I had a lovely, longish talk last night with my brother Major’s daughter by Gayle. Named after me, Sloan calls me from time to time just to talk. Maybe she calls because she knows she can talk with me about anything and I won’t give her a hard time. She’s pretty darn funny to talk with, not much she won’t say. Must be my Bashinsky genes that she ended up with, and maybe her Uncle Leo’s, my father’s older brother. Wasn’t much Leo wouldn’t say, although he usually limited cussing to when no women were around. Most often, he seriously cussed when he was fishing and hooked a big one and it got loose.
Sloan Elizabeth (named after Major’s and my sister, too) and I only started getting to know each other after her dad went missing last year. We started talking more as her mother’s final illness progressed. Sloan is having much the same heart wrenching over her mother’s passing that I had after my son died. You live with it, you cope. Time helps you get over it, until another grieving has its way with you. You never really get over it, but you get on nonetheless.
I send Sloan copies of my posts and she says she reads some of them. I don’t know her well enough yet to know if she shares my trait of looking at situations and sizing up what is working and what is not, and then going to work on trying to straighten out what is not working. You see that in everything I ever wrote, starting with Home Buyers: Lambs to the Slaughter? in 1983. And in the nineteen or twenty ensuing books, and on the goodmorning websites, which themselves are books of sorts – approaching 1,600 chapters on the oldest website – goodmorningfloridakeys.com.
I wondered yesterday if my propensity to go after what is not working was why, in early 1987, the angels acccepted my prayer for help and my offer to be used for human service? I can think of no other reason why they would do that. For truly, a propensity to break new ground, to challenge the status quo, to get ice water dumped on your head, to be burned at the stake or nailed to a tree, is essential to working for God.
My father’s widow, Joann, holds forth that she is close to God. I wonder how she would like having Jesus, Michael and Melchizedek standing on her neck 24-7, 365? I imagine she would like that a lot less than she likes me, which ain’t a whole lot. Irony of ironies, after he passed over, my father started asking me in dreams, the son he would not receive, to try to straighten out what he had left unfinished. I tried, even though I felt only God could straighten out his affairs. I still feel that way.
Throughout all of the upheaval between my father and me, I never stopped loving him. He was the parent with whom I had the heart connection. On receiving news of this death in late August 2005, I burst into tears. Not because he had passed on, but because we had not reconciled in this life. The late fall of 1995 was the last time we sat down face to face. In my dreams after that, he was the best father any son could have hoped to have.
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