So here’s something.

We all have our personal mythologies; items and mementos that hold special meaning or that act as talismans to connect the past with the present and forge a notion of physical continuity between them. Something we remember from youth that exists to this day.

For me, the necklace that lived around my father’s neck was a constant fact of life. It was a crocodile’s tooth, which is different in real life than you might expect. Yellow and curved, coming to a point, but surprisingly blunt at the end. A lifetime of cartoon depictions of the concept of a crocodile make the reality of one somewhat jarring. It is at once less sinister than imagined, but somehow more horrible for its plainness. By itself, there’s only a hint of menace. But with a little imagination, with the suggestion that if it were in a field, set and angled with a row of others, all in concert and aided by the force of a muscular snapping jaw, there’s a visceral awareness that it could do some really terrible damage.

This particular tooth survived through time, living on string around my father’s neck, and now mine, because it was once lodged in my father’s thigh, back when it was still attached to one of those snapping jaws and had the thrashing weight of a giant reptile backing it up.

See, my dad was, when I was born, a reptile keeper at the Bronx Zoo. The job was a fulfillment of a childhood dream for him and one that he abandoned what was shaping up to be a successful corporate sales career to pursue. And the day that tooth came into his life– and leg– it almost killed him. This is the story of that tooth and how I have come to wear it now.

My father, Joel, had a storied lifetime of careers. At various points he was a solider, a salesman, a wall-street executive, a pauper, a local television celebrity, an actor, a farmhand- a farmhand

LONG DIGRESSION BEFORE RETURNING TO MY POINT:

When I was in third grade, over the course of four tense, late night hours, I saw him midwife a calf that was being born terribly breach; he was sweaty and exhausted, but determined; he had inserted a loop of some kind of metal into the cow, into her birthing canal. I don’t remember if it was a length of wire or a tool of some kind.  The cow was also exhausted and flagging from the effort and strain. By the time my dad finally managed to hook the jaw of the calf and turn her in the womb to deliver her, the cow had given up pushing at all; it had even given up on the plaintive lowing sounds that had filled the barn for so many hours. When the calf came out, it wasn’t breathing.

The farm owner turned away, but my father would not give up. He put his mouth over the wet nose and mouth of the newborn calf and pushed breath after breath into it. I’ve got a bunch of snapshots in my head about who and what my father was. Some of them are funny, some of them are wistful, but this one lives in its own space: This was my dad in his most essential form, there on the cold concrete floor of an industrial farm, arm slathered and slippery, unwilling to give up or give in. I remember him saying, “Come on, come on, you live. You live,” to this little thing, in between breaths. He was willing it to listen to him. Its eyes were shut and it looked pinched and somehow fake. A collection of angles in a rude form of a baby cow. Breath after breath pushed in by my father’s mouth. Nothing.

The farm-owner, normally a bully of a man, but subdued and given pause by kind of reverential gravity this scene gave, decided that enough was enough, and said quietly, “OK, Joel. It’s done. There will be other calves.”

My dad waved him away with a gesture and a look of such intensity that I still recall to this day. It was regal. It stated, elegantly and without presumption, that titles and jobs were now held in abeyance;  he could not be bothered in dealing with the farm owner to explain anything. The look, the privilege implied in that brushing wave. He was not just in charge with that look.  He was in command and not to be questioned. Not because he wanted to be, but because he needed to be. And it was accepted just as quickly and just as silently by everyone there who had been witnessing my father shepherd this difficult birth as it became an emergency over so much time.

He took his attention and focus away from the task for only a moment to wordlessly establish this new, temporary order. It is hard to describe what happened there, in that moment. Things changed. Roles changed.  He had willingly been a “yes, no sir, three bags full” employee of the farm owner, as he recognized that the man was insecure about being in charge, and therefore prone to being cruel. But things changed with that moment.

It spoke an uncomfortable truth without saying a thing- that he had been allowing the owner to play at being in control. That he could, if the situation called for it, quell him with a look and a wave and not be challenged. It was something.  I was only, what? 8? I didn’t have words for it then, but I remember it.

He was not panicked or delusional, he had not lost perspective in the struggle; he was clearly aware that this was a losing situation.  But he just refused. He was determined. No one spoke. We all, the farm owner, his three sons and I; we watched my dad go about this task, this amazing exertion of willpower. Because that moment told us all that he was the man in charge.

