To receive...

Is it better to give or receive?? Well, now that all depends, doesn't it?

When I am in dance class, I find my mind wandering. I think about what I have to do when I get home, what I may have to pick up at the market, chores that await, issues at work, all while I'm kick-ball changing or grape-vining left (jazzerterms). My eyes are watching the instructor and my body responds to hers, matching her moves quite effortlessly at this point.

Then something happens. I actually stop thinking. My mind has exhausted all its usual haunts and it finds itself... quiet... Funny to use that term when all around me are dancing women and pounding music. But I am totally in this little node of silence. I am totally receptive. Open to everything around me. It is truly a Zen moment.

pictures

The first thing I did when he passed away was to look for old pictures.

I don't know who the photographer was in those days, but everyone is always squished in the bottom right hand corner and a thumb was just about in every frame.

There is a series of poloroid photos that my dad took of us using the automatic timer. I love these... he was so young and gorgeous. My dad was always gorgeous. (think young Al Pacino) He was 22 when he had me, and couldn't have been more than 26 or 27 in the photos. I was always smiling a giant smile showing you every tooth in my little loud mouth. My grandparents in the background and always around a ravished dinner table. The leather carafe of wine as prominent in every picture as that persistant thumb.

I cleaved to these photos during the wake and the funeral as if my memories were going to be ripped out of my life like my father was.

After the funeral, I was sitting in his kitchen and a friend came over. She's a bit new age, and she said she had been to a psychic. She said her (dead) mother came through and told her,

"Will's here (my dad). He wants you to know that he's okay, and that he chose this to be his time to die. And to keep looking at the pictures... "

No one knew I had those photos in my pocketbook. At least I thought no one did.