I emailed my best friend in Ohio and wished her a Happy Thanksgiving. I told her, "No dad this time for Thanksgiving dinner... Last year he slept through most of the meal and pissed on our picket fence."
She replied: "Some how I can't picture that on a Hallmark card." {November 2009}
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{December 2001} It’s true, my dad told me, that he tried to “drink himself to death.” He said he read about it in an article, that, if someone drank enough alcohol, they could kill themselves. But now that I was back in his life, I made him promise he would not attempt to do himself in.
I left my dad at the rehab center and made a trip to his apartment to get him a few belongings. When I opened the door, the place smelled like a dry warm furnace. I went into his closet for a change of clothes, but nothing was clean. I sorted through everything for some items that I could take home and wash for him.
I stood in the middle of my father's livingroom and saw candy wrappers on the carpet next to stained paper napkins and empty whisky bottles. Everything was a mess except his art supplies: paint brushes neatly stacked in tin coffee cans, sketch books carefully bundled in brown boxes, and blank white canvases that he prepared and never used leaned neatly against the wall. There were large boxes with his paintings sticking out of them, carefully placed so they wouldn'd scractch each other.
I walked into the bathroom. It was beige and bare. A faded blue towel hung on a broken hook and orange pill bottles spilled around a dirty sink.
