Sometimes I can drift back easily to a life I barely know the memories will fill all the edges of my mind. I am in the long ranch home with half peeled off seventies wall paper and dirty yellow beige carpet. Teak wood fills his office tall bookcases a large desk facing out over a picture window. A huge credenza lines the board of the room dividing it from the rest of the house. This would have been the formal living room or perhaps a game room but it wasn’t designed to be an office, that’s how we used it. His form hunched there in his chair facing the computer, sometimes I wondered if he saw the landscape that stretched outside his window, huge tall pines a hill, oaks, a stream, and waterfall, flowers gone wild, a wobbly fence. Did he see the young girl wave when she grinned up at her dad in the window?

In the evenings the main light would usually stream from his computer hunched in the dwindling light he would work. Writing, research, reading I am not sure what all he did, this spiritual man, this educated man, not by school but by himself. Wisdom filled the crinkles in his eyes, but only occasionally would it come out. I was too young.

I can see his face, slight grayness in his cheeks from his facial hair beginning to grow again. I loved his eyes like crystal ponds of blue they danced, or faded away from you, their color though held your gaze. The lines that crinkled in fan shapes at their edges, made you know he smiled, although his smile isn’t something you can remember vividly. You can remember his hands his fingers long and boney, the skin soft, splotched in different colors from some pigmentation color. That’s how you always remembered them. The veins loose and near the surface you could see them as they crisscrossed on their paths.

What I would give to just have one more conversation, but oh the disappointment that would be sure to fill me. I believe in the world of sleep and dreams we can become close to those who have passed, at these moments I am sure we talk at great lengths but only occasional do the memories of these moments together filter to my consciousness in the mornings.

I think about my parents, these two people that came together, that brought me up—strikingly different—and I can see shadows of both of them fill me up. Knowing that there is no doubt that lives, a part of them has been stamped into me, into my essence.