Father's Day, 2018

Michelle texted me a Father's Day greeting this morning, "Kris gets to share Father's Day with Lon today. How wonderful that must be!" I smiled and texted back a little later. But meanwhile, I tried to picture what that might mean, Kris and Lon together in heaven. What that might look like.

Just a few minutes earlier I'd run a computer search on "Lon," looking for a photo to post on Facebook. I got distracted from the photo project, but not before noting that much of what turned up in the search for files with "Lon" in the name were notes I had made about his behavior in the early days of his dementia, when something was going on but nobody seemed to know what. I was trying to document what that something was, so there are a lot of these little files. Perhaps I'll do something with them someday. But today, I thought, I'll open just one, just one and that's it.

So I did, and it was a paragraph about a tricky situation, a parent-teen softball game at church. Kris was planning to go, but he did not want Lon there, for fear of a scene. Lon, however, had read about it in the church bulletin and was making plans--because, hey, he loved softball, he was a great softball player. He was walking around with Kurt's glove and Eliza tried to take it from him. He threatened her with a fist, she had a meltdown, and then he turned into a kind parent explaining condescendingly to her that she should do what big people tell her. She was ten or eleven, and she knew that she was right and he was wrong, but she had not yet learned sometimes we had to let Dad be. And poor Kris, trying to figure out how to manage all this, appealing to me for help. He did not want Lon to be around his friends and their parents, with his craziness and misreadings exposed to others. He was afraid Lon would get angry, would look stupid, that everyone would end up deeply embarrassed.

I remember the day, but I don't remember what finally happened. Whether we outsmarted Lon and kept him from the game (which sounds mean and cowardly, but trust me, you do what you gotta do when you can't reason with people). Or if he actually went and the worst didn't happen--I'm thinking maybe he just watched the game, choosing to sit on the sidelines, aware and afraid that it was all too complicated, too bewildering. Better he should fake it on the sidelines.

So when it came time to imagine Kris and Lon together on the other side--wow. I could picture a six-year-old Kris "wrestling" with Lon on the bed. Or the 12-year-old baseball player whom Lon was so proud of. And then a lot of hard times, a lot of stuff to be angry about, to grieve, and a lot of responsibility that should have been a father's that was shouldered by the oldest son.

Eliza is celebrating Father's Day by watching the Barney tapes that Dad brought home for her when they arrived as preview tapes at the paper in the days when he was a TV critic. Barney and The Brady Bunch are concrete things her dad gave her. Kurt is moving into a new place today, where he will live as he studies to become a physician.

Me? I fled the Barney tapes and tried reading in the back yard. But it's too hot. Came back in and I'm playing music in the living room, louder than "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain" that's playing in Eliza's room. I'm listening to Van Morrison--Lon's favorite artist, but a 2018 album.

Past, present, future for Eliza, me and Kurt. And Lon and Kris living in God's new creation, loved and reconciled and healed.