Driving Solo

It was a gorgeous morning. The lake to the left of me looked energetic and sparkling, with a sky that was quickly opening to a full bright blue expanse. It was hard to believe that it was mid February, the forecast was for 60 degrees Fahrenheit with full sun. Ha! This was a few degrees warmer that it was in Dallas, Texas! I was happy with this non- winter in this part of the country. We had our share of bizarrely cold and snowy winters with up to 3 feet of snow, this was a fun break form the norm. I thought of my friend Driss, and how his communications just stopped after this New Year, and the intellectual and cultural connection I had so enjoyed with him led me to think of my father. For some reason, I thought of both of them often when I was driving by myself. My father loved driving through the US, loved traveling in this vast country as often as he could. He felt traveling through it was the only way to try to understand its complex history and soul. It was odd how little traveling I had done since moving to Washington State. My husband is close to retiring age, and he often talks about how nice it will be to be able to travel both in the US and abroad. I look forward to that time, and I know it will bring my father's memory to the foreground, and that will be bittersweet, since he is the one who made it possible for me to study here and make this country ultimately my home with my American husband and son. My father died in Belgium, after having lived in the US for over 10 years, when my mother decided to abandon him to a fate of loneliness and isolation until his death in 2008, after a battle of 7 years with the devastating illness of Alzheimer's. The man who engineered our ability to live here, died alone and estranged from his American dream. That can really make me sad at times, and feel both bewildered and numb. My father grew up during World War II, and saw his mother and sisters struggle after his father died suddenly in 1943, when my father was 14. He was suddenly the man of the house, which he apparently handled with mixed enthusiasm, something I only learned of very recently. I guess it should not have come to me as a surprise that my father was a flawed human being. It however does not change the fact that I often miss my father, not emotionally, because we were never close that way, it was not within him to say " I love you", not even once, but I did have a good intellectual connection with him, and I learned my love of books, history and traveling from him. I wish he had enjoyed a good marriage to my mother who was a nightmare for him in his later years, and I wish he had lived to a ripe old age, healthy, feisty, able to live and travel through the US he loved so passionately. It was not to be. By the time my mother was done with our family, he was wasting away alone in an Alzheimer's center in Belgium, cared for and watched over by his three sisters; my mother had succumbed to delusions of grandeur and alcoholism; my youngest sister had committed suicide; my other sister had died of cancer at 44 under very stressful circumstances in her marriage; my brother and I became permanently estranged under the fallout of my mother's divide and rule empire. So the idea of thinking of my father talking to me about a trip he was planning for us is deeply moving to me. A fantasy I know, but fantasies have their place, and in this case, it is a bit of medicine, a bit of healing for my heart and mind, to think of my father and I just hanging out with my husband and son, as I was driving home and I imaginded us planning a weekend excursion together. I know, we would have to put up with his picky palette and his at times annoying habits, but I would take those any day, just to see him one more time, just to talk to him one more time. Not about our disastrous family, but about the many books on the American West, on Native American history, and legends, and art he had read and pass a pleasant afternoon together just picking his vast and intelligent mind. As it was, thinking about a time like that with him was in the past and in my memories, it was no longer a thing of the present or the future, I was deeply aware, as I drove home on this beautiful morning that felt like spring in the middle of winter.