Looking forward
Tags: Donald Trump, Holidays, Prose, Literally Literary, Family

Looking forward

The shit I think about when the dark days of Christmas strike

Photo courtesy of pixabay.com

It’s the first Christmas since Dad died and Mom is out to visit. It’s just the two of us, the weather sucks, and it’s quiet in the house. As she does a jigsaw puzzle, I find time for some long-deferred projects; one is to transfer old family audio tapes onto a PC and thence The Cloud. I’m not the type to be interested in old family tapes, but the geek in me worries that fragile magnetic media can’t last forever. So as I alternate between baking and starting cassettes, I hear slivers of long ago recordings.

I hear one snippet twice (somebody duplicated a tape?) It’s from when I was four, and, surprisingly, this is an event I remember. My dad was recording this tape to his parents, telling them that he and I and my older brother had gone to a local airport the day before, where a friend of his with a small plane was going to take us up for a ride, but that he hadn’t shown up and we’d gone home, and then today the friend had called from the airport, so obviously they’d gotten the days mixed up. Exciting stuff, when you are four, and so I remember that day. I recall staring from a grassy field and parking lot across a fence at an airstrip, where little planes touched down and took off again. This is something I remember from when I was four, I marvel.

In bed yesterday morning my girlfriend and I, tangled together, were talking softly. “If we had a baby,” she said, “it would have blue eyes.” It’s true, or at least highly probable, but also entirely counterfactual. She’s had her kids, and I’ll never have mine. Only one other woman ever talked about our (hypothetical) children. Such conversation provokes a strange feeling in me, one filled with a fair degree of regret, if I’m honest with myself.

Now I hear my dad telling his parents that a few days earlier the cops had showed up to tell him that kids were playing with cars on the street down the hill and one (me, it later turned out) was sticking his tongue out at drivers. When he got there, he found us and our two friends. By the time the cops showed up, though, my friend and I were off peeing behind a bush and only my brother and his friend faced the law. I laugh at this.

My ex is coming over for lunch tomorrow with me and my mother. I look forward to seeing her, even if there will be three of us, all struggling to figure out what our new roles are, how we all fit in to the world, fit in with each other. Her own father is in the hospital now and she will fly out the day after to see him, likely, for the last time. She’s a good person. She deserved better than I gave her.

Dad signs off one tape to his parents, saying “maybe you should save these tapes and send them back to us some time; we might like to keep them and to listen to them in the … distant future”. This is the distant future, Dad, I say. Actually, this is beyond the distant future, beyond any future you could have imagined. And he sounds so young — was, in fact, younger than I am now.

An orange-haired, pathologically insecure and untrustworthy buffoon is taking over the US nuclear launch codes in a few weeks. How the fuck did we get here? This wasn’t even imaginably part of that distant future. I suddenly feel better about not having had children. A fine present they are all getting this year, today’s kids.

The last story I hear is my dad, telling that I’ve just learned to ride without training wheels. This, too, I remember — I can picture the school field where we practiced. I struggled with it, he said, always looking down and then falling over. Something clicked, though, he said, and suddenly I figured it out. I had started, he said, to just look forward, and then everything was easy.