flashbacks of the cell phone ringing in the car on the way to work, the counter at Dulles, the halls of a hospital long since closed, the small dim room where they bring you to tell you the worst\u2026and then waking up on the hill looking out over the old family church and the sprawling graveyards next to the fields, under a luminous purple sky full of puffy white clouds.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d want to ask what it was like all those years ago, whether the world really felt like it was coming apart at the seams in 1962 or 1963 or 1968. If that played any part in the nine year wait between marriage and childbirth. (I\u2019d have a lot<\/em> of explaining to do about the last twenty-two years.)<\/p>\n I\u2019d ask about those evenings of piddling around the storage room with leather-working tools ,or melting lead and tying feathers for fly-fishing lures, or a jigsaw and C-clamp, whether that isolation was meant to be meditative and whether it paralleled what I\u2019ve attempted for years with books and pints and streaming audio from Ireland as I attempt to punch out of the world for a while.<\/p>\n I\u2019d ask about the motivations behind staying in a rural exurb instead of going closer to the city like my mother wanted – a more human scale? Just comfort and familiarity? Something as simple as lower house prices in a world where the interstate wasn\u2019t going to be finished until 1985 anyway?<\/p>\n I probably wouldn\u2019t have the heart to ask what it was like looking out an office window at the marchers in Birmingham, or seeing the world change completely in the South, or whether they were making a deliberate choice to try to bring me up in a way that would be a break from what I once heard him snap on in anger as \u201cthe redneck mentality\u201d on election night in 1990. I would like to think he would be appropriately horrified by seeing the jump from 1998 to 2020 in one fell swoop, instead of being frog-boiled like his wife and taking the Host of the Beast (in Heinrich B\u00f6ll\u2019s famous formulation), but there is relief (if no comfort at all) in the thought \u201cat least I\u2019ll never have to know.”<\/p>\n And I guess at some point I\u2019d just want to know about getting old. If you ever stop regretting the decisions you got wrong. How you plot a path forward as the doors slowly close one after another. How it\u2019s possible as the years go by to keep doing the best you can and don\u2019t be a horse\u2019s ass…as each of those becomes ever more difficult with the passing of time.<\/p>\n It\u2019s mind-bending enough to know that I\u2019ve been in California for a third of my life, but it\u2019s more unsettling to know that in four years, I\u2019ll have lived half my life without him in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" flashbacks of the cell phone ringing in the car on the way to work, the counter at Dulles, the halls of a hospital long since closed, the small dim room where they bring you to tell you the worst\u2026and then waking up on the hill looking out over the old family church and the sprawling … <\/p>\n