EPTJim first made his way into our family when I was roughly 7 years old, my Mom had purchased a guitar for my older sister, Jackie, and she had no idea how to play it. At that time Jim was working part time as a guitar teacher alongside his primary job. He would teach Jackie to play the guitar, and would later connect with everyone in the house and go on to date my Mom.
As to their dating, I was young and barely realized/noticed at the time, but Jim was always good to everyone in the house. He would indulge in collecting and occasionally playing Pokemon cards with me, and we would sometimes go down to the old dock and walk along the grey sand, flip over horseshoe crabs to take a peak at their undersides, and watch all of the little crabs scuttle in and out of their littles holes.Once in a while we'd even go fishing, though rare was the days where we caught anything. At this point in my life I was bereft of male role models, my father having left when I was five and living with two sisters and a mother who would later admit to having no idea how to respond to the feelings of a male child. Maybe Jim came around a little late to become my father figure, but he came really close.
Eventually my Mom and Jim stopped dating, I didn't notice when, but eventually they did. Despite that, he had been living with us and would continue living with us. When I was 12 we collectively moved away to Virginia, where we currently reside. Around this time Jim was starting to approach his fifties and I could tell that it was affecting him. It wasn't a midlife crisis or anything, but he began to drink more, it rarely if ever really effected anyone in the house, but he also began to admit that he wishes he could have been a successful artist or musician. Despite that he maintained his status as a pillar of the house, one of the two people that kept us afloat financially and mentally.
As years passed I could tell that Jim was unhappy with his lot in life. If there was one true commonality between myself and Jim, it was that we truly pined for something greater than what we had. My mom was content to live quietly in a small house, my older sister had doomed herself to failure via drugs, and my younger sister showed a tremendous capacity to do nothing with her life and be happy with it. Me and Jim wanted more though. Jim wanted to be a great artist, a great musician, or a great theologian or philosopher. I think that as the years passed he realized that becoming a great artist, or musician, or philosopher was impossible.
The biggest indication of this to me was that when he was drunk he would mutter obscenities, and when he was sober he would almost chant "God is good," or "thank you lord, thank you." The chanting has increased through the years, and I could feel that they were words of despair more than anything else. I think I was the only person who really appreciated Jim's lack of happiness in this house. He pined for something greater than this small house in a rural county in Virginia. I don't think he was really happy.
Despite that, he always tried his best to put that aside and help us stay afloat, without him I have no idea where we would be, and at this moment I don't know where we will be without him. Every weird wavy tai chi motion, every guitar song played on the porch, every piano song played in his room, every time that he cooked our dinners because he knew noone else would, every moment that he went out of his way to do us or others good, even the drunking muttering and sober chanting to god or Yahweh or whoever, every time he'd try to convince me or my mom that big foot or aliens are real, I'll miss every last minute of the time we won't be able to spend together and I'll cherish all of the times that we did.
Jim. Thanks for sharing this with us.
