"Sketch Book"

A compilation of memories of my father:

1. My mother was away on a trip.  We were sitting in church.  He took off his wedding ring and looked at it hard for a few moments, before turning to me and asking me to read the inscription on the inside.  It read: Forever yours.  He took the ring back from me and slipped it back on his finger. It was probably 2007 or 2008.

2. It was 2:00 in the morning.  I had gone to bed hours before, but woke up sweaty and hot.  I looked up from where I lay next to my two little sisters and saw him on the computer next to us.  The blue light made him look sick.

3. We had been on the road for 6 hours already.  I sat next to him with my dog in my lap.  He talked aimlessly about how unfair all of it was to the dog, and started to cry.

4. I was sitting with my sisters in the middle of the afternoon upstairs.  He was yelling at my mom.  We were hiding.

5. My car broke down in the middle of Salt Lake and I was alone.  He left in the middle of a soccer game to come pick me up.

6. He had just had open heart surgery, and it was his first day home from the hospital.  I rested my ear against his chest and listened to the steady thump of his new heart.

7.  He picked me up from school on a regular day with my suitcase packed.  We never went back to our house.

8.  They offered to pay for therapy for him.  He refused to go.

9. He checked himself into a psych ward without explanation.  I asked my mom when he'd be back.  She told me soon.

10. I left for college, and he dropped me off.  He carried all my bins and boxes up three flights of stairs, even though he had a bad knee.

11. He linked his arm through mine and walked through the streets with me, singing songs he learned as a boy in school in India.

12. He rubbed my ear to distract me from my growing pains.


------


My next step is to brainstorm some of the images that would accompany these memories.  These would be presented in the format of a website, where it would be just like a short video with the memories being read along with the images/vignettes.  The footage is not just of my father, but perhaps of other things as well.

I'd want to get other people to contribute to this as well, and have them try to recreate the memories with subjective images or video clips.