Today, a colleague, with whom I hadn't spoken in a long while, called me at work. Her nearly first question was, "How's your father?" There are a fairly substantial number of people among friends and colleagues who knew him, met him, often at social gatherings at which he joined me. He charmed anyone he met, particularly the ladies, for whom he always had an appreciation, right to the very end. Perhaps it was one, perhaps it was the thing that gave him longevity, a passion for the female mind and form.
She hadn't heard and I told her that he died some few months ago. Her question and my response had the effect of making it seem as if he were still here. He couldn't be gone if someone is asking after him. And on the way home, as I passed his favorite restaurant, Chao Krung, on Fairfax, I remembered how much he enjoyed our dishes with a glass of wine brought by one of the pretty waitresses in traditional Thai garb. He'd always compliment them with a smile of approval. What I can't quite capture is that moment of his tasting the wine, I see it, but now, the hand that put the glass to his lips is ash in a container in a wall, but for the moment of seeing it, he is as present as he ever was, still enjoying that moment. Always enjoying that moment. And now, in the present thinking of that moment, I enjoy watching him, more in a way than I did when it happened.
Because it can never happen again it has a preciousness more than in its original playing out. In that moment, he had no sense of not being here. When he trusted the doctors he had no sense of not being here. Just as I have no sense of not being here.
I am trying to express something I can't quite grasp, not for him, not for me. I am not sad. I think it's a searching. I think it's a reaction to watching the movie Frequency, one I really enjoy for the connection of two lives in a way that could never happen in reality. Funny I just realized that I came home and had to watch it after these thoughts about my father, as if somehow there could be some re-connection for us, despite the reality of where things stand now. A kind of mutual, "I know", "I understand" that could never have happened in linear time.
One person's fantasy of quantum mechanics in passing. The multiple paths that can happen, might happen, do happen. And for a moment, Dad and I are at Chao Krung in the present and he is asking for another glass of wine after asking me if I am in a hurry. I am not. 
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