This is going to be a bit strange as I’m supposed to tell you all about how I’m now back in New York, where my heartbeats with more familiarity, but it’s not. Well, it’s kind of not. This is about a John Irving story and me.

The night I found out my father died, I couldn’t sleep. Not because of the obvious reasons, or rather, JUST because of the obvious reasons. I couldn’t sleep because the airlines wouldn’t let me get from LA to Detroit as quickly as possible. There were no flights under a million dollars that would let me get to where I needed to be. So, with true Capricornian furvor, I stayed up trying to find a flight. There were times where I took a break. Yaze was asleep and I was, for once, the night owl.

I am television obsessed. I like the sound of it. I like the inhuman glow it radiates. I am floored by its technology. I will most times always find something that interests me that comes out of that ever changing box of wires and digital spaghetti.

This particular night, a movie came on with a little boy who was handicapped and had a weird voice. I am sucker for things that make my heart sag and I was especially in the mood for that given I had someone very stable suddenly ripped from the fabric of my life. If ever there was a time to be sentimental, this was it. I had intended to cry as much as possible for as many things as I could. I’ve always been a multi-tasker.

The movie was about a little boy who was smaller than most and made an impact on his best friend, his best friend’s mother and all of those around him in this little New Hampshire town. This kid was Owen Meany. He was smart, he was witty, he was a “magical negro” (see my post on that) without being a negro. By accident, Owen hits a baseball that flies through the air and kills his best friend’s beloved mother (Ashley Judd). The scene with Owen apologizing to his best friend was more than sufficient to turn my waterworks up higher. I had, by this time, decided that I didn’t have enough pictures of my father and was tearing through boxes (we’d just moved) and anything that could hold our haphazard organizational system.

This movie stopped me in my tracks. I’ll not ruin the end but Owen has always left an impression on me. It was that night that I firmly decided my father would always talk to me from beyond if I just listened hard enough. I had decided that my father had existed, like Owen, for so many good reasons that I needed to cry out of my own selfishness in wanting him back so he could continue his journey of being a good reason for all of us who loved him.

Flash foward two years. I have decided to leave LA. I am lucky enough to stay with the company I work for and get relocated back to NY. One of my favorite co-workers and fellow chatter-buddy (we can be like church ladies except he’s a guy and I don’t really go to church. I suspect he doesn’t either. But you get it) give me a book and writes an inscription that says, “If you don’t cry over this story, you’re a robot.” I look at it, impressed with its thickness. I am a story snob. My old boss says you don’t have to finish a book if you don’t want to so I am just now learning how to not finish a bad book. This book is on watch.

I take the book on the plane with me to New York. In it are pictures of my love, Yaze, my dad, and the card Jen wrote me. I read Jen’s card first and I cry because it is a true testament to that fact that I am leaving a routine, not just mine, but other people’s routine that involves me. People I love. This is a lot of pressure to decide to leave a place where there are people you will miss (even with technology, sometimes methods of communication change. Everything is change.) and hope that you are doing the right thing. I begin to read the book. The first sentence almost makes me drop it.

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest prson I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I belive in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

Need I say more? If you open yourself up, you can feel those who have died. I had decided that was my father. With me. On the plane. I will not pretend that I know what he was saying to me or why. But the very presence is enough for me. That is something I need like blood in my veins. I am not picky about the details.

I have been reading this book for a week and have just finished it. On the train, in the first few days, I noticed little things that clued me into my dad’s presence. Somebody reading an article on the increased risk of heart related deaths (my father died that way). A man with the exact graying temples. Living in the last apartment he ever saw me in that was mine. Older men in Harlem driving in that way of careful regard for their years of saving up to buy proper vehicles that chariot them through the streets. New leather seats, tinted window, shiny exteriors, fingers delicately on the steering wheel, sunglasses shielding them even more than their tinted windows, fresh work uniforms, subtle gold jewelry.

This book, “Prayers for Owen Meany” is one of the best books I’ve ever read (up there with Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day”, Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon” — you thought I was going to say “The Great Gatsby” — too obvious). The film does it minor justice and major damage as the film’s ending is not the same as the book. The film doesn’t give Owen Meany a chance to be the man that he becomes.

Now that I finished it, I’m spent. Not a robot at all. But also very inspired. I’m also curious as to why so many story tellers like going with the flow. With so many things changing out there all the time, you can imagine how many stories there are. All we writers, we’re just instruments.