Today's a good day.

Today my dad and I were going over a dialog for our Irish class when he suddenly became choked up. My dad can be a little bit of a sap at times, so this behavior was not unusual. A good sports movie always brings a tear to his eye, as do stories about poor children from the ghetto who beat the odds and grow up to be doctors and professors. He also tends to get misty- eyed when he listens to Irish rebel music or a Judy Collins record. As a kid, my dad was much more demonstrative than my mom. This was just one aspect of my formative years that contributed to some confusion later in life as to the socially ascribed gender roles. I will get into that at a later date.

It is so strange how you can do the same things over and over with no associations to a past memory and then one day you are reading about Cait asking Nora if it is a good day and suddenly you are in the middle of a big pool of memory. This has happened to me before. For a split second sadness/nostalgia/happiness/pain/regret roll through you, filling your entire body and then poof! it all disappears and before you go back to feeling normal you feel empty.

i ask my dad what is wrong when he doesn't respond for several minutes.

"We used to always say to my dad when he got home from work, 'Today is a good day, papa'."

He never talks about his dad. My grandpa died when Dad was just twelve-years-old. He had a heart attack while the two of them were walking home from the lake. It was just the two of them. He died instantly.

I supressed my desire to ask him questions on the subject. This was not an "in" to a discussion on the grandpa I know so little about and my dad never talks about. This was Dad's few moments of memory flooding in, filling him up, and then draining out. We continued with the dialog. It is a good day.