91. Best Western Berkeley House

Date: January 9, 1979

Age: 1 1/2 years

This is the town which was a center of student violence a decade ago. People say it's a great place, but it looks pretty tacky to me.

Love, Daddy

This one goes out to Denis, who will make it back to Berkeley where he belongs, someday. I know it's not as tacky as my father claimed it to be. Perhaps his opinion was based solely on this postcard. And after consulting a librarian's (which I'm now qualified to be, thanks to finishing my MILS) best friend/worst enemy, Wikipedia, the incident of which my father wrote happened at People's Park in 1969. Anyway, I find it funny that this is the only representation of Berkeley in my collection, and my only other Bay Area postcards are your traditional San Francisco photo ops--Alcatraz and cable cars.

So I've been in North Carolina for about two weeks now--I was hoping to update this sooner, but between trying to get settled and starting school and UNCG HAVING ONLY ONE WORKING SCANNER FOR THE ENTIRE STUDENT BODY, this fell by the wayside. I'm not going to write about life in NC just yet. There's still a lot to process. All I will say is that so far, it's been great.

My last night in New York, I cried a little after I said goodbye to my best friend, and cried some more the next morning as I was driving over the Verrazano Bridge, leaving Brooklyn. But I wasn't sobbing, I wasn't distraught. My reasons for leaving were too exciting.

I've spoken to my dad once since I moved. He sounded pretty good, and an email a few days later said that "biopsy results show only an incremental decline. Will start a new therapy next Tuesday." Once again, I have no clue what any of this means. Upon further pressing, I found out the therapy is once a week, outpatient. I know that C has asked about coming to visit, but my dad has returned to putting him (and therefore, all of us) off. I'm convinced he only wants to see us when he thinks the end is very, very near, and so our visits thus far have been based upon false alarms.

I'm glad he's getting along fairly well. Why he had to scare us with a "weeks to live" prognosis in June, I don't know. Maybe he just wants the rest of us to understand some semblance of what he's feeling.

Last week I had a dream that I was still a teenager, living in his house, and I was angry at him over something, and told him he couldn't live there anymore. My brother B took my side, and moved in to the house to resume parenting responsibilities over me. We saw our dad one last time--he came over to tell us that he'd stay away, but he would have no part of us ever again. He was the angry, unhappy person I remember knowing 15, 20 years ago. In fact, he's always that age in my dream--late 40s, early 50s. Before he had a beard. He's had a beard since probably 1996, and yet whenever he appears in my dreams, there's no beard.

I woke up feeling so horribly guilty about whatever had gone down between my father and I in the dream that I was questioning the frustration, and sometimes anger, I've been feeling toward him for the past year. When post-slumber coherence returned, I understood that my feelings are still justified, but the dream also reaffirmed that, no matter what goes down between us from here on out, there's no point in confronting him about it. And even if he wasn't dying, I'd still feel the same way.