The Walker and Faddis families and their friends should all be getting ready for a wedding this evening. Instead, Michelle is in Disneyland with several of her wedding party, Daniel's groomsmen are elsewhere, several members of my family are at a beach in Northern California and I am sitting in front of this computer at home. This is not how it should be. This ought to be a day filled with joy, anticipation and activity. For me it is a somber day. Each of us who were supposed to be in Fremont this evening have been forced by an act we had no control over, to change our plans and spend the day elsewhere.

Michelle and her Mom, Debi, came to visit us last week. While here, Michelle told us it was her plan to spend this day in the Happiest Place on Earth. I encouraged her to do so and am proud that she is there now with her supportive friends. I chose to be alone instead of going with Linda, Holly, Bryan and Judah to Dillon Beach to visit our close friends who would have been at the wedding today. Each of us is where we want to be right now which, in my opinion, is therapeutic. Some might say that my being alone is not a good thing; that I should be around others right now, and not moping about. Being alone is how I best handle my sadness. I am not distracted by what is going on around me. I can cry, or pray or think about the good memories I have of my beloved son whom I miss terribly.

"Our thing" was to quibble about stuff. We each enjoyed pushing each others "buttons." We liked presenting information the other one did not know, no matter how trivial. Each of us ALWAYS wanted to be right. We did not like the same movies, music or TV shows the other one did, mostly due to the generation gap. Yesterday, I was browsing Netflix and saw "glee" in the line-up. This is a show that I have NO INTEREST in and knowing my son as well as I do, knew he wouldn't like it either. Out of curiosity, I watched the pilot from 2009 and thought it was pretty entertaining so I watched a couple more episodes. It occurred to me that Daniel would have ridiculed me for watching even one minute of it. I could just hear him giving me a bad time about it. Well, earlier today, I was texting with Michelle and mentioned this fact to her. She laughed and revealed "glee" was a show Daniel did watch and I busted up laughing. Now, I have to decide if I will watch more of it or not.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Sample Court Report

I have felt like writing lately so I will continue to do so. After yesterday's post regarding my early life, I thought some of you might like to know a bit about what I did as a vocation. I have received a number of compliments regarding my writing ability for which I am grateful. Most people do not know that for many years as a Probation Officer, I wrote reports for the Court. In this job I got a lot of practice as an "Indentured Wordsmith." The following is a fictional account of one such report. The defendant in this case was convicted of attempted robbery. In addition to all the other information required by the Court, the reports I wrote contained information resulting from my own investigation including my interviews of the victim and defendant. Most of the report is who, what, why, where and how, but in the evaluation section, I got to throw in my opinion about what consequences the guy should get. Keep in mind, the defendant had already been convicted which inc
Read more

The Driver

After church this morning I was approached in the foyer by a young man I calculated to be in his mid-thirties. He said he was a visitor and his name was Mike. I learned he is the son-in-law of one of the churches elders and I reckon I was pointed out by someone so he came over to talk to me. Mike said,” I really like reading your blog.” He said it makes him laugh and cry and that some of it is entertaining. Mike mentioned a couple of the entries, one of which included the one about Rick Criscione and I going to Mario’s. He went on to say he hopes I’ll continue to write it. I told him that as long as I can think of things to write about, I will do so. His encouragement has led me to write today’s entry. Back in the summer of 1978, I bought a car from my mother’s friends for $300 and it was one of the coolest rides I have ever owned. It was a 1964 Chrysler New Yorker and somewhere along the way one of my friends dubbed it the “Stanmobile.” To this day, whenever someone talks about tha
Read more
After I retired last year I quickly found myself sitting around with nothing to do. I was bored and unmotivated to find stuff to occupy my time. I watched a lot of TV and surfed the web. Well, I thought that was bad, but this past couple of days have been even worse. I am lethargic and practically non-ambulatory. I realize this is not healthy but I don’t really care. Some friends have tried to get me to go out and do something active but I always decline. I’ve missed the past five weeks of church because I don’t want to face people right now. I’m not ready to take on the next wave of sympathy from those I have not seen face to face since Daniel died. I want to be a hermit right now. I can hear Daniel saying, with that little smirk on his face that indicated he was half kidding me, “Hey, Old Man, why are you letting this get to you so much? Suck it up and move on.” My answer to him would be something like, “Because it’s how I want to be right now and I’ll suck it up when I’m good and
Read more