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A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Updated: September 22, 2023 @ 5:07 am
Edward Seaton, biking the gravel driveway in Coffeyville, Kansas.
Standing in front of the office-paper recycling bin at Howie’s earlier this week, I found myself apologizing: Sorry, Dad, to do this to you. He seemed to answer, actually. Back to that in a minute.
Dad died last December. Since then, we’ve tackled the job of going through his earthly possessions in intermittent bursts. We did quite a bit of it after Mom died, three years ago, but both of them being gone basically means it all has to go, one way or the other.
Quite a bit of the job is simple. Threadbare shirts? Trash. Surplus frozen meat? Breadbasket. Mounds of newspapers? Howie’s. Angie is really good at this, keeping me on task, making solid judgments when I might get mushy-headed.
Photos? That’s tougher, especially when your folks kept all the negatives, the slides and the glossy prints. Eventually we sent them off to a company that digitizes them. It’s not cheap, but, on the other hand, what’s more valuable?
A usually-vacant old house with cardboard file boxes shoved into dark corners can evidently become a brown-recluse haven, though, and so it fell to me to dig through them, work gloves and long sleeves and all. Spiders, Angie cannot do. Period.
I’m only part-way through, but I did manage to get rid of the cardboard. Along the way I decided to pitch the files having to do with Dad’s advocacy for Latin American press freedom. There were collections labeled “Paraguay,” or “Nicaragua,” or “Venezuela.” I couldn’t quite part with the one marked “Cuba,” but most I decided – after combing through representative samples – that there was no point keeping. They were often just news clippings or printed-out e-mails, travel itineraries with illegible handwritten notes.
The thing you might not know is that Dad wrote a book about all that stuff, and so, after consulting with my brother, we figured if it was important enough, it was in that book. He likewise wrote the story of his and mom’s romance, marriage and love. That one is unpublished; someday I may polish it up and offer it to Netflix.
Anyway, after brushing away the spiders, I hauled a couple carloads down to Howie’s. The twinge hit as I dumped all those files into that Dumpster – a life’s work, reduced to paper, just unceremoniously heaved in the bin, set to be turned into, I dunno, disposable coffee cups. Ashes to ashes, I already wrote a column about. This one: Dust to dust.
But out of one of those files fell a little tiny picture, a black-and-white image of my dad, probably at about age 5, riding his bicycle. I felt calmed.
If it was important enough, it was in the book. If it was important enough, it was also somewhere else. That’s what he was telling me.
I have no idea if Dad contemplated the idea of me facing that moment. What I do know is he didn’t leave too many loose threads, and so left me with very few burdens to bear.
The spiders? Well, heck, that’s on me. I should’ve done this months ago, which he was also probably telling me, knowing Dad.
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