KT,
Your mom and I had a moment of preflections on the day: how it would begin, what it might entail, how it would roll, which you had somehow perfected as an artform. You turned daily activities and transitions into seamless journeys when we visited you in Portland.
These days have been mostly about the past few, though we’re beginning to stumble upon all things of you past. I was rooting through stuff in the spare rooms and garage, you know, where the archives of families are curated with both abandon as well as care, and a promise to one day clean things out. This downsizing, moving on, staying the course on current, though, may be a big mistake and treats time as a commodity to be acquired, traded, and otherwise taken as lightly as corn or oil or all the other stuff in the production cycle. Detour: Your analysis of product design, materials, supply-chains, product management, and distribution systems, all being learned from your program was very cool, so don’t get me wrong: this trade cycle has its own rhythm that we can talk about sometime. But for today it misses the key element of time.
Today, we’re driving to Portland so we can clean out your apartment. It will be a tsunami of grief, regret, and sadness, all mixed with boxing and hauling: It’s this juxtaposition of your life, stopped short that is overwhelming. How possibly could this be? You should be with us moving just like we planned. Take a day off Richardson Sports, get your stuff to a storage place in Portland, move in with Madison, finish your program, and... Done. And then…
So my man, in anticipation of this terrible awful tsunami of emotions, I’ve written you a Haiku. I followed the traditional rules with 5-7-5 syllables. And it is what is missing that conveys the deep meaning of this word artform: You.
To ask when not why
Always and never are now
Nowhere to somewhere
We love you. Your time has not come. It is. It will be.
Dad
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