ladamic's blog research on information networks and non-researchy random musings

2018/06/15

Missed connections (thinking about my dad)

Filed under: random musings — ladamic @ 14:08

My dad and I sit in the same spot, on a terrace in front of a tiny cottage he and my mom built in Croatia, looking out at sunset after sunset. Only I sit here after his death, and he, of course, sat there before it. I have the many photographs of sunsets (and sunrises) he took in the ten years between when the cottage was built and when he could no longer return to it. There were a number of times we looked at the sunset together, sometimes I think there was even a herd of sheep bleating in the spot where now a mini excavator is parked.

My photo in 2017 on the left, my dad’s in 2013 on the right.

But mostly we watched sunsets separately. Inside, there is the remainder of his vast library, all that could really fit. I recognize several titles I had read recently. In some books I find little scraps of paper. On them, in tidy handwriting, he listed page numbers and a few notes to himself. He treated books with care and hence did not mark them up directly. It’s difficult to decipher from his notes what he thought of the books. Many books don’t have such notes. Had he read them?

Most people must have regrets about things they didn’t do with their dad. One of mine is not having discussed enough books. As with shared sunsets, we did read some of the same books, mostly popular science. But somehow at the time we only discussed them casually, not with the intense interest I have now in asking him about them. I wasn’t the person I am now. Partly it’s that I’ve gotten a few years older. Partly I am a different person because of his death. I’ve lost some interest in TV and written fiction, and have turned to nonfiction books, the stuff of my dad’s shelves. His side tables used to have tall stacks of books he’d be reading simultaneously while following some thread of thought or logic. Because of the non-linear way he approached books, I’m not even sure we could connect over a book’s central theme, but I’d be just as happy to discuss whatever ideas had lead him to pick up the book in the first place.

Speaking of mis-connection, it may be that sunsets were not his favorite time of day, but sunrises (what if the “sunset” above was actually a sunrise??), or perhaps the many shades of blue and gray he photographed even before the sun had risen. This too would have been a nice topic to talk about, but I didn’t spend much time here. The mile one needs to walk out of town to reach the cottage has grown shorter the more I’ve walked it, but at the time it seemed a trek. The various bugs (wasps, mosquitoes, flies) that kept me away, I’ve learned to get along with (the ones I don’t manage to eliminate, that is). As the sheep and mules and horses have moved out and the properties around us are cultivated, the wilderness has retreated a bit as well. I used to not understand why my dad didn’t want to hang out in town and beelined for the cottage as soon as he could, but now I feel much the same way. And again, his death changed things. It is a tiny cottage, and his absence has allowed me to move in in a way I could not have while he occupied it.

I might bemoan the missed connections, but we connected on other interests over the many years we had together: hiking and camping, woodworking, physics, gardening. These days, fortuitously, I enjoy glimpses of my mom and dad’s garden, through his eyes. I had added my dad’s photo album of his and my mom’s garden from the spring of 2003 to my Amazon Photos. That year he was not yet retired, and the cottage was just about completed. Some days I get an “on this day” notification, and it shows me irises and columbines he photographed in Boulder, Colorado in 2003. It’s a nice connection through time. 

Powered by WordPress