Judecorp.

It's my fifth fatherless Father's Day. Here is a picture of my father dancing with my Jennifer at my brother's wedding.



I think he would have dug Punk. (Who doesn't, really?)

So Father's Day is next weekend, and I'm finding myself at a bit of a loss.

It's been four years now since my father died, and now it's been two months (yesterday) since my grandfather died. I am so used to at least celebrating /something/ for Father's Day, and now what? It's been four years since I bought anything for my father, and now I don't even have to scout around for that perfect gift for Grandpa. Super sad.

Jen's father is alive (and well), but I don't usually take responsibility for that - she usually gets a card or whatever and I always concentrated on my side of the family. And I can't imagine not having Punk do some little Father's Day thing. I'm sure they will make something at day care (not sure; we started after Father's Day last year) and then what do we do with it?

My mother has been married to a man for 24 years. I do not consider him a father figure. Is that odd? This man has been in my life for 24+ years. I have never called him my step-father, only my "mother's husband." I did not live with them. I did not spend a ton of time with him. I saw my mother on Saturdays and John was often working. He was not parental; it was not his thing. He refers to himself as "Poppa John" WRT Punk. (Not to be confused with the pizza, I suppose.)

Should I send him something from Punk? I didn't last year. I have never sent him anything Father's Day related from myself. But when it comes to my side of the family now, he is the only grandfather-ly person Punk has.

That feels so odd to me. Fatherless on Father's Day. Punk has always been fatherless and I know how to deal with that, because we planned for that... but not for me.

Phooey.

Yesterday my dad would have turned 61 years old. Happy birthday, Dad.

The thought of him never getting to be a grandfather never gets easier.

My dad would have been 60 years old today.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Two years ago last night I did one of the most difficult things I've ever done - I signed my father's DNR. I spent that night completely unable to sleep, so sure the phone was going to ring with "the news" before my brother could get into town. I think at one point, while I was signing, I actually told the witness on the DL that my brother was scheduled to come the next afternoon, so, you know, they could, you know.

But we didn't get the call, and Dad held on until Rick got to spend a couple of minutes in the room, which was and still is a great source of comfort to me. They didn't always have the greatest of relationships and I just didn't want things to go down that way. Dad and I were always closer, I suppose, than Dad and Rick, and in fact, I couldn't really stay in the room at all when he was in the ICU because every time I was around, he got incredibly agitated. I was worried that somehow I would do him in, so I took a backseat to all of the other visitors and goodbye-sayers.

It's so hard to know, sometimes, that my Jennifer and I are only really able to be where we are today - with a house of our own in a new town and a baby on the way - because we lost my Dad. It's hard because out of everyone in my family, I think he would have been the most tickled on both counts, house and baby. Dad always wanted me to have a baby, and while he was cool with the fact that I told him it would never happen, I think he held out a secret hope. And I think he gets some pleasure out of being right, but I bet he wishes he had the opportunity to be a grandfather.

Now that having a baby is right around the proverbial corner and I can't imagine going back, I guess I have to understand that things happen for a reason and all we can do is go forward and make the best of everything. But that sure doesn't mean I don't wish I could have both, and I know we would have found a way to make it work. You sure didn't have to die to con me into having a baby, you stubborn, irreverent man. ;)



I suppose in a lot of ways it's fitting that Jen and I are going to a baseball game this evening. It was somewhat of a coincidence, I suppose, but one of which I won't miss the significance.

While fun, the game last night was so, so painful. The Sox were just losing, losing, losing. They were down 7-2 in the 7th and by the time the 8th inning came around, the A's just kept scoring runs. So frustrating. When the A's had scored 6 runs in the 8th, we decided it was time to start ambling out of the park. And as we walked out, they got 2 more. *sigh*

It was kind of sad to be at the game last night. I've only ever been to two Red Sox games without my dad in my entire life - last night's and one time in 1998 with this dude from grad school. The last baseball game of any kind that I went to was when Jen and I took Dad and Grandpa for Fathers' Day in 2004 - Dad's last Fathers' Day. It felt weird to be there without him. I could just picture what he would look like there, what he would say to the players, how he would clap and when. I imagine him tossing encouragements to the godawful Sox last night, and every so often I would hear echoes of him throughout our section. "Come on, Manny, hit one for my kid," or "This is his time, he's due," or my personal favorite, the heckler of an unfortunate A's player named Perez who watched his batting average go from .098 to .095 throughout the game. "A 95 batting average? WHAAAAAA?!!?!?!" Poor Perez.

That was definitely a "for the television" game for sure, with the sticky humidity, the hot temps, the lack of breeze, and the dismal score. Not to mention the lack of Dad. But hey, it was a good time anyway. I sure can dig some baseball.

~//~

Heading off to the beach with Coworker Marti Maraschino and Coworker Funk. I think it's awesome that Marti Maraschino is all about calling people last minute to make plans. I can dig it. Also, Movie Club tonight. HIIIIIIII-YAH!

Jen and I had just moved to Boston a few weeks prior, but we splurged and spent gaggles of money that we didn't have (we didn't have jobs yet) to get 4 tickets to an afternoon Red Sox game - Father's Day presents for my father and grandfather. Grandpa, Dad, my brother and I caught at least one Sox game every summer with the Freemasons and numerous games in Pawtucket (Red Sox AA team) when I was a young person. The Masons stopped taking trips when I was a teenager because it was getting too expensive.

At the time, it seemed so important to do this, to buy these tickets and convince my dad to drive my grandfather up, because we didn't know if we'd ever get another chance to go to a game with my grandfather. He's 88, after all, and though he is pretty healthy you just never know. We didn't want to miss an opportunity to have a Fenway Father's Day with Grandpa and regret it later.

