*annoyingly happy*

Dear Leigh:

Your post made me feel a lot more at peace with the relationship I have with my family and the physical distance between us. You're right; patience is really the way to handle it (though I'm not sure I'd have the patience required for Mike) and actively keeping up the relationship I have with my parents is the best I can do. No sense worrying about the dynamics--they are what they are.

I'm really sorry to hear about your shingles. At least you get a week off of work, right? Though I'm sure you'd prefer a healthy week at work to a week at home in pain. All I can say is make sure you let yourself rest. A few years ago I decided to "work through" a cold, and I ended up having that cold for over a month.

Now I will talk about myself, something I fear I will be doing entirely too much over the next 5-6 months. Jeremiah and I plan to get married in December, and I'm already boring myself when I listen to the conversations I'm having with my mother about it. Not that I'm not excited--I am--but I remember how sick I got of hearing my roommate talk about plans, and I imagine that in less than a week I've become that girl that won't shut up about her wedding.

Even so, I'm going to continue talking about myself. I'm very sorry. But I just had one of the best experiences of my life in terms of fatherly pride and approval (which is what I strove for growing up and still not-so-secretly want), and I must share:

Recently, (for the past year) my parents have been having issues with their house. The main sewage line had to be replaced, resulting in a huge ditch through the front yard and dirt all over our cul-de-sac for several weeks; the basement flooded, ruining precious belongings like books and baby clothes; the basement stayed wet due to the disturbed ground of the front yard and they had to call in people to dig it up and install sump-pumps; and now the roof has to be replaced.

So my dad's talking to me tonight, and he says "you know, I think your phone call on Tuesday was like the culmination of our luck turning around. On Monday, the electrician came to put the plugs in for the sump pump, which cost us more than we expected. Monday night, I came home and your mom had a long face--the air conditioner wasn't working. Well, Tuesday we called the electrician back in, thinking he must have hit something while he was working, and sure enough he sheepishly pointed out a little switch that he accidentally tricked, flipped it back, and the AC came on. Then, the roof contractors came and gave us an estimate much lower than we expected, and then YOU call to tell us you're getting married!" His voice, at this point, was filled with more joy than I've ever heard in it. "What I'm trying to say is: we're just so happy. We're so happy for you."

It's the sappiest I've ever heard my dad get, and I realized then that whether we can sit around and chat like old friends doesn't have anything to do with the depth of our relationship. Not with my dad...I don't think he'd WANT to sit around with me and talk about clothes or my friends or J.

So I'm no longer lamenting the fact that I don't talk with my dad like I do with my mom. The way we relate is just different...each of us is, I think, eager to see the other happy. We just don't go on and on about it.

Now time to return to the work world. My syllabus is due in a couple weeks and I am stumped...any suggestions for a fun composition topic to cover in the last couple weeks of class? I'm trying to do "contemporary composition" and talk about blogs and graphic novels and funky websites as new ways of expressing with writing, but it's really hard to make it all flow.

I hope you are feeling much better. Write soon.

Froehlichkeit und gesundheit (happiness and health) meine Kusine (I thought I'd try out my foreign language--it doesn't sound as pretty as your French, though).

Kate