Oops, oops, oops

and other memories I wish could bring to the table

A year ago, when my father shared with me the twelfth draft of his “dadmoir,” I scrolled through the epic narratives of every car he has ever owned right to family.

I’m sure this is akin to flipping to the back of the alumni magazine in years predating electronic connection to learn who had a baby or earned a new degree or died suddenly.

Blah blah blah, new science building, blah blah blah award winning archeological finding, get me to the glue.

The dadmoir is full of mechanical things that are meaningful to my father, but it’s safe to say that he does not use memoir as a mechanism for emotional processing the way I do. His Captain’s Log contains a short chapter dedicated to his mother, Sophie who I met a dozen times before she passed a decade into my life.

I was hoping for the glue - the sticky stuff that holds us together and makes death intolerable for the living - but the chapter is so sparse that it holds only a few acknowledgements of a possibly vacant mother, or a mother whose interests were on the very far side of the Venn diagram.