Sandcastles

Strange week. I went to a shrink a couple days ago, first time in my life. My dad won't get any help for drinking so I figured *I* could probably use some. Here's the twist: 35 years ago this shrink was cheating on her husband with my dad. He was younger than me back then. Sorta goofy, huh? I'd never had a conversation with this woman in my life up until she met me in the hallway of her apartment. My dad was younger than me when she finally left her husband to be with him, but by then he'd met my mom. Now my parents split 22 years ago, but he never went with another girl. He found other things I guess.

I couldn't put my finger on what I was really looking for from this lady. "Yo, why don't I want to live forever anymore? Or even to a hundred." I kept that one to myself. It's a sorta lie, anyway. I still do half the time.

Other stuff is going on, but I don't have a beef with it. My best friend got on a plane. Which got me thinking:

In some ways 1993-2008 has been a single conversation with Dan lasting 15 years, with interruptions...

It's spooky when you've seen the little 5 year old version of somebody and they've seen yours. Long before you knew how to build up walls or motes around your castle. Before you set up the intercom to your ivory towers. Before you had dungeons and vaults. Before anything that mattered to you had an address that anyone understood. These people know the score on all your little social and personal triumphs and banana peels. They saw how you changed when somebody was there to hold your hand and what you looked like when everybody laughed. Maybe they even saw how you moved alone. You met some of these people halfway and they could identify your speck in a crowd of specks, even if a summer blurred it or a snow that shut down school was whiting out the whole world for a week. Some stuff happens. If they moved from THEIR childhood home yours might've become the surrogate. All the points of reference along the way, the whole emotional shorthand you're working off, that face delivering a whole wing of the Prado or the Louvre sometimes. They have some secret ingredient in them that exposes all the invisible ink of your personal history. Gosh, I never ate a thing my mom cooked aside from Hungarian crepes, but I never turned down anything Dan's mom offered. Hers is still the only dinner table I've ever sat at because I wanted to. It just looked right. And she made him. How couldn't I trust her?

Some moments never lose their wrapping paper. You just get to keep tearing that shit open every time you think about it. Funny how this stuff goes sometimes. This shrink cried 3 times, me zero. Here's a couple:

"I'm 67, Brin. I was married to a man for 23 years, had his children. But your dad was the closest I came to a husband."

I asked why it didn't work with my dad.

"One of the reasons was that I knew how much he wanted YOU. A family. I had two kids with my husband and after the second child there were complications and I couldn't have another child. I couldn't share that miracle with your father. I couldn't offer that and I knew how much he wanted that. I knew how important that was to his life. And I was scared of so much in those days."

I was scared for the last while even though in a bunch of ways I've never been more content. For the first time I had this sinking feeling my dad was waiting around to die.

My last name, Friesen, is Dutch. It means DIKE BUILDER. Which seems like a nice place for a bloodline to start if you're interested in building stories. Here's one:

Me and my dad, when I was a little kid, used to go the beach ever summer when the tide was out and build dams and sand castles. We'd flip a coin for who got to build which. And the game was, once the tide got close, defending the castle from the dam once you broke it. If the guy who released the dam couldn't demolish the castle he lost and the defender of the castle won.

I remember having this odd feeling shoveling the sand and picking up handfuls, shaping and taking care in building the castle. Especially spooky feeling making the castle beautiful, giving it a signature of some kind, putting up little ornate towers with wet sand. Because whether or not the dam's flood took me out, the tide WOULD only a few minutes later. So what was the point? You were fucked. It seemed like a very sad exercise.

I don't think I really got it until I heard about that orchestra on the Titanic after it was clear the unsinkable ship was going down. Not many options, fellas. Sorry. Enjoyed your music, but no life boats for you. So, you can run screaming or pray or try and steal a boat from a woman or a kid but I don't think that's gonna work out too well for you. Or you can do what you're here to do and play.

I wonder what they played.

I went for a walk with my dad yesterday. The leaves are all changing color and Queen Elizabeth park has a lot of places we've been over the years that we're fond of. There were still some ducks left over at the pond. The paths through the garden have squirrels hopping around stocking up for what's coming pretty soon.

I mentioned about that shrink to my dad near the end of the walk. He knew I'd gone to see her. He knew it wasn't about being all long-distance with my girlfriend but about him. Which caught him off guard initially. I told him about when the shrink cried because she couldn't have his child. His face went open for a second before he smiled a little and shook his head.

"I never knew that."