Ryan Mercer's Thoughts

Hey dad.

We are now past 2 years of the global COVID pandemic spreading through the world. Worldwide over 445 million cases have been confirmed with over 6 million lives lost to it. I have now been working from home for 2 years later this month.

While on the subject of working from home, I recently quit my job of nearly 16 years. People were quitting left and right as the pandemic has made it an employee’s market so I decided to jump ship too. I had not had a cost of living increase in 14 years so it was time to move on, I have started at a trucking startup that actually cares about its employees and I just finished my second week there. I really like it, the people are all super nice and supportive of each other. It has been a major culture shock going to TrueNorth from FedEx.

The morel clone I made last year, you know the clone of the one you gave your father as a joke, is doing well outside under a tree. I stand in the kitchen and look out at it, it does make me miss you and grandpa Jack but I do not regret putting it in the yard. I have now been in my house for about 16 months now and it’s going pretty great. We had the basement flood last year when we got somewhere between 8 and 12 inches of rain in just a couple of hours but we only lost a single particleboard shelf and people from church rushed to help us get the water out and clean up. My wife and I were running buckets up and down the stairs for at least a half-hour but the water was still rising, finally, we managed to get a call out for help and within an hour I think we had 8 people here helping us about the time the sump pump finally started to catch up. Just having help show up made the clean-up go much quicker and raised our spirits considerably.

Mom’s health isn’t the greatest but she seems pretty happy and stays pretty active. Her roommate and her don’t seem to get along very well but she’s on a waiting list to get into a retirement community the Quakers operate in downtown Plainfield.

As the latest wave of the pandemic started to die down, things looked great. Then on February 24th Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. The world quickly responded with sanctions and as of today, over 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine. Many are staying to fight though, despite facing superior forces. Men and women, young and old, are taking up any arms they can get their hands on and fighting in the streets while a Russian military column stretching over 40 miles moves deeper and deeper into their country. People are dying in the streets, in their homes, in their apartments, as superior Russian forces launch mortars and missiles into the cities. It is surreal. Around the time COVID started, there were massive worldwide wildfires, then we dealt with COVID and domestic civil unrest, we moved into a more virulent strain of COVID and now find ourselves at the doorstep of nuclear war. Russia has explicitly threatened to use their nuclear weapons if anyone tries to mess with them taking Ukraine.

One begins to wonder if I’ll be around next year to write this letter, or if I’ll stand on the other side of the veil and get to tell you what happened to between this letter and the next in person. On that subject, proxy baptism was performed for your mother last year. I haven’t gotten around to yours, or grandpa Jack’s, but things are weird in the world.

I heard your voice last year for the first time in a very long time, an answering machine recording. You sounded decidedly more country than I remember. Funny how we forget things with time.

Hopefully I am still around to write one of these next year, if not I guess I will be catching you up in person!

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.

Past letters.

In 8 days you'll have been dead 23 yeas.

It’s been an interesting year. A pandemic has become an ever-present part of our lives since last year… that virus really took hold. I noticed in my records yesterday that on that day last year 5 citizens of the United States had died to the virus, today the confirmed death toll for the United States stands at 531,456 people with the official worldwide reported total at 2,570,265, but likely higher. 29 million confirmed cases in the United States, almost 116 million confirmed cases worldwide. It’s… been an interesting year.

I got married. April 10th, in a church parking lot because of this COVID-19 virus causing everything to be closed with quarantines and people beginning to shelter in place. Married in a parking lot with mom, my wife Amanda’s 2 parents, Trent Cameron performing the ceremony, and a random fox that trotted by while we stood in visual range of rush hour traffic on 267. We had a more sacred religious ceremony in November as pandemic restrictions relaxed just the tiniest amount. My wife is a teacher, one of 12 children, and comes from Missouri. Her father is a retired builder and effectively a lifelong farmer, her mother is a retired teacher, one of her brothers is a medical doctor and another an eye doctor, the rest are all equally intelligent and driven. She’s got dozens of nieces and nephews too and I’ve met some of them.

