Three and a half months

A few days ago, I woke in the morning after a dream where I had been with my dad in Wisconsin.  He had been sitting on the sofa positioned in the way it had been for years until last summer.  After this dream, I felt as if I were dwelling in a cloud of sadness.  It is March.  My dad passed in November, and ...  I wish I had words for this.  I am crying now perhaps more than I did then. 

Part of me wonders if this is borrowed sadness.  Sandy, my dad's wife, posted on FB that tomorrow will be the anniversary of her infamous first date with my father in 1988!  This would be the date where my father's wardrobe made...  quite an impression.  Luckily, she looked past this and the rest is now history.

I feel as if I see my father in everything right now.  In see him in his books on my shelves.  I see him in the mattress pad that Paul washed and that my dad bought for me once.  I see him in cleaning out my old car for sale and finding an old cassette tape that he gave me on my seventeenth or eighteenth birthday.  I see him in my desire to mange my finances well.  I see him in Elsa the dog, to whom he took a great liking and remembered longer than anyone else he met so late in life. 

Yesterday, I took to watching a mindless serial TV program from the 60's on netflix while I worked on things.  This morning I did that again, but with the realization that I've been doing this to cover everything up.  Recently, my life has finally slowed down a bit from the fever pace it had been going at since September.  It is good to have time to be a little slower and perhaps a little more real, but at the same time - other than over the Thanksgiving holiday - I really haven't stopped since my dad died.  Work and activity, all of this going and going.  I did kind of resent it yet I enjoyed and craved it, too.  Now with just a bit of spaciousness, I feel as if I've been left in a room with everything else cleared out except a certain sadness that I had been avoiding.

Even now meeting this sadness feels like an indulgence.  In an hour and a half, I must leave for a concert.  I have to sing and sing well. Maybe I just need to turn that 1960's serial back on to have something to put back in front of that sadness.