I've been blogging almost a year.  Well, the blog has been an unsteady enterprise, but I've been thinking about blogging for almost a year.  And that means that I am approaching the one year anniversary of my mother's death. 

My first blog was actually supposed to be a bulk email to my friends.  But I had been thinking of using a blog to keep a diary, so I decided to post on Open Salon.  I sent a link to all of my friends, instead of sending a bulk email.  That's how I accidentally discovered that Open Salon was a community.

I posted my first entry the night before my mother died and my second on the day that she died.  And then I received kind notes and condolences from strangers.  Every single one of them meant something to me.  Today, I still find it hard to read those first entries. 

In the last year I have been through some gripping pain and a huge hit of total lethargy.  I managed to post a few decent blog entries.  Today, the pain is less acute and some sort of normal has returned. And, thankfully, I am standing on the brink of a great adventure.  In November, my husband and I are packing up the kids and moving to Dalian, China, for two years. That should provide plenty of blog fodder, shouldn't it?

This year I've been obsessed with capturing all the photos, films, and videos of my mother, and of my entire family, into digital form.  I'm happy with the project (it appeals to the nerd in me), but I still have a long way to go.

This afternoon I received a batch of jpegs that had been created from a box of slides I found at my parents' house.   I don't have a slide projector, so I wasn't sure what all of them would be.  I was surprised to find that most of them are of the person who made the biggest difference this year: my father.  God, I love my old man.

In my family, my mother laughed.  And my father, every minute, every hour, every day, did everything he could to make her laugh. For that alone, I will always love him.  This year he proved to his little girl, again, that he is the strongest man alive.

 Mama and Daddy at the beach

When I was a teenager, I got a chance to attend one of my parents' grown-up parties.  I saw my father in top form.  He drank, he smoked, and he danced and flirted with every woman present.  My mother sat by with a gaggle of friends throwing barbs at him all night. For an uptight teen, this was a horrifying experience!  As an adult, I treasure the memory.

Here's some documentary evidence that this was always the pattern.  None of the women below is Mama.

 Drunk Daddy