My daughter is learning to play the guitar and my son has grown a beard. It seems there is no end to the unusual things that might occur in a lockdown.
“Every man should grow a beard at some point, just to show that he can,” I told him once.
He had scoffed at the time, “I don’t want to grow a beard. I’ll look like a hobo” he’d said.
Yesterday my daughter produced a picture of me holding the dog when she was a puppy and said, “You had a big beard when this was taken. You look like a homeless person”.
My daughter tells me that she is worried that she is only using her thumb and index finger to pick strings. I tell her she should be worried.
“That’s why my picking sucks,” I say. “I didn’t discipline myself to do it properly in the first place.”
There are a lot of issues that come from not doing things properly in the first place and the gaps in knowledge and understanding left in their wake.
Going out for our daily exercise talk turns to my mother-in-law who, having experienced a significant decline in health, needs to go into a care home.
My daughter is outwardly upbeat but I know the thought of her grandmother not being around is really testing her.
For a while, there was talk of looking after granny at home until the hospital said she’d need full-time care.
“I worried about how mum would cope. I also worried that one day I’d take her a cup of tea and she’d be dead and that would freak me out,” she tells me.
I think about the day my father died in the house.
“It does change a house,” I say. “It’s the image that always comes to me when I think of the house.”
She says nothing while I remember having no clue about what I’d lost as I looked at him lying peacefully, gone.
“The thing is, you have a lot of wonderful memories of your granny don’t you?”
We spend the next twenty minutes listing as many of them as we can remember, each one tumbling out over the last.
“When someone dies all of that is protected forever. Nobody can take that away from you.” I tell her.
“I guess not,” she says.
It makes me think about how scant the memories are of my father. After he’d died I realised I didn’t really know him and not knowing someone you love makes you grieve harder for them when they are gone.
When we get home my son has tidied his beard and is complaining about the time which has elapsed since he last had a haircut.
“Perhaps we can organise another one of the public rounds of applause to keep in mind all the people that have had to go over a month without a haircut?” I suggest
He offers me a withering smile and goes off into the garden to lift some weights.
“I’m going to try and incorporate another finger into my playing,” says my daughter as she disappears up the stairs.
I decide it’s time to write a song about my dad.
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