surreal

is pretty much the only word I can use to describe my last few days, and I don't think it's going to get any less so.

I owe about 25 people phone calls, I went back to work yesterday, and there is a small neatly-stacked pile of my dad's clothes on my floor waiting to go to the cleaners. It's really bizarre. I have a hard time assimiliating the information that he's no longer on this planet. Or, at least, in any discernable form that I knew him to occupy.

My co-workers have been very kind, and today was an easy day. Tomorrow I get back into the swing of things. I have a three-hour presentation to prep for that's happening next Monday. I haven't really been breathing, but I remember ever so often.

I saw the first picture of my dad's dad while I was sorting through his things; I came across a small stack of his childhood pictures, his dad's obituary, and a burial record for Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Worth, Illinois with a map to his dad's plot. In his handwriting, he wrote the dates of what I presume to be other relatives: 1880-1946, 1882-1965, 1913-1963. The last set is his dad's -- fifty years old. He survived his own father by 8 years, 7 of them on dialysis. At some point I'll visit the plot, too, now that I know where it is.

Before I left I packed up and went on a big road trip with Mazzy - out to every place of significance to my relationship with my dad. Setting out from San Francisco, we drove up 101 to Willits, out Redwood Road to the house that Jeopardy money built, down through the windiest road imaginable to Fort Bragg, site of many a weekend jaunt with my dad and I as we waited for my mom to complete her radio show on KOZT. We stopped many places, but wound up in mendocino, overlooking the driftwood beach where we shared many hours pouring over potential pilferable pieces. That beach is a shadow of its former self and I feel partly to blame. Mazzy and I headed back via 128 through Booneville to San Francisco, where we met Cathy for dinner and I was handed off to Cathy for the trip to Oakland Airport. Exhausting, but a wonderful and heart-rending trip. I took many pictures and will post some when my camera has enough battery to upload them.