Ghosts and Ancestors

Ben got me a book called Happiness for Humans as a Christmas present. "Part love story, part meditation on the role of AI in our society, Happiness for Humans by P.Z. Reizin is a fun, light romance that also happens to ask some important questions about what it means to be human-and what it means to be in love." Gosh. It might be a good book or a terrible book, but it certainly demonstrates  that he has paid attention to what I am thinking about lately.

He also got me a plastic expandable thingummyjigger that you can us to bring four pints back from the bar. James Oakes - the world's leading gadgeteer - lent me his at a Ruts game earlier this season and I have lusted after it ever since, Chalk another one up to the Bomber's powers of observation. I am humbled.

Springsteen

I'm gonna add this song to our set tonight. Alright, this is the final days of Patti's first pregnancy. And I receive a surprise visit from my father at my home in LA. Now he'd driven 500 miles unannounced to knock on my door, that's his style. So at 11 a.m. we sit Sunday dining room, and we're nursing morning beers, that's his style. That's my father's breakfast of champions. When, my dad, never a talkative man, right, blurted out, "You've been very good to us". And I nodded that, that I had, ya know, and uh, and he says, "And I wasn't very good to you". And, the room just, was, stood still. As to my shock, ya know, the acknowledgeable was being acknowledged, if I, if I didn't know better I would've sworn an apology of some sort was being made, and it was. Here in the last days before I was to become a father, my own father was visiting me to warn me of the mistakes that he had made, and to warn me not to make them with my own children. To release them from the chain of our sins, my fathers of mine and our fathers before, that they may be free, to make their own choices and to live their own lives. We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence. My father, on that day, was petitioning me, for an ancestral role in my life after being a ghost for a long long time. He wanted me to write a new end to our relationship, and he wanted me to be ready for the new beginning that I was about to experience. It was the greatest moment in my life with my dad, and it was all that I needed.