Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli.

Just got a call from YHWH, et al, and the Family Truckster came up lame a few miles from the YHWH Family Compound. Her brother will be along shortly to make repairs so all is well. Flying Leathernecks and Flying Tigers for me tonight. I haven't checked tomorrow's lineup, but I'm thinking of ditching America's heroes for America's Family, the Corleones. I'm going to visit mom's grave and when I get back, I think I'll watch Godfather I and II. And if I have time I think I'll watch Return of the Pink Panther.

It's funny, I was raised on those movies (made by a Tulsa boy) and I can't get one person in my family to watch any Peter Sellers with me. It's pretty much the story of my life, though. Like probably every other kid in the world, I was pretty sure I was adopted growing up. I had nothing in common with anyone in my family and to top it off I didn't look remotely like any of them either. My sister is a dead ringer for my dad's mother and sometimes him as well. Her kids' pictures routine stand up side-by-side with pictures of my dad at those ages. But me, I look nothing like anyone on either side. Someday I may do an Adjective Queen-style post on that topic.

I've been debating about three days on whether to call my dad and see if he wants to go with me to visit mom's grave. It's the kind of emotional tennis I play frequently because I annoyingly care so much about other people's feelings. Ever since my mom died my dad has gotten more and more remote. Almost everyone has told me it's normal because men don't communicate anyway, which I understand, but since I have no other parent, I just naturally assumed he would step up and try to hold the family together. When mom died he lived a couple of hours northwest of here and he stayed up there alone for about a year before selling his business. I called him a couple times a week and went up there to see him every other week or so. I even started following NASCAR and watched races just to have something to talk about. I'd scan TV Guide and make a note when movies he liked would come on so I could call and say, "Hey, did you see Bullitt was on TNT?" SGK was only a couple of weeks old when mom died so I thought maybe that would keep him going since he and mom were hyperinvolved in my sister's four kids. But no, he rarely called and visited even less. I decided that since SGK is an absolute carbon-based copy of my mom that maybe it pained him just to look at her so hard did he take mom's early death. That may be. I never asked - didn't want to make him feel guilty for ignoring his granddaughter. I just take SGK to visit eldies at a retirement home so she can be around grandparent types.

He got remarried about three years ago and moved all the way across the state. Still two hours away, but in another direction. His wife is very kind, but very different, in many ways opposite from my mom. She has two twenty-something children and he has clicked with them very well. He does lots of fatherly things with the son and son-in-law and he's an excellent grandfather for the girl's two children, so it's apparent he's capable of doing those things we're missing around here. YHWH tries to console me by saying she thinks that he needs to be needed and he must perceive that I don't need him. I kind of get that. And, you know, he's very nice and excited to hear from us - when we call him. The totality of it is that he has pretty much cut himself off from his old family and started over completely. And that's what brings me to the difficulty I'm having making this call. I'm pretty sure that he doesn't go to the cemetery anymore and so if I call him and ask him if he's going and he isn't, he'll feel guilty or uncomfortable admitting it to me. And I just hate to make anyone feel bad. Isn't that sick? In my own defense, it's not cowardice or wimp factor 9, I can be very strong when I need to. I'm just far too empathic for my own good. Maybe someday I won't care so much and confront him wielding Don Corleone's verbal blade, "A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man." Of course since I have a blog, Michael would rub me out like Fredo because you, "never tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking."