Last year I turned forty and realized that I had raised a skeptic who didn’t believe me. “You seem much older,” she said. My wife made an ironic clucking sound. To truth it, as she says, it was less a clucking sound for Adelaide than it was one for me, a “Hey buddy, you can come down on her hard if you want but she’s not wrong, and what have I been telling you about your haircut and how you dress.” Loud and clear, Patricia, loud and clear. She laughed post-cluck. My daughter laughed. They went off together hand-in-hand to take the car to school. Adelaide is in the eighth grade. Patricia is an assistant principal. I work from home now, mostly sitting down at my impeccably arranged desk and falling into memories, which are also impeccably arranged, though in the manner of an armory. I am wounded by the past because it is so clear to me. I see myself vividly, and Patricia even more so, and Adelaide taking her first tentative steps on the apron around our first tentative house. I keep wanting to get back there and then wanting to shield myself from how idiotic that idea is. It’s all impossible, isn’t it? At four, when the hand-holders return, beaming like psychos, I’m often at that same spot. “Good day?” Patricia will say, and I’ll squint like I’m a man who speaks a different language. “You look like you surrendered,” Adelaide will say, or something similar. “I hope you surrendered to the Allies.”
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment