not enough time
There was never enough time. We work too much. We didn’t talk enough. We were always too busy. It was always an afterthought.
My dad was always at work. He volunteered for the shifts nobody wanted, weekends, holidays, any time. That’s the kind of person he was. Of course, I was also a very busy person. I went to school. I worked. I sat at home and never went out. I avoided the telephone. Though I must admit, any time my dad called it was a great treat, so I always answered, or I called back as soon as I could.
There are so many things I'm going to miss. So much of his life I wasn’t allowed to be part of because his wife hated me. She was his second wife. She has always hated me. She always will. And she can say all she wants about how I was never there for him and that I never called and that the only time I called was when I wanted something. Part of that is true. The reason I didn’t call was because of her.
For the last almost nine years she’s been married to my dad, she went out of her way to be hateful towards me and to my sister. Mostly to me. Truth be told, I don’t like her all that much either. How is a person supposed to take it when they call their dad’s house to talk to him and she hangs up on us? What kind of person does that make her? What she doesn’t know is that my sister and I, we used to call him at work or on his cell phone. We almost never called the house, just to avoid having to talk to her.
I miss my dad SO much. I would do anything to take it back. I would do anything to have him with me. I would try harder to get along with her. I would… god I miss him.
I'm going to miss the random phone calls. I'm going to miss passing him driving down the street and hearing my cell phone go off playing “Ridin’ Dirty”… Funny thing, that song, pretty much every time my dad called was when we passed each other driving somewhere. I seemed to always be in the car when his calls came through. It became a joke after awhile and that song became his custom ring. Dad was the only one with a custom ring. Mostly that’s because we hardly ever saw one another, hardly ever talked on the phone. Neither of us was really big on phone calls. We always kept it short because of that.