Pancakes

I miss my father. Not strange, I guess, he died a few years ago and the death of a close relative is bound to strike some emptiness in anyone, and missing said parent should not be a surprising thing to most people. Without regard to the relationship you shared or the closeness you felt, this person is no longer there and therefore there is a manshaped hole where no hole should perhaps be.

This is a general, low-level missing. The kind you don't really notice. When your friends are gone for the weekend and you really want to go and grab a movie you miss them, this is much more acute, not to mention partners or significant others that you want with you when you want to watch a sappy movie or when you are just plainly noticing the enormous size and loneliness of the bed you're in alone. This too is a type of missing that is very much of the here and now.

But losing a person to death makes for a type of being apart that has really settled in, it knows that you'll have years of not being together to come and it needs not to be so fierce as all the other types, it can take it's time, and it doesn't ask much of you. The difference perhaps between the psychologist that is trying to talk you down from a ledge RIGHT NOW versus the one you hired for a year's worth of therapy, paid in advance. The knowledge that there is more than enough time for the good bouts of missing to come so as not to rush things now.

But every once and again ( a phrase I am fond of, as you might have noticed) this tenant in your mind does feel the need to press a couple of buttons and really make you realize that the missed one is not there, nor will he/she perform a specific action ever again.

And thusly, now, I miss my dad. I hadn't really realized it untill this weekend, which managed to bring the point home quite without argument, but I miss my father most and fiercest when confronted with home-made pancakes. Pancakes of any kind, really.

My mother used to do all the cooking in our house, and she did and does it wonderfully, she is a great cook. But my father made pancakes, and eggs. Eggs more often than pancakes, but eggs are easier, pancakes are special.
When he died, a few months after he died, I was having a conversation about the blasted things with a group of co-workers and I mentioned that my dad used to make great pancakes. This resulted in nothing more than a slight decline in my general mood, nothing much more.
This weekend, Thursday, my housemate made pancakes, and then Friday I had them at the birthday of a friend.
Two nights in a row of pancakes, and two nights in a row of a slight sadness I was not quite able to place. After all, I'd had pancakes during the last few years, nothing happened there, hell, I must've even made them myself at least...

Never.

I have never made a single pancake myself.

Off course I never did.
Even when writing this down I know I have never done the deed because it isn't my thing to do. Making pancakes is his job, not mine. Ridiculous.. Right?
Come to think of it, I haven't eaten them all that much... Not counting this weekend I can only remember one visit to a restaurant where I have ordered a pancake. That makes three incidents of pancake-eating in almost three and a half years.
Typing this is actually physically difficult. Writing this down, even just for me and whomever reads this seems to be opening a kind of emptiness inside me that I don't often experience, a dullish ache not related to hunger or boredom or loneliness, but the very sure and certain knowledge thet my dad will never make a pancake for me or my little brother again.
Strange.

I know smells can be marvellous to jump-start memory, I know that certain colors and tastes can bring on a rush of experience that rivals actually being there. None of this is happening. I cannot recall a single pancake he ever made. I don't have warm memories of him standing by the stove and flipping them in the air or me waiting for that first warm piece of dough. None of that. No sunshine slanting through the kitchen windows, no clean white porcelain plates steaming on the tables, no golden syrup dripping and making shapes in powdered sugar landscapes.
None of that.
Just the knowledge of no more pancakes made by my dad. Because he isn't there any longer. And it seems unfair, but that doesn't matter, running outside and shouting that it isn't fair won't make it otherwise, it can't be helped. It seems just such a foolish thing to miss. Not the wisdom he has given me, that I still have, or the things he should have been there for, for in a way he will be, as I will keep him with me always, but pancakes.. Something robbed me of them.
And yet I don't hate pancakes, like them even, not the best food in the world (that would be nigiri ikura) but okay, I can do them, and I should be able to make them. But I won't.

It's his job.