At the house on Buffalo Avenue

I’ve been taking a break from blogging lately as I process the radical shift my life has taken recently. I do hope and plan to get back to my more normal posting routine and content in the future, but until then I hope you’ll bear with me just a bit. I’ve had quite a lot on my mind, and I feel like I want to express at least some of it on my blog. Despite all the grief and loss of the past few months, I still feel extremely blessed to be part of the Big Guy’s family, and I’m grateful to have the memories of their warmth and love.

My father-in-law passed away at the end of May, and we spent the first week of June going through his belongings, trying to figure out what to keep and what to let go of. I ended up with a stack of his old notebooks because throwing them away just felt wrong. He was a very prolific writer and a profound thinker — but I sometimes struggled to read his handwriting. When I came across a short piece he wrote more than 25 years ago about the younger of his two sons I really wanted to share it with the Big Guy. I never got the chance, but I believe that the words are still worth sharing.

Christmas 1962

The picture on the wall is really a collage. The pictures are of my son Barry. He was born in 1959 in Fort Worth, Texas. We transplanted him to California in 1962. I didn’t even ask him if he was ready to move. I am afraid there are a lot of things I should have asked him when he was growing up. There are pictures of us going fishing when he was only three. He started at Lake ___, fishing with line and hook, no bait, catching perch. He has been fishing ever since. We used to catch trout, catfish, and a few bass. Then I took him bluegill fishing. We used to fish with bait, because we caught fish to eat. When he was nine or ten I took him salmon fishing on a boat out to the Farallons. He took to it like a trooper, landing his own fish. He caught his limit plus three for some of the adults who didn’t catch their limit.

The pictures of Barry are almost all of Barry and fish. Once he caught a big halibut. We ate some of it he shared.

Now Barry is a bass fisherman. He no longer uses bait but artificial lures. He has a boat that cost more than the house in California where he grew up.

The pictures show that Barry is a very practical individual. His other interest are cars, not new cars, but old cars. He does like fast cars, he chooses Chevrolets. The first car, which I helped him buy, was a Chevrolet. He went to work at a Ford house to help pay for it. He decided that he would make his living as a mechanic and forego college. He changed his mind, and one picture shows him getting his diploma in mechanical engineering. I always wanted a degree in Engineering. Is that why he got the degree? Do our children sometimes end up fulfilling our dreams? I know I was really proud of him and still am.

I suspect that Barry is more proud of all the fish he has caught.