Soon it’ll be three years of me putting words in this space once a week. The action has kept my writing muscle limber because even when I haven’t felt I’ve had anything to say, something has come. But yet, I don’t want to ever just be filling up the squares without a reason for them to be filled. Gawd knows, the thoughts don’t need to be ocean-bottom deep. I have no problem skipping stones along the surface as long as there’s a surface and a stone that holds either meaning or entertainment or some-such reason for existence.

Never have I lived a more day-to-day, hour-to-hour existence emotionally, which is pretty damn clarifying. Practically, I have good solid money-making work dates on my 2023 calendar and that’s an anchor I’m happy about. The moment-to-moment bits are around my dad and not because he’s in any kind of crisis at all but more because he lives in a space of being acutely aware of not being acutely aware. Though it’s not seeming to bother him as much as it used to. Not like it did when he would realize conversations at 8 a.m. were disappeared by 9. Back then—August—he would get a panicked look in his eyes. Now there’s a kind of humor. An I Can’t Remember Anything shrug. I’m currently feeling my way away from paralyzing worry and more into some stand-up Yes/And moments with him. For example: Dennis and I had an early Thanksgiving dinner with him since D would be gone on the actual day. Somewhere inside of the appetizer-cocktail hour, my dad decided this dinner was in honor of Dennis’s birthday. Naturally, we went with it. It was sweet actually. Short of not having birthday candles or presents, the whole thing was celebratory. On the actual Thanksgiving day, though, he and I went out to eat and that’s where reality entered and felt all wrong. The sheen of discomfort from both he and I around movement in crowded spaces, being patient while waiting for our table, communicating in a loud environment was tense. Probably more for me than him given I’d had this idea of our night out as being a treat. A special outing. And so, just about the time a group of young vibrant things came rolling up fast behind us on the sidewalk and there was jostling as they passed, and I shot laser beams out of my eyes at them hoping they would go up in smoke, it dawned on me that this night was a rocky pass. But I also realized that I’d been that klutch of kids four-or-so decades ago. To be fair, there’s not a lot of reasons they should be hyperaware of age and fragility moment to moment. That’s more of an acquired life-lived kind of thing.

As a new calendar year approaches, I take a little stock. Mostly of what seems concrete, which is just that I’m here. That he’s here. That hours do pass and situations do happen. There can be some lightness to the gravity. A technicolor world of dayGlo jello thoughts and build your own adventure explorations. No black and white. The boundaries blur, the shifting sands roll, I pull up my socks and away we go. More stories to come.