eventful

Today I had breakfast with my father and grandparents in a small diner full of deep-chilled deer hunters; broke the screen on my cell phone; attended a funeral for a woman I had never met but wish now that I had; walked around inside a log cabin that was built in the early 1800s by one of my earliest Norwegian ancestors, a guy who had an amazing name, a cabin that now sits quietly in the back lot of the Historical Museum, a cabin that my grandfather actually lived in for awhile as a child, back when the cabin was up on the hill overlooking the lake, and that Norwegian ancestor’s 120-year-old Bible set inconspicuously on a shelf, the inside cover signed at dated with 100 years of owners; sifted through files of history learning about family members I have never known, like my grandfather’s father who fought in World War II and then disappeared for years until they found him in Alaska with a new wife and a new life; ate lunch with my father at an A&W which was initially started in the 1960s by the woman whose funeral I attended earlier that day and her husband who is now 93, missing the tip of a finger and can only see out of the corners of his eyes; finally told my father I was an atheist after avoiding it and fearing it for years; feasted on long conversation when we had subsisted for so long on short ones; gave my father a copy of an essay I wrote about him last year (an essay in which I kill him, sort of; an essay I had thought I would never show him); ate far too much toast at Don’s while talking with an old friend, my best friend, and a new friend.