I didn't know how wrong and how right I was. The Sox finally won a World Series in 2004 and the team was positively on fire. The crowd was crazy. We had a great time. It was the last Father's Day gift I would ever buy for my Dad.

And I think it was possibly his favorite.

My Jennifer is awesome. She spent a good chunk of last night freaking out on my behalf because I was so pale that my lips were white after the whole triple-sticking fiasco. And this morning she woke up enough to hold me and tell me that I didn't ruin everything by messing up the shot. (Someone elsewhere online told me they think the Ovidrel needles are freakishly dull. I'm starting to believe that's true.) She was excited when I told her that I got a positive pregnancy test to show that the trigger was in there. She sweetly answered my, "What if this screws up my monitor?" randomness with, "We'll buy another one." She's the queen of the quick answer.

Maybe I'm just exceptionally sentimental right now because my body is all full of hCG and I just watched the last episode of Seventh Heaven. Man, those Camdens make me want to shout my love from the rooftops, apparently. And think about random sentimental things.

We're getting pretty close to the first anniversary of my dad's death. And I miss my dad. There's rarely a day that goes by that I don't think of something he would want to know about - stupid things, mostly. And tons of experiences I wish we'd be planning right now - like maybe another trip to Yankee Stadium for a Red Sox/Yanks showdown, or that cruise he said he wanted to plan someday. Heck, even imagining what sort of infuriating off-color remarks he would make about our babymaking process makes me wistful.

The sad truth, though, is that my dad's death is what's making this whole endeavor truly possible. Well, Blue Cross Blue Shield is helping, too, I suppose. But the little things he's left behind for us allow us to think about things like maternity leave and expenses. And that's huge. I always knew I'd never be the recipient of some outlandish inheritance - we're simple folks, after all - but I never imagined I'd be gifted with the ability to lay a foundation for two hand-to-mouth married girls to coast by on this rollercoaster.

And I know he didn't plan it this way, and I know that given a choice, we'd all prefer his presence to his safety net. But part of me seeks comfort in the fact that he's in all of this somehow, that his hand has dipped into the well of this process. And I think he'd be pretty effing excited.

Ugh, I wish I could stop coughing. That is really getting annoying and my voice sounds so craptacular. Yuck.

Yesterday morning when I didn't go to work, I was tooling around on the internet and decided to check classmates.com, which I do about once a year. I had a message there from this girl I used to hang out with in junior high school. She'd contacted me once before through classmates a couple of years ago, but this message was from August and was something like, "I heard something about your dad and I want to know if it's true, please tell me how I can get in touch with you!" And so I wrote back with my e-mail address and a little note that said, "To whatever you heard, the answer is yes." So now she has started e-mailing me, which is cool.

So one of her e-mails said that she'd talked to my brother a while back and heard I got married. So I wrote back and said that yes, I'd gotten married right before my dad died, blah blah blah, and I attached one of the photos Patti took of Jen and me, and made some other chit chat. I got another e-mail from her this afternoon congratulating me on getting married, and asking about what my last name is now, and the best part was, "So what's your man's name?"

Holy crap, I laughed so hard I nearly pooped my pants.

I wrote back, "I don't have a man, silly, I have a wife! And her name is Jennifer. And I'm sorry that I assumed that you knew that but I just realized that I never thought about how far back you might have talked to my brother... because a million years ago I was married to a dude named Aaron who still lives in Ohio and just bought a house with his girlfriend. Oops."

I haven't heard anything back yet. Heh.

Never fill in a bunch of friends/relatives into those "Birthday Reminder" e-mail thingers. Because then you'll get a million reminders about your late father's upcoming birthday. And really, who needs that?

We were supposed to go to Mindy's holiday party today but we never quite got around to doing everything we needed to do in the morning/early afternoon so we could go. I spent a good chunk of time in the morning chiseling the huge-ass hunks of ice out of the parking spot so we have a nice clean area for the car, but by the time it got to be that "we should seriously start getting things together if we're going to that party" time, we still hadn't done anything else we were supposed to do, like pick up Jen's dry cleaning or wrap holiday gifts or write out more holiday cards or get a Christmas tree. So we decided to skip the party instead of figure out how to frantically get this stuff done when we got home. Plus, we were in terrible moods which doesn't really make for good party-going. So, bummer.

I realized today that two of the holiday gifts I ordered online must have gotten lost in the mail, since the website said they were shipped on 12-01 and the USPS tracking number came up as a bad number. So I had to talk to customer service and they have to put a trace on my package, which takes up to 10 business days, so I had to cancel the damned order because those lost items needed to be wrapped and mailed to NJ and SC. So now we have to find new gifts at a store somewhere so we can start mailing out these packages. Also bummer.

I did so many more holiday cards while watching "A Very Brady Christmas" that the pen/marker I was using is completely dried out. Sucks, cause I still have more cards to do. I found all of the received cards from last year and so many freaking people moved that I don't know what I'm going to do. I found a couple of people's updated addresses on LJ but I don't really have the energy to go on an address hunt. After the cards I cleaned up a little bit and then started making a big vat of chili to take to Coworker Gina's tomorrow for the Survivor finale. Jen started the laundry so there's not so much to do tomorrow, because tomorrow's shaping up to be a day of pain:

Get up early, put the crock pot of chili on, run to some store or other looking for replacement gifts. Go to RI - wipe dad's computer clean, bring monitor and TV to grandparents' house for them, bring china to grandparents' house for storage, load car full of more of my/dad's stuff that is coming to live here, tidy up a little more in preparation for estate folks, visit with grandparents briefly, run back up to Boston to get chili and stuff together, go to Gina's, come home and finish laundry.

This is definitely a "Bah Humbug" holiday season for me.