This was running through my head early Saturday morning, when I couldn't sleep, half because of physical problems, and half dreading the day:
"Is anybody there?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?"
1776
This is the last time I will sit here in this place on a late spring day, the cool breeze coming through the window, the breeze that in June always had me dreaming of July and vacation. I look around the house trying to impress all the details. It's a bit turned on the heel these days; the shining new Solarian from the early 1970s has lost most of its finish, the wallpaper Dad and I laboriously put on the walls of the bathroom looks weary, the "refinished" kitchen cabinets (all they did was put some type of "contact paper" over the old ones) look hideously dated. The carpet Mom put in several years ago has gotten "baggy." (I wouldn't have put a new wall-to-wall. There's a perfectly gorgeous hardwood floor underneath, which I would have never hidden.) There's only one bathroom. Half the porch windows no longer open. The windows in the unfinished second story, which we used as an attic, are still the old counterweight type.
But I had a good time growing up here. Oh, I'm not saying there weren't bad patches. We can a couple of medical scares, including Mom's gall bladder and Dad's prostate. Once I had pneumonia and the doctor knocked me unconscious with a dose of penicillin that was too large.
As I got older, Dad and I often clashed. I'm not talking big rebellious teenager stuff; I wasn't that type of kid. In fact, I'd decided when I was in elementary school that, unlike the other kids, I didn't really want to grow up. They were all atwitter about having their own cars and own money and own apartments. I thought about having to go to work at a job you really didn't like day after day and having to do hideously mundane things like pay insurance and, even worse, mow the lawn. But Dad and I were a lot alike, so much alike that we occasionally couldn't help setting each other off. We were both painfully self-conscious introverts who got our feelings hurt if you looked at us crossways.
Dad was also hurt because I was closer to Mom than I was to him. But the three of us, most of the time, were the Three Musketeers. I was never ashamed of going on vacation with my parents. We had fun and, once we had the money, went to fun places—Fort Ticonderoga, the Flume in New Hampshire, Quebec, Expo '67, Williamsburg, cross country to California, and by car down to Florida. (I had one girlfriend who told me enviously, "I wish my parents went on vacations like yours. All mine want to do is go to someplace where they can sit around the pool, have a cocktail, and relax.") They almost never left me alone, and then never with babysitters; always with family. We sweltered together on summer nights, got cool at the beach and cold in the snow, went to the drive-in, consumed copious quantities of Del's Lemonade, had cookouts, went to see the leaves in the fall.
When I lay in my bed at night, with the nightlight on and the door open so I could hear the quiet murmur of the television, I felt like the luckiest, safest kid in the world. No one ever pried in my diary, or told me to stop writing my stories, although sometimes I think my wild imagination puzzled my dad. (I keep thinking how happy he'd be to know that I was finally "into" computers. Way back in 1973, he told me this would be the "going thing" in the future. But back in 1973, you had to get an A+ in math to even peek at the school computer and I wasn't interested.)
Of course I grew up (and sure enough, got stuck with the job I didn't like and cutting the lawn and paying the insurance). In 1985, our magic number was reduced by one; in a few days or a few weeks or a few months it will be reduced to one.
But the memories remain.
And I'll always be glad I got to enjoy the ride.
"In life you pull out the gate
Then you head dead straight
Steer clear of the main road, it all looks the same
Can't miss the signs, keep between the lines, and
Stay awake at the wheel—
If you drift, try to take in the feel of the moment
Along the big ride."
Rupert Holmes, "The Big Ride"
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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at
9:43:00 PM
: 11:05:00 PM
