28. I am floating just a little, a silly thing for a grown man to do. I have lost traction just a bit, and I do not always know where I am going. I do not always care, and that is dangerous. There is much at stake. In the end, I trust my self. So far I trust myself, but I am keeping my eyes open, just in case.
A week ago I went with my children, my son and two daughters, to camp on the Leon River in Central Texas. We arrived on Saturday morning to meet my father and my sister and her family who had been there since Friday afternoon. My father and my son erected the tents while I organized our food and supplies in the small, screened-in shelter. The shelter had electricity and was good for supplies, but wasn't good for sleeping because it was infested with little scorpions that came out at night. For the next twenty-four hours we cooked and ate and relaxed and fished. My daughters lavished attention on my baby nephew and fished a little. My youngest daughter caught the biggest fish of the weekend, a five pound freshwater drum. She threw it back. My son spent most of his time fishing with my father, his grandfather, a thing so mundane and yet, from my perspective, so surreal. My father disappeared when I was younger than any of my children are today, and was gone for decades. I've never fished with my father. I've never known him. Now, here he is. He's been off drugs for more than three years and he's teaching my son to fish with spincast reels and baitcast reels, night crawlers and shad. I cannot teach my son these things, because I have never learned them myself. It's surreal, and it leaves me floating a little. It sets me drifting downstream, my shoes digging little shallow trenches in the soft mud of the river bed, unable to find footing. "I wonder," I think to myself, "where this river goes." It doesn't seem bad, it seems good, so I go with it.
On Saturday I replaced our kitchen faucet, four hours cramped in the cabinet under the sink, four trips to the hardware store. This is not the kind of thing I commonly do, but it turned out okay. I'm not sure why I did it, but the urge came over me, so I went with it. Once my neck and back stop hurting, I'll be glad I did it.
I'm going to count this all as one thing about me. I'm not sure what you would call it.
Hello, friends. How are you today?
Later. Love.
