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I’ll leave it to other people to talk about how swell their dads were, how their dads taught them to fish and play ball and inspired them to be honest and hardworking. I have a different story to tell. It’s a story of how my father mended me, how he stitched up an old, tiny oozing wound, how he held open the screen door after ten years and told me to sit down while he finished making dinner for me and my family.

I sat down in the chair I’d always sat in and I watched him put a bowl of instant mashed potatoes in the microwave and take a turkey loaf out of the oven. One of those cheesecakes out of a box with cherry pie filling on top sat on the counter. He had gone all out.

We ate dinner. After ten years of not seeing or speaking…

I heard Steven messing around in the kitchen. Dishes were clinking and water was splashing and then he was yelling, “What’s wrong with the sink?”

I yelled back, “I don’t know. What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s not draining!”

“It was fine a minute ago.”

“Well it ain’t fine now!”

I thought for a second and offered, “Is something covering the hole?”

I hear him sigh. It was an annoyed sigh that says, ‘of course nothing is covering the hole. The first thing I did was check the damn hole. I’m not an idiot.’

“No.”

Removing food and God-only-knows what from the hole is about the extent of my plumber-knowledge, so I say nothing back. After a few more minutes he yells again.

“I bet those kids put something down the garbage disposal again!”

“Yeah, probably!”

The kids are constantly shoving large quantities of food down the drain. I don’t know…

If I could paint angels
I would paint angels surrounding me
I would paint all the souls I miss every day
Into life and have them here to stay
I would paint them from my heart
So they could be outside me
And I would never throw
The paintings away

Book Number Twelve – Station Eleven by Emily St.John Mandel.

This book has been on my radar for a while now, the first I read of it was in a Buzzfeed article that discussed the novels to look out for this year and I have to say they got it spot on.

It opens with famous actor Arthur Leander dying on stage during a performance of King Lear, that same night a deadly virus, known as the Georgia Flu, touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again. Anyone who contracts the ‘flu’ is usually hospitalised within a couple of hours and dies hours later.

Twenty years on and the novel picks up with the Travelling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors who travel the settlements of survivors and perform for them. When they stop off at a previously visited town, all does not seem…

I don’t do yoga, but I’ve got the pants
I have no rhythm, but I love to dance
Don’t play guitar, but I collect picks
Can’t play drums, but I’ve got the sticks.
I don’t fish at all, but I have a pole
I have the right shoes, but I never bowl.

You just never know what life might demand
So it’s prudent to keep this stuff close at hand.