The Residual Sugar

17 years ago I wrote something about my father in a summit register on top of Wheeler peak in Nevada. He had passed away a few months earlier ending a rough journey with multiple myloma. He was 66, only three years older than my wife is now. Since it's Father's Day, Everyone is posting pictures of their fathers on Facebook with best wishes, expressions of love, or memorials of them in their absence.  As I sit on a balcony in Antibes, a week in to a trip that I will be struggling to find words to describe for some time to come, I am a bit astonished and a bit ashamed that I don't have a picture of him to post and I can't remember what I wrote on that mountain. All I can remember; all I can ever remember, is that he died with his mind intact, so his greatest fear never came true. But he died before he saw Maddie grow into the beautiful woman she is. He died before Carolyn and I got married, before he saw me teach a college class. And he died before I ever figured out ho…

As I'm writing this, I'm standing in Anne's loft. My bike is packed in a travel case. I'm looking over my screen at my new humongous rolling duffel bag that happens to be the exact color of my late grandparents 1968 Galaxy 500 - a sort of copper color that Tom Waits described as "monkey shit brown". We're about to fly to France. Short of illness or serious mechanical failure in one of the various machines we will use to get there, in a few days I will be mountain biking in the Maritime Alps. If it sounds like I'm not excited about that, it's only because I don't have the vocabulary to describe how strange and wonderful this all is.

I'm getting ahead of myself. The France trip had been on the horizon for awhile. It's the vacation we've never had but it seemed so abstract in January and March, like those drunken plans to do some great thing or get together again because it would be so cool and how could we not but you never get arou…