefront SquirlFree as part of her contract.)

I feel like my father’s memory, my love for him, the love he gave me, are like an indentation you make with your foot when you step from the beach into the ocean. The water rushes around, you feel specific grains of sand slide away, you sink a little deeper, and yet, when you lift your foot, what once was a hole becomes filled with fresh water, new sand, broken shells. It becomes easy to believe this, to become paralyzed, because to move is to chance forgetting, to blur and obfuscate the past, the things you treasure. But the more you stand immobilized, the less you are living your own life.

Back and forth, back and forth. Waves visit the shore and leave, and these similar push/pull feelings wash back and forth within me. I am so weary of crying, yet the tears still come. I am still searching for patterns in the tides. I know one truth: I will not drown, even if sometimes it feels like it could happen.

I attended a big to-do industry banquet last night, mostly because one of my co-workers was up for an award, and our agency was nominated for “agency of the year”. (We didn’t win.) They had a couple of local talking heads as the masters of ceremonies, and boy-oh-boy, you just have to be able to read off a card to make it in the world of TV. And these two? Not making it.

There were two grammatical flubs that I seized like an otter on trout. The first was when the smiley-chick pronounced “Czar” – and after two stuttering tries, settled on “Cesar” but more like seeZAHR and I announced to our table if we won the agency award, I was going to proclaim I felt like the seeZAHR-ina of media. (At the last agency, I was dubbed the Czarina of ProBono. And we said it right.)

Then, another woman was painfully trying to simultaneously understand and pronounce “mimeograph”, and this, dear friends, is why you REHEARSE if you’ve been given a script. So she went with MIME-o-graph, as in Marcel Marceaux pantomimes a document for you, 16 times. I, of course, immediately began my own miming at the table. Hey, I was sandwiched between the non-stop laughing of Kristin and my boss who is afflicted with ADD. He kept muttering and snarking, until finally I strongly advised him to “GO INSIDE.” (as in, yourself. That’s what I do, anyway, when faced with long speeches or painfully forced banter and I can’t escape.)

That or I just get uber-snarky. Like when my boss said, “Hey! Check out the tat(too) on (name of person who f’n hates me)!” And I replied, “Yeah. I think she got it in prison.” (Thanks to Kristin for remembering that one.)

Actually it wasn’t the lunch itself, but what happened right afterwards, that was jaw-droppingly hilarious. Kristin and I dined at Cupini’s (I had the salsiccia sandwich and am now Dragon Garlic Breath Extraordinaire…) After we finished eating, we went back towards the entrance so I could refill my soda. There was a man who had just ordered, getting ice/water from the soda machine – precariously holding his little wire table spike that held his number, so the servers would bring him his order. However, this man wasn’t succeeding in his efforts – the ice had gotten stuck in the spout. He was shoving his hand up into the spout, trying to dislodge the ice.

Now, that kind of freaked me out a little, but it seemed like he was mainly touching the ice in question, so I just stood back, waiting patiently. (Thinking, “Self, we will not get ice. THE GERMS.”) He was slamming his cup under the spout, alternating with the clawing, and I finally said something like, “Not co-operating, huh?” He grunted something, and then the clawing began with redoubled fury. I was thinking, ok, don’t burst out laughing, even though this is kinda funny. I tend to assume most people find uncooperative machines (soda, fax, copy, computer) to be generally amusing and frustrating at the same time. In other words, nothing to have a heart attack over. This guy? The recalcitrant ice somehow unleashed some sort of holy fury within him. He started dropping his glass, ice fell on the floor, he FLUNG his table number & holder at the lemons & coffee pots, to free up his other hand, and once he got his ice and water, gathered his table number (leaving the wire spike with the lemons) and huffed off in A Great Pique to await his lunch.

I stood there with my mouth open.

Kristin broke into a hundred peals of laughter. I was looking around & finally caught the guy’s attention behind the counter. I gestured to the ice on the floor with big swooping arm movements:

“Number Three? He just had a MELTDOWN.”

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My friends aren’t even going to know who I am. I give you proof that the slippery slope to insanity has begun, and pretty soon I’ll be blogging from our trusted institution, Two Rivers. (A girlfriend of mine just started working at the state-run nervous hospital, and she said I won’t get to keep my knitting there. So much for my tax dollars helping me in the long run, I guess on some level I always knew I’d have to pay for quality institutionalization.)

Yep. I have no idea why I’m doing this, except it was a small-ish project and I thought it would be good to do something different. And I ask, what is more natural in the 96-degree heat than to knit a wool hat? The answer, as you back away slowly, is: NOTHING. The kit is from Bea Ellis. I know, I know – it’s as if the Amish suddenly started driving SUVs. I’ve professed such an utter distate of knitting with cotton (hey, this was less than 3″ of that behavior – it’s just the lining of the hat, the lighter burgundy that’s crazily, mad-cap stitch-marker “hemmed” to the underside of the hat), and then I’ve been equally vocal with my dislike of fair isle knitting…. well, all I can say is, send cards. Come visit. Because I have the yarn to make at least two or three more of these.