And shortly after that moment, the thing that looked like a wet, plastic calf-sculpture sputtered and quickened. And cried. And moved.  And was alive. It went from “statue” to “baby cow” in a newly-fluttering heartbeat.  My dad was nodding, intent and on point. He didn’t celebrate or exult,  there was still work to do. Everybody just stood watching, pie-faced. He had to get the calf suckling. Then he would rest.

The mother-cow ambled herself up (also with great effort) and licked the newborn’s forelock. My father nuzzled her jaw, the mother-cow’s jaw. He was a part of the both of them there. An accepted participant by mother and newly born child. He was whispering encouragements to the mother as she dutifully licked the calf into sensation. When the mother settled back down and the calf was in place by the udders and it finally began to suckle, my father all but collapsed there.  He had stripped down to a white T shirt by that time, but he still had a knit cap on.  Smears of all manner of things were over him, his shirt, his arms, his face.

And I can still remember the look on his face, lying next to the calf, using the bulk of the mother as a bed and pillow, his arms by his sides. The task done, the moment of command passed,  the tenseness in his body was all now contented slack. His face and the emotions on it were the only bit of animation to my dad, there, beyond his breathing.  He was exhausted and thrilled and he closed his eyes and had this  smile on him that adults just don’t smile.

He was happy in such a complete way. It is hard to convey; what comes closest to describe that smile, but doesn’t quite fit the bill would be to call  it “child-like.” That’s not the word, and “free” is not the word. Whatever word it was, if one exists at all, lives somewhere between those two, maybe.

But he was no child. He was all of him a grown man and capable and strong and good, there in repose. And to me, at eight and in awe of everything I had just seen, he seemed the finest hero who had ever lived.

Oh, how I loved him for that smile in that barn.  And there, in memory, around his neck, as always,  as sure as the sun rose in the east that morning and would no doubt set in the west that night, was that necklace, with that tooth, moving up and down with the motion of his chest.

To me, it had always lived there and would always remain there. It was a bedrock foundation and pillar of the world.

WHERE I RETURN TO MY POINT

He had been many things, he had done many things, my dad.  Perhaps because of all of the various incarnations and stages of Joel Dobbin that I lived through as his son, perhaps because of the many places we lived and different homes, schools and sets of circumstances I saw growing up, the things which were constant took on a heightened importance.

Whatever the reason, the necklace was important. It was constant. As time moved on and things changed, it stayed there.  I was a little boy, I was a child, I was a young man, I was grown, I was married, I was a father; all of those different stages and relationships and points of perspective with my dad. As he grew older, too, as a token and artifact of  that time zoo-time, moving forward through time itself, but unchanged and unchanging, was this tooth around his neck.

I should get back to how he obtained it.Before I was born, before he was my father, Joel Dobbin had answered an ad in the New York Times.  It offered a position as a reptile keeper at the Bronx Zoo. Joel Dobbin  was fascinated by snakes and reptiles and insects. He had been since he was a boy,  not because he identified with them or understood them, but rather because they were essentially so alien to him.  It intrigued him that we  existed here with our thoughts and views and concerns and that we shared the world with these creatures that live alongside us. And that they, each in their own sphere, were doing largely the same things that we do: breathing, eating, surviving, perceiving– but going about them with such absolutely different strategies and awarenesses. To bridge that gap and understand them was something that held my father in a kind of quasi-religious awe.

He held a degree in Entomology from Cornell and had studied Animal Husbandry, but had been pushed and pressured into a career in business, because that is what a smart young jewish man from Brooklyn is supposed to do.   After a messy divorce from his first wife (who he married, in large part, because that was what was expected of a smart young jewish man from Brooklyn) and after meeting and falling in love with and marrying the woman who would later become my mom, he came across this advertisement, Reptile Keeper wanted.

And he wanted to be that keeper. He got along well with the head of the department, Peter Brazitis and was hired. Peter would become a mentor and a lifelong friend and they’d have a wealth of adventures together.  But first, my dad had to prove himself at the zoo and in the reptile house.

As best as I can remember the story, my dad had not been working there too long when he got the tooth. Or, I should say, when the tooth, and the croc attached, tried to get him. I believe he was feeding them and he made some rookie mistake and didn’t pay attention to where all of them were.  And that’s all it took,  the situation got out of hand and a particularly aggressive croc went for him. It grabbed him by the leg and pulled him under.

I only had a few conversations with my dad about that day. I’m hazy about the details, but I remember him saying that his over-arching thought was, “Aaah, shit.”  Not panic, not fear, but just, “Ahh, shit.”  Like, he had been caught without preparing and wasn’t this just his luck; he scores his dream job and in a month or so, he dies doing it.

