Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

It's one Jewish lunar year since my father died, and I got broken up with again (and we both better accept this, at least for a while, this time).

And I am all right.

I'd like to think I'm emotionally tough but I think it's just that I have it really good– friends, work, family that remains. And maybe it helps always knowing the relationship was a long shot, even though it hurts to fall back from boyfriend, too briefly, to friend, forever. And maybe it helps to be succeeding in the irregular path in life, web development without a degree, that only Dad accepted uncritically. Even a short relationship with a brilliant, beautiful woman could only meet his approval.

A bus driver, an older black man, reminded me so much of Dad. "You couldn't have done that out there?" he asked as I went through my bag to find my wallet to extract my Metrocard to follow my "ex" onto the B61 bus. Dad would always call me out on anything stupid I did, or anyone really, and see certain things about you very clearly, which is what makes his overall support and admiration so much more meaningful.

Even if it were 17 and 2/3 years since Dad's death, and not just one, there's been so much to bring him even more to the forefront of my attention. We've got the just-passed full moon, of course, and now Johnny Cash in the Esperanto Café, who always reminds me of Dad because of voice and the fact that Dad liked him. Meanwhile everyone here seems to be Israeli. Can't but think of Dad's stories from Israel, of anti-Sephardic discrimination, unless you were from the U.S. as he was, and just of the in-everyone's-business Jewish Israeli culture. Dad talked about the usual issues of asking for directions somewhere, and being told you didn't want to go here, and getting directions to somewhere else that your helpful guide knows you really want to go. There is a man here giving highly unsolicited advice to a young man determined to remain computer free. And, of course, Dad talking about hearing Johnny Cash's Sunday Morning Coming Down alone in Israel ind being homesick for the U.S.

Still angry at anything and everything that allowed my Dad to die before he was ready, mostly the tobacco industry and the U.S. health system (Dad was of the generation where he received cigarettes at the hospital when young, just to tie those two together). And the Celtics better do their job, and the world better hope I never get my act together, because I might be unstoppable.

Anyway, I was saying I'm doing pretty well. Lovely weekend overall. If failed relationships can all have so much growth and beauty, bring them on.

So maybe I'm not emotionally tough, maybe I just have it really good, but still, it's the world that has to reckon with me.