The Urban Pantheist

I wrote myself a note to clean the kitchen table in order to find my health card and the letter from my dad. The health card is the missing piece to making a doctor's appointment, and I was going to use the letter from my dad to post something poignant about a conversation we had.

I more or less cleaned the kitchen table, by which I mean I dug through a year's worth of stacked mail and moved some of it to other rooms and threw a lot of it in the recycling, and did not find my health card but I did find my Dental Insurance card. I figured that there's a chance that I could sign up for an online account with that, and get the ball rolling toward going to the doctor regularly like a grown man (I mean middle aged man). The application to get an online account seemed simple enough but when I got to the bottom to click "next," the blank page reloaded. Start again! After doing that 4 times I gave up.

I couldn't find my dad's letter either. I found a dozen other letters from him from earlier in the year but not that one. Suffice it to say: He documents me being a terse dick. But it's funnier than that sounds.

EDITED TO ADD:
No, wait, I'll tell the story the best I can remember it. My dad wrote it out and it was pretty funny so I'll try to approximate his version.

We were on Sanibel Island driving around, talking about Ding Darling (the cartoonist who managed to get legal protections against development on much of the island) and such when my dad said something like "Anne Morrow was out here at that time too." And then just let it hang there. Now I had no idea who Anne Morrow was, and I didn't really care. I forget what we were up to, but I didn't want to learn new history at that moment, we were trying to do one of our crazy fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants vacation style tasks. Both he and my brother do this, and I probably do too, but if I do please tell me because it's obnoxious: dropping a name or a fact out there, knowing that the person you are talking to probably has no idea what you are talking about. It's a way of dominating the conversation by leaving breadcrumbs that the other person has to pick up in order to complete the thought of the last sentence. Anyway.

I inhaled deeply and said "I don't know who that is."

"Anne Morrow's father was a partner at JP Morgan who became ambassador to Mexico and the Senator from New Jersey. Her mother was president of Smith College, where Anne went before becoming an important author. It was in Mexico that she met Charles Lindbergh, they married and she became a pilot herself. Lindbergh believed that Germany ... politics.... Lindbergh baby Kidnapping...." I confess at this point I dropped the thread of the narrative realizing that we had passed a shortcut.

"Can I stop you there, dad?" He did.

"She was Lindbergh's wife."

"Yes."

"Okay thanks."


My dad's takeaway from this exchange is that he talks too much. I'm not sure that's exactly right; I would say that we each talk a lot, and each have fairly deep interests in very different fields, and would do well to be considerate of one another. Also I diminished the important accomplishments of an important figure in history to simply being the spouse of another important figure in history. We should probably all know Anne Morrow better.

Anyway, thanks Dad! Sorry I was a dick.

This is setting up to be a tremendously horrible day. NO! A little perspective: the family is healthy, the dogs are healthy, the friends are mostly healthy. It's just the goddamned car, which, after 3 short years of it being in my life, has somehow become something i can't do without. I'd switch back to riding my bike right now, but it's not in rideable condition, and the roads are still covered with goddamned snow. I need to look at this, to chill me out:



Ahhh. That's better. If I had a working car I'd take him out for a walk in the snowy woods!

In a way, I'm glad that this slush storm has come, to remind me why it is we MUST leave New England, as much as I love it (well, everything but the weather, and housing costs). I know "there's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing" but I don't own an arctic drysuit. I'm not going to start shopping for clothes at the same places as Coast Guard rescue workers and Bering Strait fishermen, but that's the only appropriate clothes for right now.