A girl walks by in a gray dress, hugging her umbrella so tight that she's not keeping the torrents from soaking her low top shoes. Not wearing any socks, shivering and slipping around inside her sneakers with every awkward step down the slanted sidewalk, I begin to wonder if this kind of thing means I should close my eyes and not watch anything being done by anyone around me, until it's time to go home.
The rain, despite it's awkward welcome in sunlit warmth, it poured down from the sky like the stars had all of a sudden accepted this planet's gravity too, tugging down all of limitless space, the whole outspoken black scope of it reeling in. Not even the common ant, tinier than a granule of dirt, could wander with any success between the drops of this violent rain as it hammered every inch of space outside the drug store my father waited in line inside of, for pills that would presumably -- or so I eavesdropped his doctor relating -- make him okay with the fact that my mother was dead at age 35, some eight or nine years into a marriage supposedly made in Heaven.
The way it sounds like a war outside on the walkway, as heavy as the rain is, I'm surprised that I don't feel it much, and it's really only a slightly tougher glass window to see through, for between even the sheaths of waterfall torrents chasing the windows of the drugstore from top to bottom like a wavy segue into a dream, I could still see him as good as I would have wanted to. Jittery and sweating in a wrinkled suit, himself only slightly wet from the drizzle that had just begun as we approached the front door to the place, my father stood wringing his hands nervously.
When I said to him, "I'll wait outside, papa", he'd only slightly noticed me saying this. The accompanying nod bowed in like crashing rafters from the top of his head until his chin touched the sternum, like the last action he would be capable of until he too was dead -- but though filled with love, at this point it was (and I actually felt okay with this despite not having a fraction of a clue why) simply retaliation to outside forces breaking in to his private inferno of loss: the regrets of love and the love of his life supposedly, in alternate worlds, or presumably, rather, regretting the day such love was founded. Sometimes you get the hint easily, and when papa looked at me in the way he did, I understood instantly that my mother (his wife) was a loss neither of us were at the gates yet of understanding.
But that's a different thing. My papa's understanding of it, that is.
For me, a chiseled stalagmite standing in the pulverizing rain, years frozen, it was an entirely different story. I watched my father stand grimly in line like a homeless person waiting out his barking stomach's chance for a morning's breakfast at some struggling soup kitchen. Through the watershed and the rainbows I could see his stomach grumbling justly so, in absolute need of something. It was a hungry need, and watching this, not fully comprehending this first time I'd ever witnessed my father queue for counsel but kind of understanding it as a matter of acute loss, I tried to weigh my options.
Possibly, I could be in waiting for a living zombie. My friend Chesney, a few years ago, his father was struck by a milk truck on 42nd street, right in front of the school. Tetherballing the wits out of this loud, obnoxious hooligan (just waiting for reprise when the legendary vehicular brute would inevitably strike back in fistfuls of cast iron), we kind of saw it, Chesney and I. Most of it. The initial contact where my friend's dad came under the scrutiny of the truck's steaming grill was an opening fire gunshot to start a race. The heads turning, all over the playing fields, that was when the race started. The first fist to shoot out and pop an index finger in the direction of the body flying like a dart through the air, that was first place winner in the race. When Chesney's father's dead, dummy-like body tried to find burial rites in the windshield of an on-coming station wagon twenty feet off yet instead bounced away awfully and hit the front of the milk truck a second time, and some kid who happened to be standing directly next to me squealed in an almost feminine take on horror, he unwittingly landed second place. Chesney's father came to a halt, finally, unbelievably, inside the back-lit early-morning marquee of Rally Jameson Elementary's roadside welcoming sign, pitching stick-on letters every which way to Hell and back. My friend Chesney, from then on, he became a mute.
That's what my father looked like at this point; reflecting the non-existence that Chesney does now.
