A Good Day to Read Something Else

I offered what follows on the last Saturday in December of 2008. Until I re-read it earlier I would have told you I'd mellowed in the decade-plus since then. Like so much else in my life, before and since, I would have been wrong in arriving at that conclusion. 

I think at the time I wrote it I might have had zwischen den jahren (between the years) blues; I suspect it may be a cyclical thing as I'm feeling it now. Today might be a good day to read a newspaper or the directions on the side of a box of cereal. I feel obligated to suggest that before you proceed.
 

Across the Universe

I started writing this blog, rant, bark at the moon, confessional, about fourteen months ago. I stumbled across the device to do it, otherwise, I would have had to invent it, and being an idiot, that would not have been pretty. 

If this is the first time you've been here, I could tell you this is just part of an off-day, but then you'd look at another entry and realize that was untrue. If you've been here before, thanks for the use of your eyes and your brain--as you've long since figured out, I don't write this for you, or anyone else. I write it for me. I spend decades with no place to put my words and now there is here. 

In a way, it's funny how the sins of one generation are visited, if not embraced, by the next. I don't keep in close contact with my brothers and sisters, with the exception of Adam (who was always exceptional) and yet from what I've gleaned of our lives when some of us interact with others of us, we are all driven like the old man was. Be it getting up in the middle of the night to go to work, staying late, taking it home and working on it over the weekend, we each, in our way, accomplish the behavior we had modeled for us when we were younger. 

For some of my sisters and brothers what makes this even more impressive is that by the time they came along, Dad was past the full-bore days-they got a taste and not the same treatment those of us on the front end of familius-crippled-insidus received and yet they arrived at the same conclusions. 

We were raised, whether we knew it or not, by a parent for whom nothing we did would (or could) be ever good enough. We competed with one another for whatever passed for my father's affections. He never hugged, he never kissed, he never patted you on the head or on the butt. 

He had the heaviest hands imaginable and almost anything you did as a child to and through young adult, would prompt him to use them while a torrent of verbal abuse, practically technicolor in the richness of its vocabulary, rained down upon you. All I ever recall my mother doing was growing sad, leading me to wonder what that relationship was like. 

The only opinion in my father's house that mattered was his--he didn't care if you attempted to parrot it back to him when you talked because he wasn't listening. I learned to save my words, and ball them up like the fists I knew I could never use against him in anger, pick my moments and wound with a word until the conversation was mooted by a backhand across the mouth. I carried around the anger from those not-quite-last-words for decades, oblivious to the toxicity I was harboring until I met a woman on Christmas Day in 1976 whom I knew the moment I saw her, I would marry. 

And I did--it took me until October of the following year, but I did. And when we traveled home from Germany so I could show the old man the woman who loved me, barely a year later, I realized I was stepping out of his shadow only because she enabled me to. He neither knew nor cared that I had decided the 'next time' we came across the Atlantic, he and I would talk. We had our lives ahead of us, he and I--and now we were married men, and to me, equals. 

I didn't know the next time I'd fly across the pond would be to bury him along with all the things we never got to say. It would have been a very deep hole, I admit, had it happened, but I swallowed the fear and pressed on as the husband in the only role I knew. 

And when my wife told me she was pregnant, and we learned it was a boy (we still have the black and white Polaroids from the ultrasound where the doctor showed us the telltale 'ornaments') I had so much to say and no one to whom to say it. 

Through the birth of our other child, so alike and so unlike her brother, she made, and makes, me crazy to this day. To and through the Fall of the Wall, and the NATO Going Out of Business Sale whereby I didn't lose my job, but it lost me and I had two hours to pick one part of the world where my nearly-previous employer promised to seek a position for me. And I chose the Northeast because as Robert Frost noted in Death of the Hired Hand, 'home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.' 

I discovered Connecticut was really two states (not a clear concept when I was a child). There was the Gold Coast, where Buffy and Derick had ponies, and then there was the part beyond the Connecticut River, not so much the Land of Steady Habits as the Land of Sharpened Elbows. 

We have a house because of my ability to earn a living and we have a home because of my wife's talents at adapting to a strange and different environment that strains and challenges her and us every day and yet we rarely feel the shocks because she is that strong in protecting us. 

And my children have grown into adults, unlike their father, to my immense relief. Yes, sadly, a lot of their looks are from my side of the family but their easy smiles, the welcome in their eyes, their willingness to help a friend whom they've just met, they get from their mother. 

They are, as always, my favorite presence under the Christmas tree and my proof to my own doubting heart that there is a force greater than myself who does know when a swallow falls to earth or when the lilies of the field need to look splendid or when one person, crippled inside, needs to sit at a keyboard, but not one that composes music, and create a Song of Thanksgiving that only he can read.

-bill kenny