A hole to fill

Tuesday August 19, 2008

The online journalling world lost a good friend today.  Doug over in Denver has passed on.  I counted him a good friend, though we were a world apart.  He leaves a loving family and many, many friends behind, all of us feeling somehow that no matter the distance a momentary flutter was felt on our horizons.

Sad times.

Here the first tentative sign of our house move appeared in the delivery of a pack of cardboard boxes intended, so soon as the starting gun fires, to take our books, CDs and DVDs.  They are sitting in a corner of the dining room where, so Graham says, our indoor packing operation is to begin.  He has a picture of it in his mind, and licks his lips in anticipation of tacking the job.  Me, I want to hide.

The smell of the cardboard, the roar of the tape

 

Then, in Sainsbury’s car park, I spotted an elderly dog with his head poked out of the window of a car.  He was waiting for his dad to come back, I suspect, and had over a good few years perfected the art of looking so sad you feel an urgent need to hug him.  I didn’t, of course.  Not my job.  I did however give him an encouraging word.

“I know, old chap.  It’s hell waiting for your man to come back when he’s away and you’re on your own.  Fear not, though.  He’ll come back for you soon enough.”

And sure enough, as we drove away, his master appeared and he was translated instantly into an ecstasy of rump-wagging, tail-waving dogginess.  Dad had come back.

Waiting

The trouble is that, in human life, in the end Dad does not come back, and you’re left waiting for a hole to fill, trying to cope with the knowledge that it never will.