Comings and goings

Family is a good thing, and that's why people gravitate to it. The feeling of being with people you love and who love you is a little like seeing a gemstone rotate under a spot of light, showing its flashes of brilliance and its flaws and imperfections too.

When you're away from family, or when everyone has gone their separate ways, your world seems flatter. The concrete of Brunswick that much greyer; the dust of the countryside that much more desiccated.

If you're like me you want to take refuge in something familiar: a Bob Hope CD maybe, or a marathon of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  After Joni and the girls left I must have listened to that Bob Hope album fifty times in a row.

I can't let my girls feel like that forever, like their Daddy was always a million miles away and gave them only the rag-ends of his time. I must go there to them. Heather was right for sure.