Part 4.   comedy is easy.  family is hard.

Unsettled

Visiting my brother Scott and his wife Tammy last night and talking about my late father and it quickly becomes apparent that we had different fathers.   We have always known this.   The conversation gets a little heated.  

Because Scott is an airline pilot, he has spent his entire life with our father, easily visiting over the years.   A lifetime relationship.   I on the other hand, only had contact with our father twice in the last 35 years of his life, despite me writing to him over the years, and never getting a response.    Hard to take.   With me and my sister Jill, he chose not to spend his life with us, and gave up having a relationship with not only us, but with our kids as well.   To his own detriment, of course, but painful for us nonetheless.  He just never made the effort, or seemed to care, like you would imagine any other normal person would do.  Not the father we had hoped for.   Like I said, Scott and I had different fathers.

Consequently, even though we can talk objectively about everything else, whenever I speak frankly about the callous things our father did, my brother gets upset.  "Why can't you just be positive?".     I sort of understand this, because if someone wanted to speak "objectively" about my kids, I would tell them to JUST STOP.      I don't need that kind of objectivity.   That was Scott last night in a nutshell.    The odd twist in all this is that people in my family are known to be frank and direct with each other, and sometimes not stopping when asked to.    Maybe I was a little guilty of this last night. m. culpa.

Prescott

When Tamale and I showed up in Prescott in late June, there was lots to do.   Lots of clearing brush, lawn chairs needing fixing and painting, pavement work, etc.    I was there for almost 3 weeks keeping busy with projects.    Tamale and I had the whole downstairs to the house,  and I wanted to be there long enough for her to adjust to the house, my sister Jill, her husband Joe and son Cody, and especially to living a life as an indoor cat once I took off for a substantial portion of the summer.  

Tamale is about 3 1/2 and has always been an outdoor cat in Oregon, and has always gotten good attention from me, and it is only the two of us in the house in Bandon, so I had some slight anxiety in her learning to adapt to a new house, family and environment.   My sister and her family have always been great animal people, so it was a perfect environment to give it a try.

I was going to say that Prescott seems to be a town in transition, from being a desert/ranch/cowboy town, to being a tourist/retirement town full of wealthy retirees from Phoenix and California, but I now realize that to apply a "transition" tag to any town, or anything for that matter, is only  commenting on a state that we are all constantly in.   We are all always in a state of transition.    

Where I live in Bandon now is very similar structurally to Prescott, in the sense that it is also transitioning from logging/fishing to retiree/tourism - as tends to happen to pretty towns - from an older world, to a newer one.  Hence the expression that the only thing Constant is Change.   

For myself, I am transitioning STILL from being a dad to being alone again in life, similar to how I was for a bit in my 20s.      This summer walkabout a weird exercise and a re-visitation to how I used to live my life 40 years ago.  On the road.   Wandering.  The surprise not surprise is that it has not been what I expected.   Similar life.  Different person.   Never Be Afraid the 20 year old said, gazing into his future.   The 65 year old responds: I Am Trying.