when it counts...

usually every july i post a little tribute to my dad... last years being the most famous... 

this year i was having trouble getting started when i happened across the journal i kept while he was sick and after he passed away.  as i read it i was instantly transported back into a memory that had catapulted to the front of my brain shortly after he was gone... i thought i'd pass along the story that was so typical of my dad.  funny how i had forgotten about this until i reread it.  glad i wrote it down to remember... and re-remember- again.

may 5, 2010

was taking a shower the other day when the most random memory came upon me.

i was 16, interviewing for a job at the Gap (swoon).  i didn't have a car yet so my dad had driven me there and patiently waited in the mall on a bench. (ironically, it was at the Old Buckingham Mall... which i live 1 block away from now)  i wore a black baby doll dress with yellow sunflowers that i had borrowed from a friend and it was my very first job interview... 

and a weird interview at that.

it was a group interview... totally nerve wracking.

they even made me assemble an outfit, to my horror.

i guess i hadn't realized you actually had to be fashionable to work there.   

before the interview was even over i knew i wouldn't get the job...  and it was a teenager's dream job. 

by the time i left the store my heart was broken into a million pubescent pieces.

i walked out of the storefront and straight into my daddy's arms... a ball of tears.  it was like he knew i would be exiting the store in tears and he needed to have his arms open just for me. he was my harbor and i just soaked up his love as i cried about my impending rejection.

then (i think) he took me for ice cream...

that or i've inserted it into my memories because it seems the sort of thing he would do.

it is one of the happiest of my sad memories because even though he spent a lifetime on the road as a truck driver away from us, it seems to me he was always there when it really mattered... 

and i can't picture a better person to console me in that moment than him.