dream

last night i dreamed my old man was giving me a haircut, something he's never ever done (my mom usedta cut my hair when i was a snotnose after i refused to go to the italian barber that my father used). lately he and i have been talking more than we have in a long time. he's starting to lose his memory and can no longer work on the math and physics he loves, so he's taken an interest in what goes on in his neighborhood, and in my life, too. everytime we talk, he'll ask, "do you like your job?" and he thinks that it's good that i do, even though it's only bagging groceries in a supermarket and writing about stuff that maybe 2,000 people in the whole world would give a shit about. we've gotten over being irritants to each other. when we talk, i try to speak with empathy about what i know of his life, and i'm starting to regret all the years when we didn't talk at all. what seemed to my younger self to be self-aggrandizement and work-centeredness seems now, in the fullness of time, to be him doing what he knew how to do to provide us with a good life and a secure future, which is the best any of us can do for their kids, i think. if we're lucky, we get to spend half our lives forgiving our parents for being human, and the rest forgiving ourselves for the same damn thing.