Decades later I would look into my father's eyes and try to reach past the murkiness of Alzheimer's with my words, my apology, hoping that in his heart he heard me and understood.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
To be honest, I think I'd become a bit selfish with memories of my father. I wanted to hug them close to me.
I would ask my dad what he did, and he'd say, 'I listen to people's problems.' In some way what he did for a living is in my genes.
In college, I would follow Bob Dylan around, and I would show up to a concert, and he would sing some song he hadn't sang in a long time, and it would speak to something, and I would think it had some great fateful implication.
My mother would have been so crazy about my grandchildren. She was a fabulous grandmother, and she would have been absolutely crazed as a great-grandmother. I miss that part of her.
I'd been kind of a hiccup in my parents' lives. They lost track of me and I didn't know what I was going to do with myself. And then fate reached in and took me in its hands. I was discovered right out of high school and started getting work.
After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
I'd had to cope with a lot of death and illness in my family from a young age, and that maybe gave me a bleak outlook on the world.
We would go back and maybe not say that thing to our dad that we said, or maybe be a little nicer to someone who we cared about and had a relationship with when we were young. You know, they're subtle things, but we carry those with us forever. And I think that regret and time travel are intrinsically linked to me.
I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.
I'd drown in a sea of tears if I lived my life ruminating on the past. I would undoubtedly revise memories to be more joyful that they were, or ever have been.