Things you forget you love...

Yesterday I noticed that for the first time in a long time, there was no snow at all in our yards on on our house's roof or anywhere on our property. I breathed a sigh of relief...

Then, I woke  up to snow everywhere and I remembered that I forgot that I love snow. I could love it again because I know it's not sticking around for months or weeks or even days. So much snow this winter made me forget that I love snow, the wonder of it, how it falls on your face, how our Puli, coming back from his morning walk, looks like a snowball until he shakes it all off on the front porch.

So I started thinking about things I forget I love. I've made a list.

1. Avocados--for some reason we don't eat them much, but I put some on our salad tonight and remembered I loved them.

2. Seagulls--there are seldom any in Cheshire, but one was in the Stop and Shop parking lot the other day, obviously deranged or lost to be so far from the sea, but there he was and I remembered I love sea gulls.

3. Sea-salt caramel gelato--actually, I never forget I love this--I simply try to curb my craving from time to time and then give in and....it's magic....

4. Rubber bands--you hardly see rubber bands any more and forget about them, but I opened a drawer on my desk I seldom open and found a bag of Smart Living high quality Rubber Bands, assorted sizes that weighed 1/4 pound. Heaven!

5. Sponge Bob Square Pants--Bern, through some odd and inexplicable moral stance--doesn't watch cartoons. But the other day, when she was out, I walked by the TV room and she'd left on the TV and there he was, that lovable little, undersea guy. I watched an episode and fell back in love.

6. My Dad. I just realized that tomorrow is his 107th birthday. April Fools' Day is when Virgil Hoyt Bradley was born. And I was born a couple of weeks later 40 years later. My mom and dad were much older than my friends parents since I was the only child of a 40 year old father and 38 year old mother. I had friends in southern West Virginia whose grandparents were my parents contemporaries! Sons and fathers have issues. And Dad and I had our share. I came home with Bern the Christmas after we had married with a beard and when Dad greeted us at the door and was appalled, he wandered off into the snow in his bedroom slippers while my mother assured us he'd come back before he froze to death. He was a right-wing Republican (for all the wrong reasons, not to admit there are any 'right' reasons) and I was a left-wing Democrat. (However, as right-wing as he was, he wouldn't recognize his party today...he'd have to be a moderate Democrat to be in the same place on issues he was back then as a Goldwater man....)

But tomorrow would be his birthday and I suddenly am aware of how profoundly he loved me and how he taught me to catch a baseball and bought me a dog that I loved for years, a beagle named Fatso, though he wasn't, and how he was so proud of me in college and seminary and how, even though he was a 'Hard Shell Baptist' (google it if you dare!) my being an Episcopal priest seemed to be something he approved of more than the college English teacher I intended to be. And I remember how, when he came to live with us in New Haven, he would wander away, and I remember how painful it was for both of us for him to go into a nursing home and how disconcerting it was for both of us as he slipped into dementia and how the last time he was at our home in New Haven, he soiled himself and as I was cleaning him in our downstairs bathroom he was weeping and telling me over and again how sorry he was that I had to do that though he had done it for me hundreds of time and I remember how I was with him in St. Raphael's hospital and told him, "I'm going home now, Dad," and he replied, "so am I", though he wasn't, I knew and if he'd been a parishioner I would have known what he meant and as a son I didn't and when I got home the phone rang and he was dead and Mimi hugged my legs and said, "you're an orphan, Daddy" and I was.

And tomorrow is his birthday, and like the late snow, I am so glad, so honored, so humbled to remember that I forgot how much I loved that man, my father, my Dad....Virgil....