I took this photo in Spring 2021 when I first arrived in Connecticut to visit Papa Callan. I had been walking around his neighborhood while he was staying in the hospital. I was feeling poetic. I was a bird on a wire. And in my short-sightedness, I imagined that I would stay at my father's house for a few days--a week at the most--and then I would fly away home.
Little did I know that I would end up living with Papa Callan for almost a year--doing the grocery shopping, cooking meals, cleaning, taking care of his laundry and driving him to doctor appointments. Once a week, I organized all his medications and placed them into little boxes.
Every night, he watched PBS Evening News Hour while I made dinner. And on Sundays we watched Sixty Minutes together. Over the summer, we huddled indoors during hurricane season and prayed the basement would not flood. It did flood. When the rain stopped, I drove Papa Callan to the beach and we looked out at the water. Toward the end of his life, this was all he could do--sit in the car--and watch the waves. He had congestive heart failure and renal failure. First thing every morning, we recorded "his numbers" in a little notebook, starting with his temperature, then blood sugar levels--after that, his blood pressure, and finally his weight. I watched him go from 141 to 109 pounds. When I expressed concern about this, he told me he was proud to be down to his fighting weight!
Who was he planning on fighting, I wondered. But then, he would describe how he was on the boxing team at Yale and how he once fought a professional boxer. When I suggested, he needed to finish what was on his plate at dinner, he told me he had quit the clean plate club and he was ready to get into the ring again!
So much comedy! So much comedy it made me cry. And then, laugh. And then cry.
All this was punctuated with emergency room visits, the ICU, followed by rehab, home, then back to the ER where we would begin this merry-go-round all over again.
Creative friends—it’s okay to feel occasionally untethered--like a bird on a wire, or in the words of Bob Dylan—with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.
Take solace in the fact that this is where the heart of creativity resides. And as a creative person, this your origin story.
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