My continued apologies to anyone who's tried to contact me recently.
Early in the morning on October 11th, my mom called me with the news that my dad had passed away earlier that night of a sudden, completely unexpected heart attack. He was 62.
He had spent that day burning some brush and mowing the lawn. He ate dinner with my mom, watched a football game, and went to bed at his normal time. Fifteen minutes later, he came back downstairs complaining that it was too hot in the bedroom, and he was having trouble breathing. He went out on the porch to cool off. My mom could tell something was wrong, so she followed him outside. He asked her to call 911. The ambulance arrived quickly, but they couldn't do anything for him.
When my mom called me with the news, I packed some clothes and got in the car. Eleanor came with me. We stayed in Virginia with my mom for about a week. We did a lot of puzzles, watched a lot of television. A lot of flowers came. A lot of people stopped by. A lot of them brought food. We talked about my dad, and tried to figure out what we had to do now.
Everyone says things like this, but don't take your loved ones for granted. My dad was never much of a talker, especially on the phone. When I called home, I usually talked to my mom, while I heard him muttering questions for her to ask me, in the background. But a few days before he died, my mom happened to be out of the house. So I spent a little while talking to my dad. Ironically enough, a good friend of his had just died of a heart attack, and he was pretty shaken up by it. We talked about that for a bit, and about my dad's plans for putting in a new bridge over the creek near our house. And about how SPX had gone for me. And how my mom and dad planned to come down to Savannah in a few weeks, and about the restaurants we could go to. I don't think I said "I love you." It wasn't the sort of thing one said to my dad. But we talked, and I'm grateful for that.
My dad had just retired from his job a couple of months earlier. For the last 36 years, he had worked almost 7 days a week as a German professor in the Modern Languages Department of the Virginia Military Institute. He and my mom had a lot of plans. They were going to travel, visit Germany. My mom had finally gotten her passport only days ago. They were going to make some renovations to our house. They were going to fulfil a lot of long-postponed promises. But I guess nobody really dies at a "good time."
We all relied a lot on my dad. I didn't really get along with him when I was a teenager, mostly because he was one of the most "grown up" people I've known. He worked hard for decades to make sure we had what we needed. He had the sort of sense of humor that a kid just doesn't get, and he was incredibly smart and well-read. It took a long while for me to understand and appreciate him. I wish I had a little more time to get to know him as an adult.
I'm still recovering actually. The last couple days before the con were a madhouse of Kinkos trips, silkscreening, assembling minis, packing, and dealing with a host of last-minute annoyances. Did I mention that I was running on about five hours of sleep over the last three and a half days? I only finished the art for my new mini at around three in the morning the day we left. By 8am it was scanned, assembled, and the layouts printed out. At 10am I was at Kinkos copying up the book's interior on their fancy new double-sided copier. Thankfully, Eleanor did all of the silkscreening for the covers for me. At 2pm Lance was in town and we grabbed some lunch in the downtown Roly Poly. Dean finally dragged his ass into town a little after 3. As soon as all of our stuff was loaded into the car (no mean feat,) we hit the road. Weirdly enough, I didn't feel at all sleepy the entire drive.
Even though we were putting the hammer down the entire way, the drive still had that nice "road trip" flavor. Dean and Lance are almost polar opposites in their tastes in comics, but we all had our SCAD backgrounds in common. Around 8pm we tuned in to NPR for the presidential debate, and that provided more conversational fodder - although even Dean (the resident right-leaner) admitted that Kerry came out ahead.
By the time we got into Bethesda, it was way past midnight. We met up with Erik in the lobby, and trucked our luggage up to our room on the 14th floor. Lance scurried off to meet up with
David Youngblood and his crowd. Eleanor came up with her own crew (David Yoder, Joey Weiser, and Adam Alard,) so I dropped in on their room for a bit. Then I headed back to our room, assembled a few minicomics and then crashed out in the armchair for a couple hours of sleep.
Next morning Rose showed up and I convinced her and Antar to set out and find some of the things we had forgotten in our half-assed flurry of preparation - things like a tablecloth, a disposable camera, a cash box, and some sort of table display. While they were gone, I used the few hours remaining before the Expo floor opened to make up some big "Failure" signs out of brown paper, ink, and whiteout. Did I mention we kind of half-assed it? But everything seemed to come together in time.
