Luminary

My girlfriend and I went this past weekend to WaterFire in Providence, RI. If you have not seen this romantic display of art, music, energy and community, you must. This weekend's theme was Choose Peace.

New this year (I believe) was the Starry Starry Night feature, which allows people to craft a dedication message, accompanying a candlelit luminary along the canal embankment and nearby steps, for a lost love. How fitting to do this, as my father died 11 years ago today: Aug. 11, 1998. In life, he wasn't the brightest beacon of light out there, but today I continue to feel his presence and am nonetheless inspired to try to live my life the best way I know how.

Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

Happy anniversary. Ten years ago today you stepped into something good in the great big dairy farm in the sky. How is it going? Are the cows healthy and well-fed? Do the milk tanks still have its divine shine, or have you been so successful that there's no denying the wear and tear?

I imagine you must be happy. I imagine you in overalls, shoveling shit and looking up at me with the proudest grin, from ear to ear.

It's been a decade since I last saw you. A decade. A DECADE.

I rarely think of you anymore, but because this is the big one-oh I've been thinking of writing you this letter. (Did you get the one I wrote a couple of years ago? I was planning to write a book about you, but... oh well. I got as far as writing two pages worth of memories, one for each line in my journal. Turns out, that was good enough for me at the time.)

So yeah. I rarely think of you anymore. That doesn't mean never, though. You were a tremendous influence on me, for better or for worse. I am always aware of how I am, how I react, how I overreact. I am aware how much of that had been molded by you, and how much I have grown on my own in the last 10 years.

A decade!

I remember how you often said that sometimes I need to get burned in order to learn a lesson. Not literally, of course. I need to experience life's joys -- and its consequences. (Yet, instead of following through on that philosophy, you continued to shield me, to protect me. I never understood that. Maybe I will when I become a parent.)

To be sure, I have grown a lot in the last year, and especially in the last few months. I realize I needed to experience both joys and its consequences in order to learn what I am capable of, how far I actually go to please people and how disastrous that can be.

I know you were unhappy the last seven years of your life (almost a decade). You're happier now, I hope. Unlike you, I choose not to free myself of self-doubt and pessimism by death. It's too bad you did not realize you could be happy with life while you had a life to live.

Because you see, it's not enough to hold on to a lifelong dream and be discouraged when things do not go your way or how you planned it. Sometimes disastrous consequences are not so dire when you step away from them. And when you step far enough away, you start to realize how unnecessary being caught up in the drama (that you create for yourself) really is, because all that you have to make yourself happy is within yourself. You don't have to travel the world, you don't have to seek sanctuary in others, you don't have to die first before you find true happiness.

Sometimes you need to let go, and go with the flow. ... Be happy you're still breathing in and out, be happy that people can be your friends if you let them, be happy that you alone have the ability to know what is right for you at any given moment, no matter what anyone else says or does. Be happy you're moving in the right direction.

Because sometimes, you do end up getting what you want.

Love,
STASIU

Graveyard shift

This week has gone by so fast, yet last Sunday, or even Monday, seems like it was on the other side of the universe.

Events that were once a supernova of negative energy are now just a small blip, a dim twinkle of light among many, something pleasing to appreciate and admire when a glance is thrown in that direction.

Nevertheless, the future is uncertain, and that can be scary.

When I told someone this week about an opportunity that had seemed to present itself, and my small twinge of anxiety surrounding it, the guy got excited. He gets that way when he is about to give sage advice.

"You know, that's fear," he said of my anxiety. Then he told me how he conquers fear.

Find a graveyard, a really old one. Find a really big gravestone that has a description of what the person was like, preferably a firefighter or officer or someone similar who was heroic or otherwise lost their life before his or her time. And then think, what would this person say of your troubles? What advice would this person give you?

"They would tell you that what you fear is so insignificant," he said. "They would tell you to live your life. You know, you look at their gravestone and think about what they accomplished. But they're dead now! They'd say, take those risks! Live your life!"

Interesting.

I live close to Mount Auburn Cemetery, so I decided to go there. It's a big cemetery, so at first I thought the burying ground on the intersection of Mount Auburn and Arlington streets in Watertown was part of it. I went there and soon realized it wasn't. It must be a family cemetery. A really old one, too. Not many BIG gravestones, other than one tall and proud one for the only Watertown soldier to have fallen in the Battle of Lexington. There were many old slabs from the 1700s, the 1600s and even the 1500s. So old that the typography of the letter "s" looked more like the letter "f", and abbreviations for some words were unfamiliar (although decipherable).

Back in the summers of late high school through early college, I worked at the local church doing maintenance, including burying people. A backhoe would remove the earth and place it on a pile close to the grave on the morning of, or the day before, the funeral. A concrete box would be lowered in, to house the casket. After the funeral, my supervisor and I would shovel back in the dirt, packing it in as much as possible. Somehow, more often than not, all the dirt impossibly fit back in place.

And here, in this family plot, where there were no concrete blocks, these slabs were commemorating those who had not lived for 300 to 500 years. They were dead. They were no more. They were dust.

But I am not. I am alive. Upon reflection, the anxiety I had was just laughable. It really was insignificant. Had I let it get the better of me, I would have continued to rot in pessimism. Because I shifted my perspective and was able to shrug the anxiety off, I was able to enjoy the rest of the week. And take a risk. And live.