Yesterday Beaker bullied me into calling Ray, my foster father. I hadn't spoken with him since well before Christmas. At Thanksgiving, my grandmother had wondered about Ray's mother: she'd be very old now, wouldn't she? (Ray is about 10 years older than my mother, but his mother was very young when he was born). I called Ray about a week after that. His mother had died a few months before. He hadn't flown out for the funeral: too far, too expensive.
He wasn't home, so I left a message. His voice on the answering machine, high-pitched, "polite" yet tense, clearly a little drunk, clearly displays his discomfort with technology and with communication. (He didn't even have a phone when I was living with him.)
Today he called back. He sounded a little breathless. Now he's on Medicare he's seeing doctors regularly, thank goodness, and he seems to be in reasonable shape, despite the smoking and drinking; perhaps the miles and miles of urban walking were enough of a counterweight.
We talked about tenure. We talked much more about birds. He has successive obsessions that last a few years: poetry, painting before I knew him. Jazz, then Baroque, then early music. Photography—yes, art nudes of young girls (will I tell you more later? Oh yeah.) And now, birds in the city. He sees more species regularly than we do, out in the sticks with our fancy Wild Birds Unlimited multi-species temptation system.
Noted: he didn't ask about Annajane. Never does.
Also noted: he sounded lonely. When I thought he was trying to get off the phone, and I kept heading him off, bringing up something new, it turned out that he was just trying to ask me about the texture of my daily life a little. At the end he brought up how long it's been since we've talked.
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