Regret and I generally don’t play well together. I don’t find it a particularly useful emotion; I’m happy or at least comfortable with who I am, and so regretting the steps that got me here seems wasted. Of course, some regret runs deep, a dark channel of underground waters that will always fill your ears with its rushing sound.

I regret that my father and I didn’t have the best relationship growing up. We were pretty good when I was young, and we were good when I was much older. The in-between, not so much. He relaxed with age, and I stopped being a shithead teenager, so that helped — but, even still, I wish we could’ve had a better relationship. I felt like we were on a real upswing, and then — poof, prostate cancer, and a swift ride to the end. Onto the happy hunting ground with him, and me? I’m left behind with memories intangible and tangible.

The tangible ones, well. I’ve got a big box of photos and keepsakes. Loose images and organized albums. It’s a kind of archaeology, going through this stuff. Sifting through old bones. Dusting off photos (and sneezing in the process, since dust drives my sinuses into mucus overproduction, as if the government is poised to make mucus illegal). You find things you missed the first time, or forgot: all snippets, loose pieces of a lost puzzle. My father, born on this day; his birth ran up a bill of $82.00, and that was for what appears to have been a mandatory 10-day-stay in the hospital. His license was suspended in 1974, as he went 70MPH in a 35MPH zone, and had to take a driver’s class to get his license back. He went to some high school reunions, missed others. He didn’t go to Viet Nam because of the farm. He traded 20 whitetail deer for a breeding pair of elk.

I have hunting journals. Farm receipts. Notes, letters, business cards.

And photos, of course.

Funny, now. When I got into photography, it never occurred to me that my father was into it, too. And, looking through his photos, I’m sometimes amazed at how they look like photos I might have taken: lots of flower close-ups, lots of sweeping Colorado shots, strange images that he obviously found intriguing or connected to in some way. Of course, since he was the one holding the camera, I don’t have as many shots of him as I’d like. But, I still have quite a few, so I’m going to go through and start scanning them in, cleaning them up, and keeping a digital album of his work.

I’ll post them to Flickr, since I archive other photos there. This photo above is two Dads and two sons after a pheasant hunt on a game preserve. Obviously, one of the sons is me, though both sons share a particularly nerdy pair of Coke bottle glasses. I’m the nerd in the orange hat. I’ll add that, for a nerd, I racked up a not unreasonable tally of birds that day.

I don’t think I’ll ever consider myself a great hunter. My father was. It was very much an integral part of his identity. The man had a wild spirit and he connected with that act in some way. Though, he connected with animals in general: we always had a wide array of animals on our farm. Deer, elk, horses, pigs, chickens, peacocks, pheasants, rabbits, and of course, dogs.

Though I was never a great hunter, I think I was a pretty good one. I did particularly well with the shotgun. It’s funny. My father owned a gun shop in our driveway, mostly selling to local hunters and cops. He didn’t really do it to make money. (Hell, he might’ve even lost money.) But on several Christmases, he’d give me guns. Usually one per. Because I was a certifiable Angry Young Man, I always assumed this was an act of laziness more than anything — the holiday would come and he didn’t know what to get me so he’d go out to the shop and pick something off the shelf and, ta-da, instant present, just add gunpowder. Suffice to say, I was a dummy. It never occurred to me that he was giving me these things because that’s who he was, and he was genuinely giving me a present that meant something to him. Whenever we hunted or did target practice, he was always proud when I made good or great shots. At the time, I guess I wanted him to be proud of me for other things — once again, that’s me being a dummy, a little bit. Someone’s proud of you for something, it’s better than them not being proud at all.

See earlier comments, re: Angry Young Man, and re: regret.

We talked about hunting together again. It was something we’d done when I was a teen, and half the time I have fond memories, half the time not so fond. I had a hard time hunting deer — never killed one, purposefully missed a couple, since we had deer as pets and all. Groundhog hunting was a little like baseball — fun when you had action, boring when you had to sit across a valley and wait for a little brown dot to pop up at his hole. Birding, though. That was great. Great memories, there. Pheasant, chukar, goose. Really enjoyed that. He mentioned going hunting again several times over the years, and I kind of put it off, but was warming to the idea and — well, regret, regret, regret.

I guess my suggestion would be, don’t put things off. Don’t think you’re going to have a better chance. Don’t assume that tomorrow comes, because nobody can promise you that.

It’s a late, late, too-late, woefully-too-late birthday present, but I did get my hunting license again, and I am going to go pheasant hunting. I know he won’t be there in body, but I can at least take solace that he can be there in spirit. Maybe for that time, he and I can walk the fields of his Happy Hunting Ground together, if only for an hour or three.

Happy birthday, Dad.

[EDIT: Spectral intervention, or weirdly timed iPhone glitch? As I was finishing this up, proofing it, my iPhone -- sitting three feet from me -- dialed my mother. I hear someone saying Hello, Hello? And I didn't know where it was coming from until I realized my phone had dialed her. Huh.]