This post isn’t for you. It’s for me. I’m just sharing it because I made a commitment to myself that I’d put it all out there in this space, whatever goes on in my life. The stupid, the crazy, the fun, the pain. Why? No clue. Probably because I said I was going to do this thing, and I’ve always seen myself as a kind of guy where what you see is what you get. Good or bad.

If you haven’t noticed, I don’t have a great filter on my mind or mouth, and sometimes it’s unfortunate that the two are connected. But it’s who I am and how I am and what I am. I’m the one who has to live with the consequences when that filter malfunctions, and I can take it. In my mind, I can take anything. And I don’t really give a fuck about other people’s minds. So you get to hear what I’m honestly thinking.

Anyway, about why this post is for me.

I got up this morning and scrambled, looking for a story I wrote about my dad in the one English class I took in college. At the end of my freshman year (we were on tri-mesters, so it was spring session), I had to take an English class. It was mandatory for all freshmen, and I put it off till the last session. It was one of the few A’s I received in college. And that class 20 years ago was the one, only and last writing/English/journalism class I ever took. As if that doesn’t show, I know.

So for an assignment, I wrote this story about my high school graduation and I kept a printed copy. It’s one page, double spaced on the old copy paper, printed on a dot matrix printer. I remember the computer room in my dorm that I wrote it in. On a big box IMB with the huge green, blinking screens and everything was DOS based. Yes, this was even before there was Internet. Oh, the humanity.

I don’t know why I’ve kept it all these years, but I think it was because I knew that someday I would share it with others, just because I could. It’s nothing that’s going to win a prize, but, hey, I was 18 years old, two years removed from my father’s death.

Which brings me to today. Today, it has been 22 years since he died. I had a semi-meltdown this morning when I thought I had missed it. “Working” at home as a “freelancer” has thrown my calendar all off and I have no idea what day or date it is. So I thought today was actually Aug. 8. And that I had missed the date.

But the funeral program, which I found when looking for this story, listed his age as 56 and the date of death was Aug. 7, 1988, making today the anniversary of his death. And as all Cubs fans unfortunately know, his death came the day before the lights went on at Wrigley. What a terrible fucking week it was.

Twenty-two years later and I can remember every single motion I went through the night I got the call. I was 16 and had moved out of his house two months earlier. I was in the basement at my mother’s house. I answered the phone by the bar, which held me up when I heard the news. Heart attack. I remember every damn thing for the rest of that night like it happened an hour ago. The crazy fast drive to the hospital, running red lights. The waiting room. The doctor telling us. The wall and how it felt with my fist going into it. The crying. Seeing him on the cart. All of that shit.

Now, even though this post is for me, take a minute right now, not later, and do yourself a favor. Tell the ones you love, who really make your world spin and get your groove on and rock your balls, tell them how much you love them. And that you appreciate them. You won’t regret it. Because if you don’t do it now, you might regret it later.

So, with that, here is the story I wrote in 1990. The grammar, punctuation and editing be damned. This is exactly how I turned it in, and shows how bad the other shit was that the professor had to grade because this was an A+ paper.

Oh, and fuck off if you don’t like the tearjerker shit. This one isn’t for you. Peace.

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His Eyes

As soon as I walked into the auditorium, I knew right where he was. He was sitting at the top of the bleachers, like I knew he would. He kept to himself. When everyone applauded, he applauded, when everyone was quiet, so was he. He was just waiting, like me.

It was my turn. I stood up, with my row, and walked forward. My heart beat faster, and as I looked at him, I knew his was too. I could see it all in his eyes. They were not like anyone else’s eyes were to me. I could see all the pride, joy, and happiness all at once in my father’s eyes. His were the only ones that I felt were watching me. His were the only ones that mattered.

After I received my diploma and was walking back to my seat, the realization hit me. It hurt. I finally realized that I was the only one that knew that he was there. Nobody else knew. To everyone else, he had died over a year ago, but to me he was there that day. It hurt because I could not share the joy of seeing the look on my father’s face with everyone else. His eyes told everything and I wanted everyone to see them for themself. Then I realized that all of my friends could see that look too. At that moment I knew that all of them could see in their parent’s faces exactly what I could on my father’s face and that made me very happy. Once he saw how happy I was after realizing this, there was an even more special glow in those eyes and then I was happy that I was the only one that could see his eyes.