Hard dudes. Quick deaths. Few words.

First person plural: off. Blame this on cold medicine.

I should mention that my Dad is the oddest person I’ve ever met. He is and has always been a quantum person: blip! he’s here, joking, laughing, fully engaged and charismatic in the way men who claim membership in the “Smiling Irish Bastard Hall of Fame” can be. (I have next to no idea where my family actually hails from, it’s just the phrase and the similarity that matter most here, not the documented truth.)

Then, in a minute–blip! Gone. He still stands in front of you, or next to you, but in an instant his mind has gone somewhere completely alien and unreachable to you. Someone once wrote of Dean Martin that he must be either the deepest soul on the planet, so elusive was he, or that he was the shallowest. I’m never really sure of either, but the two do share an ethos of being phenomenally elusive people as hard to hit square on as Linnie Patrick coming through the hole. Years can pass without any real, substantive information being exchanged in conversation, and I have, on occasion, written down what I know about my dad using notebook pad. I don’t get past the second page. There is not enough information to fill the pages, thus saving the world from the 3,923,918th anguished daddy-issues bildungsroman.

(You all owe him a note of thanks. I forward them on for you happily.)

Linnie Patrick is a deliberate reference here: Linnie played for Alabama and was quicksilver in cleats when Bear Bryant coached at the University of Alabama. My father met Bryant once–possibly more, but again, information here is scarce–through the equally vaguely defined relationship my grandfather claimed with Bryant. All I know is my grandfather, a horse-trainer who shuttled around the country from track to track, knew Bryant in some degree and had enough of a connection to wangle a visit and (apocryphally) a scholarship offer for my aunt. I’d love to elaborate, but I can’t. That is all I know, leading to the endless stream of qualifiers, parentheses, and limiting modifiers. I don’t know much, and like 99.9 percent of history, it has evaporated into an oblivion of forgetting, half-memory, or denial.
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