I think I remember him saying that what he felt more than pain or fear was a kind of professional embarrassment. He was surrounded by hungry crocs and underwater, with one of them on his leg and he was reasonably sure he was going to die.

And he found out something about himself.  He was calm enough about it to have a series of thoughts, to parse out what was happening how he felt about it.  He said that what occurred to him, there under the water was the idea, “You know what? If this sonofabitch is going to kill me, he’s not getting out without a fight. Fuck him.”

And he fought.  And when he did, he was just determined. Committed. As the Fates would have it, my dad dragged himself out of that croc pit that day alive and victorious. He had managed to shift his position when the croc released the leg to get a better bite and rolled on to the top of him and wrestled his arms around the jaws to prevent them from attacking.

All of this was only a few moments, probably. But enough time to provide a defining moment. I’ve come to believe that this is what we get, in life. A lot of down-time, a lot of routine and ritual and here and there, often without preparation or warning, a small number of moments, branch-points where we are called upon to decide who and how we are. Occasions arise and they ask us to rise to them; to react to them.  These moments, strung together, if we’re consistent, can form a kind of narrative about us that forms a story. A story of who we are.

My dad’s moments, when they came, he largely rose to meet with this kind of identity.  When it came down to it, my dad stood his ground and fought. Win or lose, he fought.

So, back to the zoo. In time, with examination, this few-moments-struggle would become something grand and defining.  But there, in that moment,  now safe and not-killed, he was just embarrassed in front of his new boss and mentor. He was wet and muddy and bleeding profusely from the leg. He may have even apologized. I think I remember him saying that the rest of the keepers were laughing; it was like an initiation ritual and rite of passage when dealing with life-threatening animals: the first time your life was actually, really threatened.

Since the doctor’s bill would have been too expensive, he treated the wound himself with the kit they had there. It was a lot of ripped flesh but it would heal. However, lodged in the leg, under the bandage, was a lump. Over the next week or so, maybe more; maybe two weeks? I don’t know. Over some time, however, the lump moved. It worked itself across his leg until eventually it pushed close enough to the surface to come out. And it was that tooth.

So he kept it.  He found some crafts-person or jewelery maker who drilled a small hole through it and he wore it around his neck from then on, figuring he had earned it. He kept it as a token of remembered bravery and also as a kind of memento mori; a reminder that when you wake up each morning, you don’t know if Death might decide to come knocking (or biting) so you might want to live accordingly.

He didn’t make a big fuss about this necklace of his. It just was. He didn’t talk to people about it, he didn’t brag or use it to start conversations. It was a very personal talisman to my dad and a piece of his identity. And it never left his neck.

It lived under his uniform when he would later become a decorated Master Sergent in the United States Air Force, before that it was hidden from view behind a shirt and tie as he anchored a local news broadcast. It was there with him as he won a series of daytime appearances and one night-time appearance on a TV game show called JEOPARDY; this back in the days before Alex Trebek.  It was there on fishing trips, hikes, walks, parties, trips; everywhere. It just was.

He had made a kind of a deal, I think, with that moment under the water and weight of the reptile.  To honor and remember it, to remember that feeling of realizing that when push came to shove, he acted, he kept this physical object close to him. And to remind him that come what may, when everything else was stripped away, that was who he was. He was the man who fought.

When he got lung cancer, we didn’t talk much about what would happen after he was gone. I wouldn’t allow it. I wanted only to focus on how he was going to beat this beast back too, fight it into remission, wrestle it down and drag himself away again. But we had a few talks. I told him that the only two things I wanted–when that time came, I would stipulate, years and years in the future– were his buck knife that he had carried all throughout my childhood, and the necklace. But I didn’t want it until it no longer belonged to him. That was as close as I got to talking about him not being alive.

The last night of his life, in the ICU, I stayed with him all night. The staff were very understanding; you’re not supposed to be able to do that, but they let me, so long as I stayed awake.  He had been admitted with a severe double pneumonia. When they took his blood oxygen levels in the ER, they were around 40%. He was very alert and aware, cognizant and present, but weak as a kitten. I had asked the doctor at what percentage would they have to intubate. He told me, “Mr. Dobbin, we’re long past that. I cannot give you a medical reason why your father is able to know where or who he is. I’ve never seen this. He’s at 40%, I don’t understand how he can form words.”  They managed, through pure oxygen feeds and breathing treatments that looked like old world alchemy, with steaming tubes and odd smells, to coax his blood levels back up over the next few hours.

