Apple Pie and Ice Cream

Kathmandu is indeed a very strange place. It brings about in me the need to confront my own mortality. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it is the crush of humanity. Maybe it is the squalor. Maybe it is the cycle of life that seems to be palpable in a way I have never known. Maybe it is the vulnerability of the human condition I have been forced to exist within. In an odd and ironic way, the difference in the form of life here has brought me face to face with my own existence. It is visceral—a questioning in my gut. It is intuitive—a new breaker has been flipped in my mind. It is spiritual—something fresh and uncertain is stirring in my soul. We arrived here on what would have been my dad’s 57th birthday. Maybe there is something in the cosmos, some karmic realization rising from the symphony of religions and faiths that exist here. I don’t know exactly what is at play, but I do understand that something new has been awakened within my self.

I hope that when I no longer walk the earth, and have been reunited with my dad, I will remember moments like these with perfect clarity. I believe that fifty or more years will separate where I am now and my demise. So much will transpire in that time. Jeannie and I will have a family. My own children will travel the world. Reality states that no matter how hard I try, the days of now will be hazy and vague when my sunset comes. All I want is for these experiences to be vivid in the conversations I have with him upon our reunion. I want his impressions, his thoughts. I want to know his opinion. I have so many questions for him. In that space and time when we are together again, I hope we can fill eternity with conversations of how I spent my life. I suppose that if in death my memories are not returned to me in complete detail, I will be able to rely on my dad to tell them back to me in their entirety, for I know, and have proof, that he sees everything I do. Perhaps this would be even better than total recall—he was certainly the best storyteller I have ever known.

I would love for him to retell the story of the night Jeannie and I celebrated his 57th birthday in Nepal, laughing and eating his favorite dessert. Apple pie and ice cream.