Moved

This blog has found a new home on wordpress. Point your browser to TriumphOfTheSparrow.wordpress.com (I know, ridiculously long name) and read new stories there.

I have moved all the stories from this site over, including the many drafts of so-good-but-not-quite-done stories I hope to finish soon.

Walking

The act of walking without a destination is a hard skill to acquire. At first your legs are reluctant to move; you must provide motivation, often a lie like "I am going to the mailbox on the corner." Of course once you get to the mailbox you keep going, and suddenly your legs feel wobbly and confused. It is very hard not to stop, especially if anyone is watching you. "They must know we don't belong here," your legs tell you. "Let's stop." But if you give in and stop, a worse problem emerges - "what are you doing just standing there?"

Zaire, moribund

Two figures shimmer in the heat as they walk a ridge high above the ocean. The first, a tall boy in a red Triumph t-shirt, holds a six-pack out across the scrub. The other takes a bottle, then uses his teeth to twist the cap. His orange striped shirt is unbuttoned, his gait the swagger of a boy unaccustomed to beer. He spits the bottle cap at the other boy, who dodges and slaps back. They speak in long, staccato bursts, each trying to overrun the other with words.

The two had been arguing for hours, fanned by the cool breeze of the Atlantic. Two more beers, two more rounds.

Hey Emile, the tall one said, what we arguing about?

How should I know? You've been talkin' shit and I've been telling you what it is. Shit. Emile pounded his bottle against a tree.

From a distance they could hear the Clank! Clank! of something hard on metal. Coming around a bend they saw a flagpole, its rope unburdened, flapping against the pole in the warm breeze.

Hey, know where we are? The Mangrove.

Sure, ay! Sure it is! Emile ran toward the empty hotel, its doors and windows shuttered against the elements. They step up onto the porch.

Lucien, you try the door. Lucien set his bottle down and shook the door from its handle. The door had been bolted and shuttered; It wouldn't budge even if the boys were strong and sober. He shook the door again, then batted the frame.

Hey look! The pool is empty. Come on!  Emile races for the empty pool, then abruptly stops at the edge.
It's deep!

Lucien walks up. You think? Come on fool. 

They crawl over the side, feet dangling. Lucien jumps first, while Emile loses a sandal and lowers himself. They slump against the shaded wall.

Remember waiting tables in winter? The old maitre d' Philippe and his girlfriend?

The parrot you mean? Emile smiled, took a swig. Yeh, nobody told knew what she'd wear next.

Or what she wouldn't wear... the older brother swung his bottle around his head.

Not with the likes of you around! A bottle crashed in the empty pool. I'm tired. Goin' home. You stay with your memories.

Lucien went looking for a ladder, and was surprised to see how dark it had become.

The sun had dropped behind the hotel some time before, and the yard was now bathed in shadow. through the early twilight the brightest stars were starting to shine. Lucien's face looked orange as his head emerged above the top of the pool wall.

Just then a loud crack like gunfire shattered the peace, quickly followed by a low boom that shook the ground. Lucien fell back, stumbling to the bottom of the pool. He pointed up toward the coastal sky. Hey wasthat? Emile looked in time to see a star grow brighter. A ring of smoke encircled it, growing bigger.

That star's erupting! His heart racing, he reached down to steady his body. No, he thought, that's a smoke ring. Someone's shooting.

Another explosion, this one on the ground. Both boys are knocked sideways; Emile grabs his brother and they hit the pool wall. Instinctively the boys stay against the wall, looking out toward the coast. Through the trees they can see fire and smoke. A street light buzzed on, then off.

Suddenly an explosion so close there was no sound, just a wall of compressed air that slammed them to the ground. Bleeding from eye and ear sockets, the boys are thrown up from the ground as it surges and subsides; Lucien is clutching his head at the temples, his eyes useless. A wave of undulating soil heads toward them, the earth burning as it falls away behind the wave. With a clenched jaw Emile tries to run, but there is no path to lead him from the explosion below. He grabs the side of the pool as it caves in on him.

Letter #3

January 22nd

Dear Tom,

On occasion of your fortieth birthday let me be the first to congratulate you. You have lived to a significant milestone, and I am proud both of what you have become and for how you have achieved it. For the occasion I would like to clear the air of some things that have been bothering me these years, and ask your understanding if not forgiveness.