But all that oxygen is, paradoxically, also detrimental and should have, by rights, taken away my father’s ability to think, to talk, to make sense of what was going on.

It did not. He fought, with the same determination, with the same dedicated vigor that he had fought there under the water being rolled by a croc, with the same steadfast refusal to give in that he had shown when he would not give up on that calf (a lifetime ago, several of them, now, in my mind’s eye) and he remained himself. As much as the rude mechanics of the organism tried to take over, he would not allow it. He was still him: regal, dignified and although physically broken and battered, still essentially a strong man.

Speaking was a trial and cost him precious energy, but he spoke enough that night to show me that he was all there, and all him. Again, I was so astonished; this was all mind over matter. He was willing himself to stay alive long enough to get home, where he could die on as much of his own terms as the situation allowed.

That night, he kept on trying to give me his necklace, encouraging me to take it. (That, and his Kindle.) I would not. I told him that I only wanted it when it didn’t belong to him anymore.

So the next day, through some brutal and harrowing logistics, we got him home. He died at home that night, not 12 hours after coming back.  On his own terms and with such a grace and dignity. He died well, my father. That was the last lesson he gave me as a son. What it is like for a man to die well and with bravery and good cheer.

So then the necklace was now, at long last,  no longer his. My aunt, who was a nurse and who had stayed and attended to him in those last hours, helped me take it off of him. Off of his body, I should say, as that was no longer him.

But the necklace, to me, that was still him. It was a piece that continued on, passed along and now taken up.

That was my narrative. It sprung into my head sort of organically; it seemed proper and right. I would wear it as he wore it, exactly as he wore it and it would act as a torch passed. Its shape and feel around my neck would remind me of the type of father I should be, in those defining moments as they arose, and it would keep a part of him still present and active in the world.

So in the year following my dad’s death, there was a lot of stuff to deal with. My estranged brother and sister, his children from his first marriage, who came together with me for those last days of our dad’s life, grew distant and cold again and went away.

My baby daughter was  formally diagnosed with low-functioning autism and a team of professionals doubted as to whether or not she would ever learn to talk. After a visit to a neurologist, we learned that there was a chance that what she had was not autism, but possibly a series of silent seizures in the language portion of her brain. Or, even worse, possibly a horrible, degeneratative , deadly disease called Rhett’s Syndrome; blood tests which took weeks to come back went out to confirm or deny this possibility.

It was, thankfully, negative; all blood tests came back negative for any organic cause for her symptoms.

And I wore this necklace.  I was my daughter’s constant companion and care-giver for this year, when she was thousands-of-miles distant while standing in the same room with us. And this necklace acted as a token and talisman for me, to remind me of who it was I came from.  I will not tell you that it gave me hope and assuredness and bravery and that I did not despair because I wore it.

That would be a lie.

There were a large collection of broken moments that year when all seemed lost and wrong and hopeless; so much so that it all seems like a half-remembered and awful dream at times. That year found me broken and unable to put myself back together at many points. I tried to make those moments solitary ones, away from where anyone who needed me to be strong might see or hear them.

But my hand would go up to that necklace and it would remind me:  She cannot afford for you to fall down on this job or give up. Break on your own time, but when you are with her, you do as your father would with you, as you saw your father do time and again, when it counted: you don’t give up or give in. It doesn’t matter if you are strong or not, you will yourself the strength if you do not have it. You do.

So you know–my daughter had a series of miraculous breakthroughs. She continues to this day to have them and is a brilliant, funny, willful amazing little  girl. And boy, does she talk.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the necklace, the tooth and the story of how I came to own it. You see, at that time, I was wearing it, exactly the same way, hanging from the same strap, tied in the same way, as my father had. But I didn’t own it, not yet, at that point.

My daughter was not yet pointing at things. That’s the key to unlocking language. The symbolic and magical act of pointing. It is how we first begin to name and apprehend the universe from our senses. Pointing and commanding, “I will call you THIS.” I was committed to getting her to point. I was obsessed with it as the necessary first skill that would open the door to all the others.

Before every nap or bed-time, I would sit with her on a big chair and hold against me. I’d take her hand and form it into a point and I’d move it, like a puppet, through picture-books. ABC books with photos were the best as they provided the most densely packed field of items to point at and name.

And I’d use her hand as a pointer, pressing, naming, repeating. For as long as I could, until she fell asleep.  To watch it, I would imagine, I would appear crazy or delusional. She never seemed to follow or attend; she’d resist at first and then just give in, her arm would go limp and she’d just let me move it this way and that.  Over weeks and months, this was our ritual. With no real progress.

