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The closeout list grows shorter each week this summer. Each item is difficult to complete, but seems necessary as time grows possibly shorter here. It all depends on how things go in August, I’ll make my best presentation, and if I’m lucky, I get awarded a fresh start. If not, well, then not.

This weeks item was returning my Dad’s ashes to Chicago.

This is a simple thing to do, takes a little cooperation from TSA, but then it was a simple task, keep the carry-on close by during flight, shuttles, hotel, and finally deliver to my sister.

Throughout the flight I was conscious Dad was there, I had conversations with him in my mind, talking about land features visible 30,000 feet below, about the city as we approached, he recapped his projects, Peter Hamm brewery, International Minerals in Glenview, project Deep Tunnel, Marina Towers, John Hancock, Sears Tower. It was a homecoming.

Before I delivered Dad’s ashes to Terri, I took a walking tour around downtown. Dad had taken me downtown once in college. I remember he’d circle the block while I jumped out and tried to take a photograph of Carsons, or the Auditorium, or the Stock Exchange Arch in front of the Art Institute.

The only one that was sad to revisit was the Stock Exchange Arch. The recent Renzo Piano addition to the Art Institute had been sited to cover most of the reflecting pool the arch used to stand in. Now it stood in a weedy (maybe they’re wildflowers) planter that doesn’t recognize the symmetry of the arch. It reminded me of a ruin, and of a change in a city’s values, choosing the new and shiny over the older and more substantial.

I’m feeling that way as the list shortens. I can see the time when I’ll be swept aside, maybe trotted out for some ceremonial occasions, but largely I’ll be considered irrelevant. Its not that I expect any different. I’m not a big ego I hope.

Last night as I sat on the granite wall, I thought about funhouse mirrors. You may remember them, their distorted surfaces might make a person appear thin, or especially curvy, or with a distorted head or limbs.

We see ourselves only in mirrors, ok, in pictures too, but in real time, its just mirrors. Our bathroom mirrors are supposed to be distortion free to show us ourselves as we are. This is not as rewarding at 56 as it was  some years back.

But the mirrors don’t let us see ourselves as we see ourselves. We don’t see the “us” that’s inside the image we project.

Trying to understand what’s inside is even harder than seeing it. The first question is usually “why?” followed by “how do I not do that?” But the answers can be deceptively simple…if it hurts when you do that…don’t do that! Putting them into practice is much harder, and piled up upon what we all have to do to deal with life, often gets back burnered. We need the comfort of our old ways, while knowing they build a wall between us and a future less well known.

Hopelessness can begin to appear when we realize that we cannot “fix” overnight, what took us a lifetime to become, and I think thats the most dangerous moment. If we lose hope, when we lose hope, life becomes a series of moments, like dust particles. We wipe away each one that lands in our eyes, but the ones that we don’t deal with, the particles that landed somewhere we can’t see or reach, they add to the weight of life and at some point, it breaks us.

Some people take the breaking as a time for introspection, growth and a rebirth of sorts. Others don’t recover from the break.

I think some people see the break coming, they look for lifelines or people to sweep the particles from where they can’t reach. The fortunate find good people willing to help with this, those less fortunate fall to the ground and are slowly covered in the dust of life and become residue that the wind blows into the air…to be deposited on some other un-seeing person and add one more microgram of weight to their life.

I can see a crossroads ahead, a figure standing there, maybe in a few weeks I’ll know if they are there to help me sweep myself free of the dust on my back, or if the figure is carrying a basket of dust with my name on it.

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