Remembering my father, John D. Boyd, today. He was one of those absentee dads who did, in fact, show up against all odds to play a significant role in my life, which deepens over the years. He was also a lover of stories.
I have a funny memory of he and I, having had some dim sum or Kung Pao or some such, driving down Broadway to try to make some movie whose showtime had already passed. A cop pulled us over, and as my father was handing him his driver’s license and registration, he said in such earnest, anxious tone, “Officer, I’m sorry, but we’re rushing because it’s an emergency!,” that I could not tell if he was play acting or legitimately believed that missing the start of the film was, in fact, an emergency.
“I’m sorry, Professor Boyd,” hands back the papers and lets us go.
When we got to the theater, he kept rushing in his over-anxious way, and as we were about to enter the actual theater, the doors opened and a throng of moviegoers pushed out, which my father pushed *through* in his urgency. Oblivious to the reality that this was the previous showing letting out. Sigh.
His memorial service was April 15, 2011. I only had seen him for the first time in six years, in his last few days at the hospice. Emaciated and fairly gone mentally. His final words to me and my wife, who was meeting him for the first time, were “Jason… It’s…too.. late…” … At the memorial, walking back to our cars — my mother and wife were now meeting my stepmother for the first time as well — a Great Horned Owl was suddenly sitting right next to us on the path, at eye level, about 4 feet from me, locking eyes. The Georgia sun hung directly overhead.
Dad, you were wrong. It was not too late.
He and Anne and their besties in the English and Music departments loved to get together and watch movies and shows, among them chiefly the works of David Lynch. I had watched Twin Peaks with him back in my final couple years of high school(s), the brief moment I’d ever actually lived with him. My own favorite Lynch film has always been Mulholland Dr., for more reasons than I care to explain. Deconstructionist indeed, Mr. C.
Once, a few years after he passed, I was with a girl, and we were laughing, flirting. To be honest I can’t recall if we were on the giddy upslope or inevitable decline of our tryst that day, nor the details of our conversation. But she said something about best of intentions, maybe, and I said “Oh, who knows?!”
To which I instantly heard the echo of my dad, laughing, when I was visiting him one summer at age 11: “The Shadow knows!!!”
The thing is, it was ON POINT. It was disturbingly accurate, in a more Jungian sense than Saturday serial for kids, to the conversation at hand.
And so have many of my departed returned, in odd comments, spirit animals, and on rarer occasions, slamming cabinet doors and moving chairs around. It is reassuring. Families are always rising and falling in America, said Hawthorne, but when ghosts manage to mobilize their associates to come at me with bot accounts and other minions, well…
Hamburgers are not the only meals best eaten with friends and family. Epicticus, or was it Epicurus… I… Um. Something about getting far from the madding crowd and growing your own vegetables…
Ow!
Okay, okay, dad. I will try to study more. I did drop out of an awful lot of colleges from K-grad school, but if you–
Oh shit my mother is chiming in.
Folks, I’m sorry. This storytelling may have to wait for another day. Hope you are enjoying the show. They (“they”) keep trying to erase my websites, along with my name and my family’s. It took me over three years to get my mom’s name put on the cubby with her ashes at FUSN, for instance. But it’s never too late.
As we shall see in my absolutely god-awful but riveting screenplay (the host messaged me to say I need to upgrade as the traffic is eating the server’s RAM), when you have Kaufman/Montauk time-travel, copious psychedelics, Ghost Army DNA, and plain old memories and flashbacks at your disposal, you need never think the story is over or that you are counted out. Death is just your birthday, coming home, according to Rumi.
But I must keep writing and drawing and playing and dancing and singing because I’m still breathing, amazingly, and I’ve miles to go before I sleep.
Thanks for reading.
Jay
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