Happy Birthday, Pops

Today, my dad would have turned 75 years old. It’s peculiar, demarcating in time someone who is no longer hostage to it. He can be, in my thinking, in yours, in anyone’s, whichever version of him we all choose to conjure. I have been remembering this photograph of Mom & Dad in Anchorage during their first visit north. They are standing on a sidewalk downtown, their arms around one another, smiling, & a potted plant hung from the soffit hangs right beside Dad’s head. Every picture of them in Alaska, they wore the same sort of grin, partaking of the same sort of easy mirth. 

What struck me this morning is that thirteen years ago to the day, I left Washington state with my old mutt Willa in the passenger seat of a used Ford Explorer we’d just bought, heading for Homer. I made two calls before we hit Canada-- one to Adam to wish Harper a happy birthday, & one to my Dad to do the same. 

Two months ago, when Dad was home in hospice & we were filtering in & out of his room to say everything that we wanted or needed to say, we talked about that decision, years ago. He told me he was jealous as hell, that he’d only wished he’d been able to spend more time up there with us, that he thought we were batshit crazy but that he was proud of how hard we had worked, how much we had accomplished. He knew our compass pointed back that way. 

He bought us a GoPro years ago, when he knew that his particular cocktail of maladies would prevent him from coming up anymore. I used it a while, then started just sending short videos from time to time, a way of inviting he & Mom along on the runners or along a ridgeline of a long run. I didn’t do it as often as I should have, but then I suppose one has to live the thing without documenting it all the time. Now I think about heading back home to Alaska & how it will feel so very different this time around. How I won’t be hoping to capture it to convey, but rather regarding in its vastness the hope that he’ll make it up there in whatever form again, to fly among the Arrigetch or wind down the Noatak, wend into the borealis, to see our children grow in that beautiful landscap, laughing & loving. I think of him as utterly free now, after so many years of trial. I want to be sad but I know he would dismiss sadness today as unproductive. So instead, I’ll think on him smiling & laughing & asking a thousand absurd questions about esoteric shit no one could possibly comprehend. I’ll think of his joy in looking at Whitman, of how much of a charming son of a bitch he could be. I’ll think of him pissing me off when I was a kid & then tickling me to make me laugh & how I would let go of all of my anger. I’ll think of him running along a beige suburban neighborhood sidewalk wearing an oversize Arrested Development t-shirt tie-dyed in a rastafarian palette. Drinking wine in California & hiking among the big trees. Sitting in the scattered audience of our horrible rock bands when we were kids with green hair & thrift shop clothes, nodding along. Of him singing “its a small world after all” seemingly ad infinitum for the entirety of my life, as if it was the only song he knew. & then, in years to come, I’ll think of him in the vast & unbroken enchantments of the wild places we find, unfettered, undiminished by disease, shot from the centering confine of that wheelchair through every rippling circumference of possibility & distance & time, soaring, soaring & gone. 

Happy birthday, Pops.