Too Few to Mention
I've started six or seven posts in the last couple of days, even written several paragraphs until my fingers hit Ctrl-F4 and woosh. I don't seem to be in the mood. It happens.
I thought about emulating Meg and making a list, but even that seems beyond my creative capabilities at the moment. So I'm just going to toss out a few things and hope for tomorrow.
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I like to say that I don't waste much time on regret, and in a theoretical sense that's true. Life is a one-way street. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is only an idea, and as anyone who's read science fiction or has any conception at all of chaos theory, the paradoxes involved with just thinking about changing the past can give you a headache. You can't change just one thing without changing every other thing, or so it goes.
Still, I sometimes think if only. If only I'd wandered across the lake to Redmond when we first moved to Seattle in 1983 and looked for a job. Any job. I could have been a janitor at Microsoft and still I'd probably be retired today.
Or AOL. I joined America Online in 1992, and when they went public I could have afforded to buy stock in a company I like, which is what they say you're supposed to do.
And same thing with NetFlix. I am in awe of NetFlix. These guys, a few years ago, in San Jose who saw the future and grabbed it. They knew DVDs were the thing, saw that they were lightweight, easy to mail, going to be inexpensive, and they concentrated on one thing and did it well. When Wal-Mart and Blockbuster got into the game, NetFlix simply dropped its price a couple of bucks and bye-bye Wal-Mart. Blockbuster may stick around awhile, but I suspect NetFlix owns the market for the forseeable future in video rentals. And not only do I wish I'd invested, I wish I'd thought of it.
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Funny story, at least to those of you who know me. A lady called the other day, wanting to know if I'd be interested in assisting her husband and her in putting together a book they can sell at seminars he gives. I was flattered, although at the moment I have no idea whether it's something I want to to do. Still, she said, "I love your sense of humor! It's just like my husband's," and she went on to say she'd found a column I'd written in a newspaper.
"It was the one about your daughter," she said.
oh, yeah, that one
Julie heads for Texas tomorrow. If you're new to this blog, you might want to read this first. It explains a lot that I'm not going to explain again, for lots of reasons.
Beth hasn't been here since early January, eight months, and probably won't until next Christmas. She has a life, a home and a man, not to mention jobs and responsibility. We all miss her terribly, in different ways, but Julie's loss is maybe more acute, in a mother-daughter way.
"She's this little girl from Texas with a BIG voice," was the way my friend David described her to me, back in 1982, when I read her name on the cast list. True, all true. And over the years I've watched my wife sing in concert halls, with Seattle Opera, in British Columbia, in cabarets, in musical comedies, in recitals. I've watched her sing with my infant son in her arms, my daughter in her womb, in radio commercials, in a nightclub, on a CD, and with a world-famous baritone.
On Tuesday night, Julie will sit and watch Beth in her first opera, "The Marriage of Figaro."
Circles, circles. The poignancy of this almost overwhelms me. That, and the regret that I will try not to hold onto, that I couldn't be there too.
But I sent her mother, and that will be enough, I think. There will be other operas. Beth has enough on her plate these days, anyway, without my sentimentality mucking up her moment. And I'll live vicariously through phone calls and the detailed descriptions Julie is oh so capable of.
And when I get to play proud papa in the years ahead, I'll probably tell people that I knew all along, that I always knew, and I'll back that up with stories and only Beth will know the truth, that I never thought about the future way back then, not really. It was only an idea, and yesterday was gone, and all I had was the present, afternoons spent with a little red-haired girl, who refused to believe anyone could lose a shadow and who made me dance with her in the living room, believing as I did that I was the most important thing in her life at that moment, and I was.
7:21:46 AM 
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