It seems I was cursed to live in interesting times. 3 years after you died we saw terrorists slam planes into 2 skyscrapers and the Pentagon, we then entered a large-scale military conflict, then another large-scale military conflict, 20 years later and we’ve spent the past year with everyone wearing masks in public, restaurants largely closed to dine-in eating, limits on toilet paper and paper towels at the grocery, for a while last year it was even hard to get a lot of food at the grocery - especially staple foods like beans, rice, flour.

My wife and I drove out to Brazil last summer, I was going stir crazy being stuck in a small apartment during the lockdown really ramping up, I just got on 40 and headed west. When we started to get close to Brazil I looked up where your dad was buried and went and saw the grave. It was a nice and quiet little cemetery there in Brazil. Dick isn’t buried there, but Rhonda has a plot right next to your dad.

In November we moved into a house we bought in Stilesville, it’s about 20 minutes west of Plainfield off of 40, about 30 minutes east of Brazil. It’s a red brick ranch, with a basement, it’s probably about the size of the house you grew up in and roughly the same age. We do not get residential mail delivery, have to go pick stuff up at the post office, that kinda stinks. We’re also on a well which… yeah it’s pretty stinky water, but we are on town sewer. The house has a little over a half-acre of land with maybe a dozen mature trees and a little clear space in the backyard. I actually spent the past 2 days of my vacation tilling and planting, got 100 onions in and 34 potatoes in. I also got about 80 or 90 seeds started and need to start another 40ish tomorrow plus direct-sow some greens. I’m so sore. Hopefully, there is a decent yield but I’m not sure… our soil is pretty dense silty clay loam. I think it would do corn well, and I do plan to plant a little grinding corn as a test, but next year the plan is to build raised garden beds and fill them with soil much better for the types of things we want to grow, I would have this year but we had to put about 5,000 dollars into the well and water purification right after moving in.

I’m still inactive in the Lodge but I am an active dues payer. There’s a Lodge here in town a couple of blocks over, once the virus calms down and we start to see some sort of return to pre-pandemic life I’m going to go visit it. I’m hesitant to now as I’ve found these small towns out here have a lot of covid-deniers that won’t wear masks despite it being the law in some areas and are generally just flippant about even the simplest measures to protect others from them if they happen to be infected. They did a few EAs last week or the week before but it was a hard pass for me given the virus situation.

Oh, remember the mushroom you gave your dad? I still have it, it sits in my office. But one of the first things I bought when we bought the house was a new one that is virtually identical. I was actually going to start painting it today but wore myself out working on the garden. Sometime this spring I’m going to paint it to be somewhat close to the original and then place it outside in our yard, probably under some of the evergreens not unlike how the original was at your dad’s house. The original will remain in my office until I die. I still have your horse and dog statue from your office too, they’re in the basement and I see them every day when I go down to empty the dehumidifier. An old photo of you and your flag sit in my office too.

I’m 1 year, 7 months, 11 days sober on my current stretch as I write this. Hopefully, I can continue that indefinitely.

Mom is doing ok. She’s still got a lot of health issues but she’s recovering well from her most recent surgery a few weeks ago. She moved in with a friend earlier this year in Avon to be closer to her doctors, and stuff in general. It’s a 20ish minute drive just for us to get to a grocery store.

Bun is well too. These days he spends his time in a cabinet, just sitting there greeting me with a smile when I open the door to get my razor or any number of other things. I love that little dude, he’s always there for me.

I heard your voice for the first time in 2 decades last year, just the quickest of words on the answering machine tape. I wish there was more. You sounded far more country than I remembered. I also listened to your funeral for the first time since it happened this year, I even put the audio of it up on the internet with a slideshow of images of you https://youtu.be/0o-OeM8qRVc

You know, I’ve lived almost 64% of my life without you. That kinda sucks. I wonder what you’d be doing if you were still here. I wonder what you’re doing now. I wonder what you’d think of me as a wildly bearded, balding, GED toting, overweight, stuck in a dead-end job in an entry-level position 15 years after hiring in.

Anyway, I’d better wrap this up. I’ll talk to you next year.

Past letters.

24AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2021

23AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2021