My Burden

I stopped at the home of my youth today to help bring in my mothers groceries and clean out the litter box like both my brother and I do a few times a week. I pulled up to the curb of the tidy 1/8 acre plot that was my world as a child and noticed that a few of the 15 or 16 shrubs that once lined the front yard were missing, having been pulled or cut because they had died. This was just a metaphor and foreshadowing of the emotion that was soon to well up in me.

After taking in the groceries, I walked around the back of the house to see where some workers had cut down crippling bamboo that was overtaking the lonely back yard. Through the splitting fence, the pool, unopened since my fathers passing 2 years ago was echoing the voices of laughter as kids and grandkids jumped without rules. Immediately I was taken back to the mid 70's of my youth and there were my little brother and I making a fort or pretending there was a fort and planning our next social that would never materialize except in those very dreams of kids. I couldn't come back to today or didn't want to. I took a deep breath and figured this may be the last time I come back here. But as a child, this was my asylum. My secret spot. Where secrets were told and plans devised, most to lay useless in the wonderment of childhood.

Coming back to the front, I passed countless hand made cement tombstones to the pets of my past. Fondly, I remembered each as I read the names aloud, Vicky, Cookie, Candy, Yentl, Mitzi, Faust, Schnapps, Brandy, Casey, Cassidy...each pets sad face looking, brooding at me. I recalled the joy they brought, I begrudgingly remember burying each with my father, wiping tears with dirt stained hands.

The barren property across the street where my older brother and I shot bb guns, now squared off into new homes, glimmering. I walked into the house and there was mom with her usual smile, happy to see me, but lonely and sad on the inside even after 2 years without her life partner, my dad.

After talking and drinking tea, I went up to his closet. There were his shoes, a smaller foot than mine, but shoes so big I could never fill. His favorite black hat, scarves and sports coats with handkerchiefs still in the pockets. Waiting to be worn or worn for the last time. My mother sitting down seeing me go through his clothes, red eyed, deep in thought, also remembering a time less sobering than today. This is the burden of the living. Tribulations of growing old instead of the alternative. The gift of twilight is the burden of memories, sad and happy.

Walking back to my car, the whole scene landed on me like a ton of bricks and so I sat in my car, in front of the castle of my childhood, and the tears flowed on their own with no end in sight. I should be happy I thought, to survive, but there is a burden to survival other than the joys of parties and families and friends and events. There is the burden of remembering. That is the burden we carry.

John Flaks

09.23.2010