Shit Dan Leahy taught me.
Though this may shock those who know Dan through what we call his professional life, through my early life and teen years, Dad wasn’t really one for explicit life lessons. Exceptions being the Rules, of course, and, later, once, “when someone talks that way to you, put them on the ground and make sure they stay there”. (This second was shortly retracted upon consultation with Bethany Weidner).
It’s hard for me to quantify or describe what I “learned” from him. He and my Mom formed my first whole self through some indirect magnetic action I can’t hold in my hands or my mind– definitely a problem when you’re trying to parent in some version of your parent’s footsteps.
But I know that, while I am not following his professional path like so many others on this document, I have the same core continuity of self that he has, and she has, buried within our multivalent and overlapping selves. I can feel it, and I can feel him there inside it, easily, always.
Here are a few small things, core things, I can pick out from that inner river and show.
- I sell my labor for money and so I am a worker, with commons with other workers before anyone else.
- One particular Alpha Romeo is the best car, Lincoln Towncar after that. (I would also put “Rust-Colored Toyota Corolla” in the top three, provided you slam the doors by accelerating hard away from the curb on the way to drop your kid at grade school.)
- Reading on the couches at 1415 6th avenue SW is the highest communion in my heart.
- The Heart is indeed all that matters in the end. I know it. I know it. I know it.
