Briefly and in no particular order. . .

10/28 - More than 300 people attend my father's memorial!

10/31 - Sarah and myself intended to see Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary @ The Pacific Film Archive but ended up staying home due to low energy and watching The Corpse Grinders on local channel 32 KMTP.

10/30 - Sarah, Molly and myself spent about two hours at a phone bank in Berkeley, on The Ohio Democratic Party's dime, apparently, calling potential undecided voters in Columbus, Ohio, reminding them to vote on 11/2 and providing them with information re: their polling places. I spoke to more dead voicemail space than people.

A few days ago -

• Voted via absentee ballot
• Home computer crashed

Right now - Computer still down, these words stolen from Sarah's work laptop. I'm so tired.

My dad is dead.

With this thought my father has been with me more or less constantly since the beginning of events described in the post and comments below. As his mortal remains are with me now, 8 pounds or so of silty gray ash and ground bits of I don't want to think what sealed in a plastic bag, tucked tidily inside the shiny gold box which temporarily houses these artifacts from the life of a man, this debris, this dust:

Kenneth Cody

Cremation No. 25162

Sarah and myself saw him into the fire on the 19th of this month. Or, more precisely perhaps, we saw his body into the fire. And possibly even more accurately, we saw the box containing his body into the fire. I didn't want to see him, really. By the 19th, he'd been dead for more than two weeks, five of those days in the water. . .

For five days (October 1-5) he was not dead to us but missing.

Hope eroded, of course, as those days unfolded and Jane's Addiction played the same song endlessly in my head:

I had a dad
Big and strong I turned around me, man
I found my daddy gone

- Had a Dad, Nothing's Shocking, 1988 -

This is not the first time I found my father gone, of course.

He was much taller then, and I was much smaller.

But that's another story.

My father is missing.

Presumed drowned in an apparent boating accident.

Feeling submerged myself right now.

Yet strangely lucid, as if the water that engulfed me was deep, indeed, but clear as crystal.

Your boat found adrift

against the rocky levee,
all your gear aboard.
And where are you?

Only the swift currents know.

***

A beautiful day

on the waterways, searching
for my drowned father.