Blue Ridge Mountain Edition - On Perfection, Grief and Hindsight Being 20/20 - An Essay That Looks Back on My Father.
Today's episode started out as a reading of an essay I wrote about my father's death of Prostate Cancer in 2019 with a title inspired by the Tame Impala song, "Let It Happen" which I heard performed live in Atlanta two days before he died knowing his death was about to happen after a lifetime of fearing it. Never has a song or a moment had more significance.
I was taking it easy with this episode because I'm on Spring Break days before my 51st birthday vacationing in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains with my daughters in a cabin in the woods and I want to just 'be' - but a lot came up in creating the intro - about perfection, about grief, and about acceptance - and it ended up taking, as usual, a lot more time to record than expected.
This episode talks about the choices we make in times of heightened emotion, the big moments of our lives, and how we reconcile them later. Mistakes as perfection.
It also follows a rewatching of all 6 seasons of the show Parenthood which I watched before I got pregnant the first time around. About a decade or so later, I'd forgotten so much of it. I had a lot more criticism of the characters choices but loved them every bit as much as I did the first time. The show also acted as a catharsis for a lot of unspent grief about my dear old dad and my experience learning I was BRCA2 positive.
Hope you'll take a listen on your ride to wherever you're going - and make sure to give a nod to the mountains, ocean, desert or whatever beautiful, perfect physical landscape you may be seeing as you go...
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Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.
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