Watching from outside as my father began what I perceived to be a new march into the non-living years of the rest of his life, I didn't know at that point exactly how my mother had died, either. Only that she was dead and the death itself was supposedly unmentionable and kind of confusing. But the way my father's eyes seemed to hold their ground, staring at all times directly ahead (just like Chesney after his own father's death), I had the distinct feeling that Papa knew a little more than he was telling me when he said a few nights previous to the funeral that, "What you see is what you get."
But let's think about this a moment. My father was a pilot for a major airline. Actually, he never allowed my mother and I to fly anywhere, ever, citing reasons that to me, at that time, seemed unerringly daydreamed and rather ominously incredulous. One night (which became the first of many) I heard him ranting to my mother (long past my intended bedtime) that demons were common on plane flights (...hear my mother weep to herself silently...), hanging about on the wings for the thrill of so closely Heavenward a flight. My mother, I do remember, cried herself into vast oceans of tears after these stories spilled from my fathers pale, vodka-chapped lips following most of his many week-long experiences in the clouds. Sometimes during breakfast alone with her she'd ask if I knew anything about Papa's travels she didn't know I knew about. And even that young, her questioning seemed like loaded interrogations stacked with volume upon volume of immeasurable grief, so being a good kid each time, I simply played the dumb little boy, proclaiming with an unnatural eagerness and excitement that I didn't really comprehend the origins of: "Papa's a human bird!"
What does a bird's brain weigh? Half a feather? I must have seemed like a zombie myself. Mama cried softly sometimes after asking me this.
But what does a kid do? At that age, he has only his parents to dictate to him the reality of his surroundings. At that point in my life, admittedly, I was in my own world anyway, still struggling with brutal dreams that plagued me night after night of short-tempered reindeer raping neighborhood children during Christmastime. In newly collected exchange, as it were, for countless decades of unpaid-for toys delivered in the dark without a single thank-you from anybody, on all those sorrowful Christmas mornings.
Sometimes I would just stare at my mother and smile, and I can't speculate precisely why, but she'd cry.
The rain, despite it's awkward welcome in sunlit warmth, it poured down from the sky like the stars had all of a sudden accepted this planet's gravity too, tugging down all of limitless space, the whole outspoken black scope of it reeling in. Not even the common ant, tinier than a granule of dirt, could wander with any success between the drops of this violent rain as it hammered every inch of space outside the drug store my father waited in line inside of, for pills that would presumably -- or so I eavesdropped his doctor relating -- make him okay with the fact that my mother was dead at age 35, some eight or nine years into a marriage supposedly made in Heaven.
The way it sounds like a war outside on the walkway, as heavy as the rain is, I'm surprised that I don't feel it much, and it's really only a slightly tougher glass window to see through, for between even the sheaths of waterfall torrents chasing the windows of the drugstore from top to bottom like a wavy segue into a dream, I could still see him as good as I would have wanted to. Jittery and sweating in a wrinkled suit, himself only slightly wet from the drizzle that had just begun as we approached the front door to the place, my father stood wringing his hands nervously.
When I said to him, "I'll wait outside, papa", he'd only slightly noticed me saying this. The accompanying nod bowed in like crashing rafters from the top of his head until his chin touched the sternum, like the last action he would be capable of until he too was dead -- but though filled with love, at this point it was (and I actually felt okay with this despite not having a fraction of a clue why) simply retaliation to outside forces breaking in to his private inferno of loss: the regrets of love and the love of his life supposedly, in alternate worlds, or presumably, rather, regretting the day such love was founded. Sometimes you get the hint easily, and when papa looked at me in the way he did, I understood instantly that my mother (his wife) was a loss neither of us were at the gates yet of understanding.
But that's a different thing. My papa's understanding of it, that is.
For me, a chiseled stalagmite standing in the pulverizing rain, years frozen, it was an entirely different story. I watched my father stand grimly in line like a homeless person waiting out his barking stomach's chance for a morning's breakfast at some struggling soup kitchen. Through the watershed and the rainbows I could see his stomach grumbling justly so, in absolute need of something. It was a hungry need, and watching this, not fully comprehending this first time I'd ever witnessed my father queue for counsel but kind of understanding it as a matter of acute loss, I tried to weigh my options.
Possibly, I could be in waiting for a living zombie. My friend Chesney, a few years ago, his father was struck by a milk truck on 42nd street, right in front of the school. Tetherballing the wits out of this loud, obnoxious hooligan (just waiting for reprise when the legendary vehicular brute would inevitably strike back in fistfuls of cast iron), we kind of saw it, Chesney and I. Most of it. The initial contact where my friend's dad came under the scrutiny of the truck's steaming grill was an opening fire gunshot to start a race. The heads turning, all over the playing fields, that was when the race started. The first fist to shoot out and pop an index finger in the direction of the body flying like a dart through the air, that was first place winner in the race. When Chesney's father's dead, dummy-like body tried to find burial rites in the windshield of an on-coming station wagon twenty feet off yet instead bounced away awfully and hit the front of the milk truck a second time, and some kid who happened to be standing directly next to me squealed in an almost feminine take on horror, he unwittingly landed second place. Chesney's father came to a halt, finally, unbelievably, inside the back-lit early-morning marquee of Rally Jameson Elementary's roadside welcoming sign, pitching stick-on letters every which way to Hell and back. My friend Chesney, from then on, he became a mute.
That's what my father looked like at this point; reflecting the non-existence that Chesney does now.
Watching from outside as my father began what I perceived to be a new march into the non-living years of the rest of his life, I didn't know at that point exactly how my mother had died, either. Only that she was dead and the death itself was supposedly unmentionable and kind of confusing. But the way my father's eyes seemed to hold their ground, staring at all times directly ahead (just like Chesney after his own father's death), I had the distinct feeling that Papa knew a little more than he was telling me when he said a few nights previous to the funeral that, "What you see is what you get."
But let's think about this a moment. My father was a pilot for a major airline. Actually, he never allowed my mother and I to fly anywhere, ever, citing reasons that to me, at that time, seemed unerringly daydreamed and rather ominously incredulous. One night (which became the first of many) I heard him ranting to my mother (long past my intended bedtime) that demons were common on plane flights (...hear my mother weep to herself silently...), hanging about on the wings for the thrill of so closely Heavenward a flight. My mother, I do remember, cried herself into vast oceans of tears after these stories spilled from my fathers pale, vodka-chapped lips following most of his many week-long experiences in the clouds. Sometimes during breakfast alone with her she'd ask if I knew anything about Papa's travels she didn't know I knew about. And even that young, her questioning seemed like loaded interrogations stacked with volume upon volume of immeasurable grief, so being a good kid each time, I simply played the dumb little boy, proclaiming with an unnatural eagerness and excitement that I didn't really comprehend the origins of: "Papa's a human bird!"
What does a bird's brain weigh? Half a feather? I must have seemed like a zombie myself. Mama cried softly sometimes after asking me this.
But what does a kid do? At that age, he has only his parents to dictate to him the reality of his surroundings. At that point in my life, admittedly, I was in my own world anyway, still struggling with brutal dreams that plagued me night after night of short-tempered reindeer raping neighborhood children during Christmastime. In newly collected exchange, as it were, for countless decades of unpaid-for toys delivered in the dark without a single thank-you from anybody, on all those sorrowful Christmas mornings.
Sometimes I would just stare at my mother and smile, and I can't speculate precisely why, but she'd cry.
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
Yeah so far mom is excited about the appt I set for her for next week, but we'll see how she feels about it when the time comes. She's a real rollercoaster.
Ooo...you said "verbal detail." Thanks for the compliment. I love writing to get things off my chest. I write out my dreams, too. I love re-reading them and finding patterns I never would have seen before if I hadn't written them down.
And speaking of writing...whew...there's so much going on in your post I'm having a hard time taking it all in! You say "...At that age, he has only his parents to dictate to him the reality of his surroundings..." I'm so glad I didn't buy into my parents version of reality when I was a kid.