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At the funeral, everyone kept telling me that I look like my dad. The odd thing is that neither he nor I could ever spot the likeness. I remember how we once talked about family resemblances and he said that he didn’t think I looked much like either him or my mother, and that probably I’m the spitting image of some ancestor from another century, but we’ll never know. My eyes are definitely my mother’s, but the rest of my features are harder to identify.

But now, I’m seeing resemblances all over the place. My tendency to worry and fret and be pessimistic comes from my father’s side of the family (not just him, but generations of Scottish Presbyterians). But he also gave me my taste for movies and theater and visual spectacle of all kinds, and a lot of my sense of humor comes from him as well. My love of language is from both of my parents, jointly; my mother’s family is full of Scrabble-players and makers of terrible puns, and she read to me every night of my childhood until long after I could read on my own. My father told me long, elaborate stories when I was growing up, and when I was too old for stories he talked about books with me and gave me his back issues of the New Yorker. My wavy hair is like his, and so (according to family friends) are some of my characteristic hand gestures.

It’s hard to tell how much of us is in the DNA we get from our parents and their parents, how much is in our upbringing and the circumstances that shape us, and how much is random or inexplicable. One of the things my dad’s friends gave me was a sheaf of research he’d been doing on the Scottish side of his family; he’d gotten all the way back to an ancestor born in 1771 in Lanarkshire. Someday I may go there to see where my great-great-great-great-grandparents came from.

I think I’m starting to see now why people have children. It’s as if somehow, if you can see how your parents and grandparents continuing, even in something as small as the shape of an eyebrow or a tilt of the head, you haven’t completely lost them, even if you’ll never see them again. And you hang on to that, because you have to.

It’s still difficult to write anything, but when I think of where I got my fondness for spinning words together, it helps, somehow.

There will be posting here again, I promise. There for a while, it felt
like I’d lost the ability to put words together; every time I tried to
write a sentence, all that came out were little staccato phrases, short, stark,
void of everything that sounded like me. Thankfully, that hasn’t lasted.

While I’ve been not posting, I’ve been making arrangements for next
year. Back at the end of April I was offered the chance to stay on for
another year here at UVa, and I’ve decided to take the offer. Which is
a huge relief, because I just couldn’t handle more job searching and
then moving this summer. Instead, I’ll get to stay where I am for the
time being, carry on with a couple of ongoing projects, and work with some very interesting people I didn’t get to work with this year, as well as some very interesting people I did get to work with. Stability seems to help.

Oh, and I’m going to ALA in Chicago at the end of the month. Anyone want to meet up? (Tangognat?)

This is very hard to write, much less post. But you’re probably wondering why there haven’t been any posts here lately, so I thought I should explain why.

You may remember that I mentioned an illness in the family several months ago. The family member in question was my father, and there for a while, we had a lot of cause for optimism. But last weekend, he unexpectedly got worse, and a week ago today he slipped away, very quietly, while I was still thinking he’d be all right. I hope that none of you out there ever have to receive a predawn phone call from a hospital.

Nearly everyone loses their parents at some point in their lives, but I wasn’t expecting to lose one of mine before I turned thirty. I’ve been away attending to administrative matters and helping to arrange the funeral, which was yesterday. I would say that it provided some sense of closure, but I’m still numb.

There aren’t any more words. There will be, eventually, but now I can’t write anything else. In large part because writing it makes it more real.