I was talking to @plainwhite about mourning and then by complete happenstance I stumbled into thinking about my granddad who I’ll never see again in the flesh. I have a lot of those people in my heart. Some of them are still alive, but I doubt I’ll see them anyway. Dead to me just means they’re working really hard never to see my face again. Maybe I’m doing it to them.

Point is Granddad is ash, his brain patterns and soul bits scattered to the wind whatever they were. All that is left is my memories of him, and everyone else who has them as well. The thing is that he was beloved. The man left a giant imprint, and it is what I admired him for. He’ll live in his imprint another few decades more I’d say. It’s why the movie Coco resonated with me, because I imagine Granddad is on the other side, living on in the stories I tell about him, and that other people probably do as well, or at least remember about him. He was memorable.

It is probably why I’m a narrative psychologist, because his narrative is so strong. He’s the only character I ever met larger than life. Forget Walt Disney, or George Washington, Julius Ceaser or even Moses, this guy seemed to live full…… and it was indicative to me that the age of legends was over. He was as big a man as the age allowed. He could have been richer, but it never entertained him, and the man never did what didn’t entertain him. He did dental work for the challenge, I was convinced. He liked to be social and mentally and dexterily challenged at the same time. If he lived now he’d be building complex machines of some kind in a team environment, or doing some kind of alternative to modern work, because he just created a bubble around himself that function occured in……

Anyway the song is the memory. He had this disc in his car. This is how present and smart the guy was, he kept up with tech into his 80s. He loved a wide variety of music, mostly outlaw country and he got me hooked, but this was subversive stuff. He also subscribed me to a socialist newspaper. The song is about how old dogs, a metaphor for old men can still get stuff done, and the metaphor leans pretty much into it being sex. There’s another song on this album about being too old to cut the mustard, but not that, just too tired to spread it around, and it’s a metaphor for being just fine to have sex, but too tired to philander anymore.

I mean this is some racy stuff from my granddad who could really lay it on thick with Christian audiences. I never got the impression when he met with the more prudish crowd common to Oklahoma (where we often roamed together) that he was in ill favor as was the common outcome of holding the kinds of beliefs reflected in this sort of music.

It’s sort of like how my dad once made an off hand comment when we couldn’t find a rope while camping that he had used as a prop for sunday school to teach teenagers that maybe one of those teenagers was swinging from it…… A suicide joke from my dad, probably the darkest thing my dad ever said.

Anyway I’ve been listening to a lot of music like he would like, thinking about him, dad too. My dad’s memory isn’t doing so well. I might have to become a caregiver, I don’t know how far down the line that is.

When that time comes, I’m going to be focusing really hard on the love I have for Dad, because that’s how that has to work.

Here’s one from my dad that helped get me thinking about going into mental health young;

Apparently dad got to see him live in New York when he was doing a training trip up there sometime in his mid career. The cool thing about Buster Poindexter is that he actually has an acting credit in Scrooged(1988) as the Ghost of Christmas Past, go back and watch it he’s there showing Bill Murray all his awful ways. It is a bit weird that his voice doesn’t exactly sound like it would come from that face, but that is true of a lot of singers.