This is how I want to remember Dad. Smiling, happy, alive. The last time I saw him his hair was gray, and his face bloated with sad worried eyes. That was when I left Illinois to go to Arizona with Laura. Guess he would be worried. Yet in the last years we weren't so close. His wife Nancy guarded him jealously. However I don't want to think about those sad times.

This is the picture to treasure. And I was so young then, full of almost painful innocence. I remember the night we went to get our pictures taken. A professional photographer came to the church to take the congregation's pictures for a sort of yearbook they were making. I wondered why Gramma didn't want her picture taken with us. She insisted it should be my Dad and I. I chose a brown flecked with turquoise and gold tweed wool blend skirt I'd just made. The silky yellow blouse was new, as well. I'd bought the ivory leaf pin for Gramma when I was a little girl. She didn't wear it much, so I claimed it. I'd always liked it, anyhow.

I was fifteen, and nearly my whole life was ahead of me. I had just begun to question and to wonder.

Do I want to dig further? Is there a pain this picture calls to me? What sort of pain? I feel it, a rawness that lets me know I'm alive. What is causing it? I smile when I look at that sweet youngster that was me. It hurts to look at Dad's picture. He is dead, unreachable except by the haziest of memories. There is such a breach, a tearing away, tore away, for I can't see him, hear him ever again, can't tell him how happy I am and what I'm doing, can't show him my art and poetry. The dead cannot read, cannot hear. The dead are DEAD, dammit. And there's nothing anyone of us can do about it. DEAD is DEAD, no matter what deities you believe in or don't. I'd like to think there is something left of him that would remember, that I could still connect to. But I can't invent something just to make myself feel better.

And so I look at this small picture, It's all I have left now. ALL. It helps when I talk to my Mother over the phone about the past. We touch on this common point of shared memories and it helps. That helps, therein is comfort. Therein is the stretch that spans the ugly chasm. That and nothing else. Our voices which echo across the gray distance and resonate into each others hearts. Anything that spans the gray distance between the islands of our souls, this is the comfort, is the joy, is the reason of life.

Can't sleep, I ate more than I should of delicious pizza, for it was too hot to eat that much. I'm nauseous. My mind is awake, too, reaching for something. What?