Home is where the heart is

It feels like a long time since I've been in the place I actually call my own home and I haven't spent this much continuous time with my family since I left the home I grew up in, but somehow tonight all these houses I've been temporarily living in all feel like home to me. As I was driving back today from Statesville I realized it's going to feel somehow lonely to be in my own space again in about a week. Well maybe lonely is the wrong word, I have many friends that I also love dearly in Noho, but I will miss the proximity I have here to the people I love the best in this world. I think it will feel odd for a while to be so far away again.

It was so great to spend time with my Dad but it was also scary. In my head, he is still the same young and dashing man with a thick mop of black curly hair who could fix anything that's broken, solve any problem and made me feel safe when the world was frightening. And he still builds bird houses and grows a garden and loves maps and the weather as much as I do. I guess I learned all those things from him. It's really difficult for me to accept that he's 75 now, needs a cane to walk and he's gone quite bald in the last six years. Even though I see him so rarely, I can't begin to imagine my life without him in it but this trip made me realize that no matter how much I deny the possibility, the day will come when he won't be there.

Nonetheless, when I'm with him, I can believe he will always be there for me and I'm so lucky to have a Dad that I can tell anything to without fear of recrimination. Being a Luddite and all of course, he has never actually read this blog but he was keenly interested in what I was doing with it. I love that I could tell him and my mom Helen why I came out of the closet and admitted publicly I was a cannabis consumer. I told them I smoked every day for 37 years and they didn't blink. They weren't worried about the family name and their reputations nor did they gently mock me as my sister sometimes does. They were proud that I was making a difference doing something that I care strongly about and supportive of my work. When I was done talking Dad looked at me and said, "I don't think they should legalize cocaine and heroin because they destroy lives but the government should absolutely legalize marijuana. It doesn't hurt anybody and they would make a ton of money on it." How cool is that?

And speaking of my work here, I'm burned out from the drive and spending the last two hours trying to get through 500 backed up emails so please check in tomorrow when I expect to get back to the breaking news on the drug war.