Somewhere along the way I got the notion that each day would be a little bit easier, a little bit better, as I move on with my life and move through my grief. Maybe it’s true, but I’m starting to think that might be something you see easier in retrospect, like, say, a few months from now.

I’m determined, and I’m process-oriented. It’s why I love knitting, even if the end result doesn’t delight me. So I keep thinking with the “one-foot-in-front-of-the-other” principle, and I think I’ll move in one continuous direction, a straight line, out of the worst of the grief and into a better, more adjusted place. Yeah. It’s not exactly like that.

I went to the grocery store yesterday and started feeling the fingers of a panic attack clutching at my chest. All I could envision was curling up on the floor by the seltzer water, sobbing behind a big display of Monster energy drinks, and I thought, OK, if I do that, I’m only going to say JWo’s cell phone number over and over, so they call him to come get me. Because I’m not going to tell anyone my father died. Don’t get me wrong – I’m grateful for the sympathy, but I’m exhausted by everything related to the subject. The kind strangers at the Price Chopper can just think I’m insane for no reason at all. Then I thought about how stressful it would be on everyone, including me, and I just held on tighter to my cart and hurried through the store. I bought 27 yogurts. TWENTY-SEVEN. I had to help the cashier count them, twice.

So, as much as my intellect doesn’t want it to be so, it’s pretty clear right now that this process is NOT a straight line. It’s a doodle, that doubles back on itself, that soars high and sinks low, it is a path that is clear and strong and then blurs and fades, but there is not a direct highway between Point A and Point B. I will say this: I’m grateful the whole path is filled with love. It buffers and cushions and reminds you why you must keep walking, no matter how much it feels like you’re going backwards sometimes.

James and I both have put Deluxe Hamster Wheels into our minds, and they are so large, (and shiny! The chrome is just incredible! Leather trim and everything) it’s hard to find any other space to just BE in our heads. I am speaking for him, because even though our wheels may not be the exact same model, I know completely what he’s going through & how difficult they are to extricate oneself from.

Today, my mind skips along like a smooth flat rock on a clear, mirror-surfaced pond. My Hazelden gift of the day reminded me to “Let go, and let God.” Hey, I’m all for it, I’ll let Elmo take over at this point, the challenge is to unclench my mighty knitting-strong fists from the hamster guard rails. So I said it, over and over in my mind, and immediately started changing it. “Let go and let Goddess.” Hm. “Let go, and let GREEN Goddess!” Yum! I love that salad dressing. Boy it’s been a long time since I had some. Huh. Yeah, and it was one of my dad’s favorites, too, and WHEN WHEN WHEN will all roads stop leading back there? I’ve braced myself for this commercialized, celebrated weekend, one I’d orginally planned to go home and give him knitted socks, now I’ve winced and ignored all the blaring reminders to get Dad something good for Father’s Day, but I wasn’t prepared for the salad dressing. And there are a million other things out there, I know, I see him in everything, I hear him in me when I say something sarcastic, and I know, I KNOW this is a way of treasuring him, but I just keep waiting for those moments to feel more like melancholy, more of a wistful smile maybe, not tears streaming down my face AGAIN. I also know I can’t rush it, it would only result in shutting down, and then that’ll come back around much later to bite me in the ass. But I want to rush it and so that’s why I climb on the hamster wheel, the illusion of something to DO.

Well, I’m going to try to stay off the wheel today, and maybe I’ll just keep saying “Let go & let Green Goddess” until I laugh.

If I haven’t utilized all the ways there are to cry, I’m sure I will before the year is out. I most dislike the gaping soundless crying that precedes the gut-wrenching sobbing. I know it’s a relief, it’s letting out grief, but I hate hate hate it. All the anxiety and restless hope that lived like a clawing scrambling ferret in my chest has been replaced by a similar-feeling sense of dread and worry; the future holds many opportunities to sledgehammer me emotionally, I fear some of the practicalities of sorting out the estate, and I am basically being irrational and channeling my lifelong desire to control things, to know what’s going to happen, and to try to impact it.

Deep breaths. Leaky tears. One day at a time.

Right now I’m trying to balance the emotional with the intellect, the sense of peace with the huge sadness, the bracing for what happens next with living in the moment. My eyes droop and I have bouts of crying; last night before sleeping I had borderline hysterical giggles with my husband in the dark. He had turned on a flashlight, and was swirling it around the room; then he started switching it off & on like a strobe, and what else could I do, but dance? And beat-box the club sounds of nnntz nnntz nnntz while doing it. There have been other moments over the past few days, of insane, clear capsules of humor; I know it borders on crazy at times, but it’s also nice to balance the tears with some laughter here and there.

I am so touched, so overwhelmed, so grateful for all the comments, words of support & kindness, understanding and love. I cannot thank everyone enough. I know your kindness would comfort my father, to know that I turned around and saw all of you there, reaching out.