I’ve been trying for two days now to write this and I just can’t seem to get it down right. I keep rambling on and on and going into more detail than you’d be interested in or than I’m comfortable in sharing, and then I start over and try writing it from a different tack and the same thing happens. So let’s just throw it out here, down and dirty, and let the words fall where they may.

After my parents divorced something like 25 years ago, my dad remarried and had two children, and then he raised those kids himself when that marriage also ended in divorce. So in addition to the two brothers and a sister I grew up with, who all live in Southern California, I also have two half-sisters who live in Colorado and are now in college and who occasionally read these pages (hi, C & C). Due to distance and festering resentments left over from my parents’ divorce and my father’s estrangement from “my” family in California, these two girls and my dad have essentially been a separate family from us in California. There’s “us” and there’s “them” but there’s not been a whole lot of “we,” especially where the girls are concerned.

This weekend I’m going to spend some time with all of them. Tomorrow, I’m driving down to my dad’s place in southwestern Colorado, near Durango, to hang out with him and spend the night. Sunday I’ll drive back north and meet up with C and C where they live in Ft. Collins and hang out with them. I’ve felt badly about the distance between “us” and “them” but have been … stuck over how to resolve it. I don’t expect seeing them this weekend to fix it, but maybe it’ll open some doors.

Then, on top of that emotional rollercoaster I’ll be riding, I’m also going to stop by where I used to live with my dad in the mountains outside of Loveland, CO. About a month after I moved to Los Angeles back in 1976, the worst flood in Colorado’s history tore through there and wiped out our house and my dad’s restaurant next door and killed everyone inside, including my dad’s best friend and his wife and their son, who was my best friend there. If I hadn’t moved to LA when I did, my dad and I would have been there that night. So I’m going to stop by to pay my respects. And to remember.

Stay tuned for more details…