For Dad, After All These Years

In honor of my dad on the 26th anniversary of his death.

Benjamin Hutson Hintze
July 8, 1919 - August 30, 1982

Dad 1938
I believe he was a senior in high school in this photo.

Wine, Coke-bottle-bottom glasses, and pipe.

Dad was born with congenital cataracts that weren't discovered until he was five years old. He had the biggest blue eyes in the world when he wore those glasses, and actually, even when he had his contacts in. He wore some of the first contacts made; they were as big as his eyeball and hard glass. I can still smell his pipe and cigar butts in the abalone ashtrays that were in the living room.

Me and Dad
I actually remember the photo on the left being taken. I was crying (of course) and Dad was holding me. He called me his "double recessive" — the only kid out of four that had blue eyes and blond hair.


Here is a poem by Barbara Kingsolver that I found years after Dad's death:

FOR RICHARD AFTER ALL

For Richard after all
these years, and for myself, I am

careful. A patient reader,
a waiter between
dropped stones:
you can, did you know? hear
the water's lips open

and close, watch it

fall to the bottom, dream-speed,
identify it at rest before dropping
the next one. This was not how I stayed

up with him, a kind of vigil in the all-night
coffee shop, listening and not listening, restless
under the words and the one-tune jukebox going
nowhere, exactly two days before

to the surprise of all but himself he was
dead in a garage. Leaving me

with that all-night, rubbing edges
that don't go smooth, not even
under an ice age,
looking for the word that happened while I
didn't hear. A stone fallen in
deep water among so many other stones.

Richard left me with every other friend in my life:
to read them with care, to the end, like
borrowed books.

Dad died in a car in the garage that had just been cleaned for the first time in Hintze family history. His glasses were in his lap. I never saw him dead, and for years I dreamed of meeting him on some city street in some foreign town, mostly recognizing those blue eyes. I would see him, he would walk right by, but I knew it was him. He was my saving grace.

I still miss him...after all these years.

'Cosmopolitan' Institute Completes Decades-Long Study On How To Please Your Man

Horses, horses, horses

What does it take?

In the time we live our lives...our confusion...what does it take to really love somebody?

Gigi, Savai, Amelie...maybe the first time I really felt love was when that nurse brought little Amelie out of the surgical suite and handed her to me...or maybe that was just some kind of silly attachment? Or perhaps it was when Chieko first came out of my body...I think I was too young to feel that with my first born...I dunno...

Tomorrow, Milou gets her female organs removed...

Maybe tomorrow, the death mentality will lift...the guns to the head will go away, and the clear light of day will supersede the darkness???

For now, I started a new website called "Beyond Ordinary Mind." .com Why? I don't know...maybe it will come to me.

Happy Chokhur Duchen.