When she would fall asleep, I’d hold her and try to remember that this is a long game being played. I’d put my hand up to the necklace, invoking my father in some ad hoc religious gesture of ancestor-worship, trying to not slip under the waves of hopelessness and just weep. It worked, mostly. Not every time, but mostly, it worked.

Then one day, sitting down like that, as we had done so many times before, in the middle of pointing, I felt brush of something falling down my chest. I heard a small tapping clatter as something tiny and hard tumbled to the floor.

My father’s necklace, the tooth that had lived next to his skin for as long as I had lived had just crumbled and fallen apart.

Nothing had pulled on it, nothing had hit it. It just slipped itself apart and lay in two pieces on the floor. The inside was  exposed and dark; it looked little and inconsequential. Not at all the mystical, important, permanent and immutable magic relic and artifact that stood in my mind as the culmination of the best part of  Joel Dobbin’s legacy as a father and human being, continuing through the ages after his body had become so much dust.

That story, that narrative that I had invested so much in believing? It too, split apart and lay broken on the floor. It was now simply what it was: some random fragments from some random animal, some time ago. A bit of detritus.

I was in a panic. Like, an existential panic.  It was Jolene who saved me. She collected the two pieces together and kept them safe until I calmed down and was able to look at them.

I had worn this loop of lace and tooth from the hour my father had died and I had not taken it off since. I had not formally declared the “rules” about it all, but the rough form of them were present, if unspoken, in my head.

Like a modified “three second rule,” whereby a piece of food is somehow OK to eat if it falls on the floor and is immediately picked up within the first few seconds, so too did I have  some innate belief that by keeping this chain of use unbroken for any time that I was keeping him here.  Yes, of course, he had died but as long as I did this secret, private, Twilight-Zone-Stephen-King-ghost-magic act of holding him next to me with his necklace– his charm and amulet, if you will– I was cheating death and allowing some magical Joel Dobbin essence to remain active and alive in the world.

I’m intellectually capable of understanding that this can be metaphorically “true” by way of intention and that any physical item is “only” a Dumbo-style magic feather. But being intellectually aware of an idea and feeling something in your gut are two different things.

It is not as if I had not gone through the pain of losing my dad; I had. It is not as if I had not grieved or mourned. I had. But with that necklace clattering to the ground, no longer whole or real,  I experienced this cold stab straight into the middle of me: He is really, really gone and all of this is just talk in your head.

So here I was, faced with the dissolving and crumbling of a narrative that I had been propping up and I didn’t know what do to or believe anymore. I kept the pieces and the strap that used to hold them in a wooden box. It became a kind of mini-mausoleum, there in a cupboard that I’d open up and look at at different points in the day.

Jolene took a look at the pieces. She saw that they fit together perfectly; they split straight down the middle into two halves. I summoned up the gall to inspect them myself.

“You can have it fixed,” Jolene told me.

“But it won’t be the same,” I remember saying, “It won’t be the same strap, it won’t be as he had it.”

“No, it won’t. But it is what you have,” she told me.

And she was right. It had become overwhelmingly important for me that it remain “the same;” I had built up a whole rickety edifice and mental scaffolding dedicated to this idea: I’d keep this one item “the same” and that would be enough.

But that was an illusion. Nothing was “the same.”  There is no “same.”  My dad was dead and his body was ashes and no matter how many times my hand went to a phone at some point to give him a call or I had the errant thought of “I gotta ask my dad about that” when a question I did not know the answer to came up, he was gone. And there was nothing that could be kept the same about that.

So I had one of those moments that I call a “robot meets programmer” moment. See, I have this constructed metaphor for approaching life and being a person that,  quickly stated, goes something like this: We are largely robots, programmed by habit and instruction and convention to go about our day and to deal with things. We live by an internalized set of rules, most of the time that we don’t even realize or think about; our attitudes, approaches, views and triggers are usually pretty autonomic.

But here’s the thing: We’re the robot, but at certain points, when we decide to examine ourselves, we can also become the programmer and give the robot a new series of instructions. Most often, this is when we find that the auto-pilot instructions our robot has been using are proving ineffective to deal with the day-to-day of reality. Anyone who has lost a great deal of weight by way of a lifestyle change or successfully quit a terrible habit might understand what I mean.

I’m using “robot” and “programmer” as metaphors because I’m a nerd and that’s the set of symbols that make the most sense to me, but you get the idea.

