We're at that point in the summer when we keep an eye on hurricane forecasts, as they will be coming thick and fast. Mostly here in the Land of Steady Habits, we get a lot of rain from them; low-lying areas see some flooding (not in my part of Norwich), and we get scared watching the damage elsewhere in the country on the Weather Channel.
I'm not really concerned so much about the rain as I am about what Dylan Thomas referred to as the dying of the light (and I'm not talking about the darkening of the skies).
Almost everyone my age I know, and there's not nearly as many of us left as I'd have thought should have survived to this point, is, like me, bone weary all the time. We get up tired, slog through our days semi-comatose, and crash on couches in middle-class fever dreams we never envisioned ourselves as ever living in to go to bed and fail to dream to get up and do it all again..
Don't get me wrong-I'm disappointed in myself and in my life, so far, but I'm not unhappy. I met and married someone who loved and who still loves me, though I haven't done anything remotely lovable in a ridiculous number of years. We have two children who are now happily married adults themselves and getting on with their own lives rather nicely without us (and making us grandparents as well), which is the whole plan, as I remember from the orientation briefing at Dad School back in the day.
I, and by that I mean my peers and me, didn't crash or go down in flames; we surrendered a little bit every day until we really ran out of things to give away. We traded our blue skies and beliefs for BMWs and shipped good-paying jobs to low-wage third- and fourth-world nations so that their people could have an opportunity to earn forty cents a day making sneakers that I buy at a three hundred bucks plus a pop and never even think twice about.
In another fifty years, some of those places will have indoor plumbing and potable drinking water, and those people, or maybe only the ones who survive until then, will want to put up a statue to folks like me. Don't worry about it. You're welcome, and keep the cholera blankets-hell may freeze over and you could use the warmth.
At some point, we turned into our parents, who are laughing their asses off now as they really didn't do as terrible a job as we kept insisting they had. And considering how we could fuqq up a one-car funeral procession (and don't ask me about the wet dream in the desert), it might not have been a bad idea to quit while we were only slightly behind instead of pressing on and losing sight of the entire caravan.
We thought the future was Twenty Questions but, instead, it proved to be Hide 'n Seek in a dark room. And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began, when Jesus was the honeymoon, and Cain was just the man. Same as it ever was, and I knew coming in that going out would be the same.
-bill kenny
