The Butcher Goes to Help My Dad

I always get anxious when the Butcher leaves.  And so I’m anxious, because he’s leaving tomorrow.  It will be fine.  It always is.  But still.  I worry he’ll do something stupid or something bad will happen.  I’m not one of those people who gets bad feelings and so the absense of any nagging bad feeling means nothing. 

I only once have had a premonition, and really, it barely counts.  In the moments between the first phone call that my Grandpa B. had had a heart attack and the phone call saying that he had died, I knew he had died.  I saw his funeral as plain as day before me.  I had just gotten my ears pierced and it was the day I took the studs out for the first time and, for some reason, I was having trouble getting them back in (or getting the back back on, I can’t remember, just that it hurt).  And so even though I knew my grandpa was dead, I didn’t cry because I knew that would take me days and I wanted to get the earring back in before I got started on something else.

Each of my piercings became associated with something I wanted to remember.  And I thought by getting them that it would mark me in such a way that I would.  First hole for Grandpa B.  And the fourth hole, the ones that Kimmie did by hand one drunken evening, got infected right before my Uncle B.’s funeral.  The third hole is a pair of earrings I split with my cousin, M., who I thought would be my dear friend forever.  She got one and I got the other.  We don’t really talk anymore.  We don’t really understand each other.

I don’t remember what the other ones were for.  But after they cut me open last fall, the worst feeling, after the nausea was the feeling that my ears were empty of metal and now not only had I lost the things they were meant to mark, I had lost the markers.

Things slip away.  You lose the things you care about.  That’s just how it works.

But always, I am praying “Not yet, not yet.”

My dad is still weak.  And I’m torn between wanting to talk to him every day and not being able to stand how frail he sounds.  I know he’s healing, and that there’s no reason to worry.  But he sounds different to me now, like someone who is too aware that he cannot hold Life’s hand forever and that one day, he will falter and his hand will slip and Life will keep walking, determined, forward, while he stumbles and falls.

The question is whether you pick yourself up after that, and move on without Life, in some different direction.  I hope so, but I just can’t be sure.  I doubt my own experiences, as if they are tricks played on me by a mind that can’t even bother to remember the things we changed form for.