It was his sixtieth birthday. The surprise party wouldn’t be for another week. Of course he knew about it! His wife let her chat window open on her computer. That meant that he ad a week to thin, really think, before he had to smile at people and pretend that he was okay with the passage of time. He went immediately to the photo album, to see what his father had been doing at his age. He had been a small businessman whose baby furniture business had taken off fast, and at sixty he was preparing to sell it to a larger company. He looked, in the photos, happy, but all those other things, too: overweight, a little stunned by his success, uncertain whether he needed to change his life. He had, briefly, with a younger woman, and then thought better of it and begged his way back into his marriage. “Your mother was the smarter one,” he liked to say, and she would laugh and say “Was? Is!” Thirty years later, the son looked at the album and began to spiral. He had no company. He had a wife who was smarter than him but she didn’t laugh about it. He was losing his hair faster than his father, and while he was considerably thinner, it only made him seem less powerful. Thinking this way wasn’t healthy but neither were the cigarettes his father was holding in almost every photo.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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