Becoming Kay

Okay so it’s been a while since I have blogged. But all of you out there will be proud of the fact that it has not been out of laziness. You will be happy to know that I have been busy in the best ways possible. Okay so maybe a little bit of the delay was due to laziness.

One of the busy ways included spending the “quality-est” of quality times with my dad as he and I went for a little trip around some of the States. After waiting over a year for his US visa to come through my dad finally made it here in order to have the trip of his dreams. Naturally, the opportunist that I am, I decided to tag along. Though I am quite sure I never was a part of that dream of his, I’m almost certain he enjoyed the company (for most of the time).
After successfully managing to tour the West coast sans me, I finished up with school and on the first day of my Spring break, met dad in Chicago where he was due to start his East Coast tour. I was curious to see how this exclusive time of 6 days that I was going to spend with my father would pan out. Never before had the two of us had this alone time and I was very unsure about how we would behave. Would he treat me like a baby and hold my hand when we cross roads? Would he acknowledge I was an adult and let me handle parts of the trip that required decisions and planning? These questions swam around in my head a week prior to his arrival and the start of the trip I will remember for the rest of my life.

From the first day in Chicago, when he jumped out of a moving car to get pictures taken with a newly wedded couple who it would seem came straight from the church to have a wedding shoot at Lake Michigan, to spontaneously dancing in the middle of the downtown ice skating rink with a bunch of kids half his age…from grabbing, hugging and posing for pictures with the cute boys who smiled at me on the road to getting me to take photographs of him in front of every nook and corner of every city we went to…my dad could teach the funnest person on earth how to have some fun. This isn’t to say I didn’t lose my patience with him or he with me. In fact, being overwhelmed with his energy and sense of adventure, I unknowingly pushed my dad’s energies a little too far when we hit Memphis. If he had not actually told me that he needs to sit and rest, I would have never realized that the man who I was forcing to walk all over town without a stop was my 60 year old dad. After that, though the friendship status did not take a backseat, my daughter role certainly came into play. I then on made sure he was always hydrated and that we sat down after every half n hour of walking. No way was my dad falling ill on my watch.
Which brings us to Houston- a place where I barely saw my father because he stayed with his relatives and I stayed with a friend/cousin and her family. I was glad because I knew these relatives would let him rest plenty and keep him well…which meant he would have revived his strength for New York. And New York promised to be verryy tiring.

It was possibly the best and the worst time of the trip. My dad reads a lot of general knowledge stuff. He reads a lot about places and people etc. Believe it or not but I have grown a little possessive about New York. I occasionally call it “my turf”. So I was in the zone, wanting to show my dad where I lived and how I lived and all the places that there were to see…what I was afraid of was that he would say “I know” every time I would point something out and kill it for me. And he did. But not all the time. ☺ He had an excruciatingly hard time following my lead except when it came to actually choosing what we would do that day. He hated the hotel I picked for him…grudgingly stayed at it for 2 days…got another hotel and then told me he preferred the one I got him and that he wanted to go back even though what I got him was a budget hotel in an awesome area and what he got himself was a 4 star in a snoozy area.

Getting in the cab on his last day here after we just watched Alice in Wonderland in Imax 3D (which I am sure he hated but still stayed awake through) I realized just how much I would miss this intense time I spent with my dad; The sharing of breakfast every morning, dinner, lunch, movies, Graceland, dancing and talking about absolutely nothing serious and at the same time…it made me realize how happy I was being where I am, in New York, living by myself. Suddenly, I’m not ready to go back…and I’m not sure when I will be…

It sounds terrible really because I love my family…but I just love my life right now and for the first time, I actually admitted to myself that packing up and going back home next October is not going to be fun.

Not at all.