Chasing

 I've been thinking about the music I loved when I was a kid. Why it still has the most powerful hold on me. Why the deep sense of melancholy haunts even the sunniest of songs. I think it's because the music was a window to a bright world - one which I wasn't sure I could even belong in. Those songs, for me, were like the piece of paper that the wind blows out of your hand; you reach out to grab it but swipe the air instead. You can always see the paper in front of you as every gust carries it further away; you remain as close as you ever were, but the distance between your fingertip and that paper always remains. In that small gap is the fluttering heartbeat that holds all of your childhood longing, hope and love. Yet it also holds the sigh of disappointment and unfulfilled dreams. The drift, the languorous pitter-patter of expectations dashed on the rocks of our lives realities. 

It bears repeating

 So, I will.

I've said on here before that I've been assailed by the sensation that time is a circular construct, that I'm buffeted by memories and all that has been and will be. That's come into even sharper focus over the past two weeks. I'm living everything at the same time. It's exhausting in a psychedelically brilliant way. 

I'm grateful for everything I've done, even if there are a million regrets laced into the cloak of memories that swim around my head. Those regrets are the sharp inhalation before the gentle sigh of senses fired into action by the people and places that define me. 

I think I should post this.

 Though my father was a huge Jazz buff, and that music defined and shaped his entire life, there are other things that I associate with him, too.

Dylan, Simon &Garfunkel, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, Dan Fogelberg. But above all (and rather oddly) Gladys Knight & The Pips. I know there's another post in the archives about GK&TP (a tale from a US tour, IIRC), but this one is just...Dad, really. We both watched this performance in May 1976, and he taped it, too, on his SOny TC-377 Reel-to-Reel tape recorder. This faster, funkier mix (performed and recorded especially for TOTP) was unquestionably his favourite and mine too. As a ten-year-old kid, I loved it; as a nearly sixty-year-old man, I love it even more. Every note is sheer, joyous perfection. 

Well, this terrible year got a lot worse.

 My father passed away on August the 25th. I held his hand as he took his last breath. It's been a year of frustration, pain and anguish: but nothing has come close to this. I keep thinking he's just gone on some sort of temporary journey and will be back. He won't. I think it'll hit me later.

It has focused my mind on so many things - an almost constant churn of ideas, memories and emotions. I suppose I'll be processing this gradually. 

RIP, Dad.