Perturbations
Posted to instagram by rocknrollriddler – I’m thinking about my #father. In a week and a half – ten days – it will have been a year since he died. #photography was one of the last things he shared with me. I have a thumb drive of his shots on my bookshelf. These photos are is not his. I’m trying to see through his eyes, but I have questions. #perturbations
He was always looking for the #ideal.
I look at these #flowers, and they are not my #subject, but I wonder, would he choose this composition? Would he slide right and go I for the close up?
The two leaves of grass cutting against the composition in the #closeup please me, but for him, would there be too much distraction?
I’ll have to return to the photos he shared with me to explore them more.
#perturbations
A Structured Goodbye
My father designed his own memorial. The minister even said he chose the songs and verses that were to be sung. His return to organized religion was a shock to me. After my parents divorce, he became a Unitarian and read everything he could about nature religions and Zen.
In a way, his goal was to understand people and their place in the universe. Mathematics and spirituality were the two paths that he traveled to explore that. In some ways, people were secondary. This service had meaning, but reading between the lines to understand the proof may be impossible.
In childhood my #father was photographed by his father when he was seven years old. (My #uncle Rick is the #baby on the blanket.) my father’s hands are dug deep into the fur of his dog, Pooch. His eyes are closed and his head is in a similar downward tilt. Late in life, my father wondered if he had some form of autism. He had trouble reading others – recognizing faces, interpreting body language, but he was brilliant at analytical thinking. He began studying advanced mathematics in high school and studied at Brown and NYU on scholarship. His inwardness – the way he would tune out the world – was difficult to understand, and he found ways of engaging the world in his later years, but by then I was off. It was hard to relate to that new him. #perturbations
