You are NOT the father!

What happened to daytime television? More specifically what happened to Maury Povich? Every afternoon, while applying my make-up (yes, afternoon, I am not fully ready for a day until after the clock strikes 1) I flip on mindless television to take up space. “Maury” is as consistent as birth control is effective. Every day it is the same topic “Who is my baby’s daddy?” Paternity tests, lie detectors, and screaming women who inevitably cry no  matter what the outcome may be. It starts with one of three possible personalities. 1. The hang-dogged looking mommy: she has clearly been around the block a few times. She’s seen some life, and probably smokes Pall Mall menthols. She’s just tired and wants the argument to be over. She is the most likely of the three to be correct in her accusations.  2. The grammatically incorrect outspoken mommy: There is no way that he is not the father, “Look at my son! He looks just like him!” and she will know the exact date of which she slept with the accused father, and it wasn’t for another week before she started seeing his best friend. 3. The cheatin’ wife: She is the most pathetic of them all. Yes, she cheated, but she’s sorry and she LOVES him. She will sit there and cry, and he will hold her hand and say to Maury, “I just want the kid to be mine.” and Maury will ask, “What if she’s not?” And he will tear up and say, “Oh it don’t matter none. I’ll still be there for her.” It is the latter two that are inevitably the wrong man. Then the results are read, Maury using the same tone and the same dramatic pause each time “You…………….. are (NOT) the father!” Followed by a lot of storming off stage in an emotional furor as well as a lot of screeching “I told you!”’s and even more crying. It has also become clear to me that there is an awful lot of unnecessary bleeping added by the producers during editing. It’s nasty. It is just shy of Jerry Springer (the only missing component on Maury is space where teeth should be and nudity).

Having spent some time pondering the downward spiral of daytime television, I am left with one question: How does it feel, Maury Povich, to go home from a long day at work/the studio and sit next to Connie Chung and answer questions about how your day went? She can’t be proud of you. You can’t be proud of yourself next to a journalist held in the same esteem as Barbara Walters, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

Come on MoPo, bring back Jack Hanna and his baby animals. Sure, ratings might decrease a bit, but your wife might actually sleep with you again. I’m just sayin’…

Ashes to Dust

I forgot to warn the rest of the family that spreading the ashes of a human body is nothing at all like it is in the movies. The wind doesn’t carry them off like sparkling fairy dust. There isn’t a beautiful song playing in the background. The ashes are coarse and there are chips of bone and teeth left in them. The parts that do burn down fine enough stick to your skin and clothes.

 

I knew though. I knew what it was going to sound like when his ashes hit the ground (because it does make a sound). I knew what he was going to feel like as he slipped through my fingers like a mixture of gravel and dust. I knew what it smelled like, how it tasted when the wind kicked it back in our breathing air. I knew that he would creep under our fingernails. I already knew so it didn’t hurt. It didn’t scare me. It didn’t startle. It didn’t lose it’s magic.

 

My dad and I stood at the edge of a large half buried bolder. We tossed handfuls of his father into the air and watched him scatter between the needles of the pine trees and settle between rocks and tufts of wildflowers. We felt him slip between our fingers in pieces as fine as snow and as coarse as rocks. We saw him against the mountains surrounding us. We listened to him as he took to the wind. We heard the pieces of his bones tinkle along the mountainside. We smelled and tasted what his burned up body smelled and tasted like. We washed him from our cheeks with our tears.

 

And in a broken voice my dad whispered, “And it goes on and on and on…”

 

This is what he asked us to do, but this is more importantly where he belonged. This is where I remembered him the most, and where he was the happiest. This was my grandpa. This was my father’s father. A Navy man. A sailor. A captain. The siren that stole his heart took shape in the majestic snow capped mountain range. And this was his burial at sea.  And here we laid him with his lover. Here we laid him with the creation of the God he served. Here he rested. Here he went on and on and on…