Photo for Monday, July 13, 2009

Posted: 7:55 am, Monday, July 13th

OK, well, wake/funeral/burial all taken care of, and 2.0 and I will be motoring our way back down 87 soon, to resume life as normally as we can resume it. A super-big thanks to everyone who has e-mailed or dropped a comment in the past week, and especially to Tree, Sweaty, Drolett and E for making the trek up to Delanson for the funeral. 2.0 and I really appreciate, as did my mom, and, somewhere, my dad. The weekend was a blur of tears and laughter, pretty much, as we alternated between going over Dad's nutty old postcards that he'd send me in collitch, and me crying with people in line at the wake. The wake had a line going out of the church and people were arriving constantly for two hours. I gave the eulogy at the funeral, and you pretty much all got a taste of it, as I cribbed liberally from last Monday's post. Dad's buried in St. Agnes cemetery in Menands, where William Kennedy's novel, Ironweed, opens. His plot is on a hill overlooking most of the cemetery, at the foot of a knotted old tree and near the family obelisk. (I haven't been to the plot in the past ten or fifteen years - I forgot we had an obelisk.) Everyone left on Friday, and 2.0 and I kept Mom company and went about getting our lives back together for the rest of the weekend. I wouldn't call it nice, since, you know, we buried Dad and all, but it was important, and well-spent. It's nice up in my hometown right now, and the pond is quite high because of all the rain.

I don't know what exactly is wrong with Kate Beaton, but she makes some great comics.

Oblivion, probably my favorite game on the PS3, was actually part IV of the series of games its related to. Part II, Daggerfall, is for free at Bethesda's site right now. I've played it for about an hour so far and I hate it. Maybe you will not.

OK, things will return fully to normal on Wednesday. My mom finally has high-speed at the house, but now the problem is that it's not wifi, so I have to squat on the ground next to her computer to plug in my laptop, and it makes surfing the web kind of a pain in the ass. In the meantime, thanks again to everyone who's had us in their thoughts.

bullfrog

2.0's mom -- Monday, July 13 2009, 11:14 am

My dear son in-law, Your eulogy at your dad's funeral was everything it needed to be: sweet, sad, funny, and as far as I could tell, you captured all of him--his foibles as well as all his greatness. (And he was great. So dapper in those ties, and his beautiful silver hair and smile! No one who met him would ever forget him.) It was masterful storytellig. You had one chance to get it right, and you really did. I was so proud of you, and my 2.0, for all you did that day, and in the most difficult days before that. Love is being there, and you were there when your dad needed you the most.

I'm sure you did an awesome job on the eulogy. The period after the funeral is always a weird time, too, so I hope your fam is spending some time just hanging around and keeping each other company.

I immediately recognized the yellow "Athens XXX" sign from my days riding past it on the N/W train. Is that part of Astoria now hipster-friendly? I remember the area south of Broadway being a little iffy in places.

I don't know, exactly. I was in LIC a bit south of there recently, and that was crazy hipstered up. I used to live a building over of that Athens place, when 2.0 and I were just starting to date. We walked in to open an account for rentals (my pre-Netflix days), and the guy was absolutely flabbergasted that I didn't want the adult membership. He just couldn't believe I wanted none of his fine Mediterranean pornography.

I'm not nearly the typography dork that my old coworker is, but this is still very exciting to me.

http://www.slate.com/id/2222745/