Because he was that sort of guy, my dad ended up effectively losing his life by helping others with theirs. He was beaten horribly and now spends his time on a couch. He was a brilliant man, witty, sensitive, loving, generous. Kind. There has been improvement over the past 14 1/2 years, like he can now walk a couple of blocks to the post office and back with a cane, but he's still not the same. His mind and personality and his Himness is not. Sometimes, for brief moments, he almost breaks through, but mostly there is a man there who is a shell of the father I remember. The man I knew is gone, and I miss him.

My step-mother told him about Clarion, and his response was, "Wonderful". I know he really means it, and I'm touched. But I really wish I could sit with him, the man who was the first to guide my literary explorations, and discuss writing with him and what makes good story. Because he knew. He knew so much about story and people and the layers of what makes good story powerful and resonate.

He was a poet. A good poet.

I don't know how much he knew about my fiddling around with writing because, though I wrote, I didn't talk about it. But when I was sixteen he found a story I had been working on, and he told me I should keep at it.

When I was seventeen, a month before he was hurt, he went with me to sort through scholarships I was eligible for. They were all writing scholarships. I took my twenty scholarships home and put them on my desk, not quite sure what to do. The next morning my father and I were driving by the sugar beet fields next to my grandparent's house and I expressed my concerns: I was from nowhere Idaho; what could I have to say that anyone would care about?

"Everyone has a story--everyone has something to say," he said.

"Even if they come from the sugar beets?" I asked.

"Especially if they come from the sugar beets."

And then he told me about writers I admired who came from no where fantastically amazing or remarkable as far as the world is concerned, but they still created something that touched others, and spoke their truth.

I wish we could talk about these things again.