So here I was, in that “programmer” mind, looking at what I had and what was necessary. I had this item which I needed to have meaning attached to, but I could no longer have the exact same meaning attached to it that I had been operating with. Perhaps this was even for the best.

I would have to craft a new narrative; that’s what being “the programmer” in this metaphor entails. But the thing is, once you write the program, you’ve got to go back to being the robot.  There’s a whole lot more I can go off on with this particular tangent, but I will not.

And here is what I did: I decided that I would add a new chapter to this story, the tale of the necklace, the Tale of the Tooth.

In mythic terms, It would not only be about Joel Dobbin, the hero who discovered bravery and resolve when presented with the last inch of himself, but now would be about Josh Dobbin, too. And about what he did when presented with despair.

As it was handed down to me, this item was, for all its importance and value, imperfect. The strap was frayed from use, the tooth itself in disrepair from age. Even to crocodiles, teeth are temporary and replaceable. I would have to set about to a kind of… well, a quest, to restore and revive this artifact. This amulet, this talisman. I’d have to change it. I’d have to make it stronger and more permanent and add my mark to it. I wanted a new mounting and fastening fabricated for it, bonded to it at the top, to secure it. I drew a picture of how I imagined it should look. And I felt better.

So I searched. In a world with an internet in it, this is a little easier than the kind of quests people had to put themselves on back when questing was a thing. I found an artist and a jewelry maker who lived in a town I used to work in  and I contacted her because I liked what she said about her work in her website.  I told her the story of my dad (a Reader’s Digest version, to be sure, but enough to get the point across) and how I wanted to create something with meaning that would last and be strong.

She returned the contact and informed me that this kind of workmanship would require silversmithing that she could not do, but she knew of someone who could.  She got me in contact with a jeweler named Rich Macri she knew and thought highly of. He turned out to be the person for the job.

This was not the narrative that had been, this was not THE SAME AS IT WAS–  it was the new and emerging narrative. It was one that I was helping craft. Now, the story of this necklace and tooth I wear includes its origin as well as its rebirth.

I sat down with Mr. Macri at his shop in New Milford and explained the significance of the piece as best as I could. He understood what I was going for and created a work that was expressly simple and clean, strong and elegant without undue ornamentation or flourish.

He brought an artist’s and a craftsman’s sensibility to the task. I wear it now as I type, and that is also part of the narrative. The new one, the one in which I am an active participant as well as receiver and  steward of.

 

And that’s really the thing.  at the end of it all, that’s the lesson and moral:

We may pretend that there’s a thing-ness to a thing that exists apart from our participation.

But it just ain’t so.

There exists no narrative or story, but that we make it and write it. And once made and written, it is to be lived and experienced.

There’s no inherent power to this tooth, but that I create it and give it meaning. It is a physical representation of a concept and the concept is what is important. The item, too, is important; it is precisely  important as I make it. That’s the essence of magic.

Which is not to discount the role these things play; there is a need for us, as people, to turn our concepts and ideas into forms and representations.  They are maps which lead us to the territory we seek or help us navigate it once we arrive. But they are not the territory itself. It is easy to forget this.

The scary precipice confronted is the realization that there is no “real” deeper meaning that exists on its own to many of the things we hold dear, but that we are participants in crafting the meaning. We’re making it up. Believe me when I say, you can go howling mad staring down that precipice.

We are presented with randomness and chance and chaos and we impose upon it, through our own will and perspective, a matrix of order and meaning that we choose.

It is really the old mystic construction of “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” with the realization that this is not an invitation to mere anarchy and lawlessness, but rather that we are called upon to craft and create our meanings, our laws, as we will.

And also, for all our pomp and ceremony– we’re really all just making it up as we go along. And that’s OK. A fancier way of saying “making it up as you go along” is “engaging in an ongoing act of creation.”  Either way, it is much the same. We craft the narrative. We live it.

I wear this necklace, this amulet, this charm and this talisman around my neck and it holds a wealth of meaning. It holds a wealth of personal history, it is a piece and a part of who and what my father was. It traveled through time, in one incarnation, with him as he navigated through his life, making it up largely as he went along. It is a representation of his resolve and the absolute best, most noble part of him.

But it is not him. It is a reminder that he was, and a reminder that I currently am.

And one day(hopefully far from today) when I am no longer, I hope that one of my daughters (or if the Fates are kind enough and allow me to see this far, one of my grandchildren) will wear it and add their own voice and tale to the ongoing narrative.  And maybe do as I do, every so often: put a hand up to it and remember.

I miss you, Pop.  I hope I’m doing you proud. I’m trying, in any case.