My earliest memory of you is on a summer day, when you were still a baby - maybe eighteen months old. You were in an enclosed playyard in the living room. I was on the front porch, and the front door was open so mom could see and hear you. I think she was gardening in the front. Anyway you were in there drooling and playing with your toys, which I could see from the porch. The playyard (we called it a playpen) was yellow, white and green in that 70s way, and even though it was several years old it still smelled like fresh plastic. I couldn't believe my good fortune that you had been left all alone, so I went inside and put one of your baby blankets over the top of the playpen. You looked up at me while I did this, then out through the mesh walls like you wanted to play. Some of your toys were on the carpet by me, outside the playpen. I took an alphabet block and showed it to you, then threw it up in an arch over your head. I remember you looked up. It landed in the middle of the blanket, collapsing the makeshift roof on top of you. This made you laugh, which was not my intent, so I threw another block, and another. I don't think I ever hit you, but I do remember mom coming in and grabbing my wrist just after I threw the last block. Pulling me back to the entry hall she told me never to do that again; that I could have given you brain damage. After that, whenever you would act weird I would get worried that I had damaged your brain. Now that you have survived to middle age I can finally let go of this guilt. 

My next memory of you isn't my own memory, but rather a remembered story that mom and dad liked to tell. For some reason, they had bought you a car for your birthday. I think it was red and yellow, and shaped like a VW Beetle. I didn't (and still don't) know why they got you this car when all I had was a rocking horse - on springs - that didn't even move unless you got someone to pull the frame while I rode it, and anyway I still had to share that horse with you even after you got the car, but we can probably chalk that up to new parenting mistakes. Be that as it may, you still ended up with a new car and all I had was the horse. You were not very good at driving your car. You would basically go in circles, very slowly, until you slipped forward out of the driver's seat and under the front wheels. Even though you were as tall as I was, you still weren't coordinated. I am guessing our ages were 5 and 3. I tried to show you how to steer the car, and make it go in a straight line, but you wouldn't let me. So when you (finally) left the basement play room (to have a snack?) I got into your car. I must have tried to wait for you to come back, but inevitably I gave up and just smashed your car into the wall, repeatedly. I don't remember if you were in the room when I did this, or if mom and dad were there, just that I did permanent damage to the car and got into a lot of trouble. I know you didn't deserve that, and as you got older you definitely became more coordinated, so I should have just had patience. I know that now, and I am sorry.

For many years I had dreams that I was beating you up, but you were laughing at me. I would hit you, smash you, jump on you, pull a bookshelf down onto you, yet you would just smile back at me like it didn't matter. Those dreams have stopped now, the last one maybe ten years ago, so I think we can say all this competition is firmly behind us now.

We have already spoken at length of the alleged stolen bike from Farells, and needn't trouble ourselves with a recounting here. Suffice it to say you got a new bike, and nobody went to jail for theft or conspiracy. I suppose that now you are a police officer you could look up the official records of the theft report, but surely it would be best to let the situation lie.

There are a few more loose ends I would like to wrap up quickly: it was me who ate your Halloween candy in 1976 and 1977; some of your Hot Wheels cars did end up in steel vice grips; I took the plastic monkey from you that dinner at the beach; you did not get your fair share of nickels at the nickel arcade, because you would just waste them anyway; and finally, I did not see you and Octobra together on the playground, despite what I told your friends.

I hope you are well, and that you have no more headaches.

Love,
~

The Maxim of the Eternal Parent

We are our fathers. We are our children. This isn't to say there is no possibility for better, just that it's damn hard.

You can't really understand the sacrifices of your parents until you have children. Just when your life gets going -- you're old enough to have a job, drive a car, have friends and a romance -- just when you think "wouldn't it be nice..." you suddenly get this really noisy and demanding little creature to take care of. Unlike everything else you've had, this little guy has no instruction manual, no on/off switch, no warranty or service contract. You are now on full-time parenthood 24 hours a day for the next 18 years or so.

If you are conscientious enough, your children become the center of your world, otherwise they are an obstacle to whatever the center of your world is. Either way, you suffer: supreme sacrifice or supreme guilt.  As long as a parent lives, they will be forever changed by this unique form of suffering. And this was the same for their parents, and their grand-parents, and their parents through beginningless time. The endless loop from conception to birth to adulthood to conception, the chicken-and-egg routine of life, belies not so much a linear chain as it does the interrelatedness of all humanity as siblings in a huge family. As grand as that sounds, it's just another way of saying we are who we are, nothing more or less.

I saw a bumper sticker today: We learn from history that we never learn from history. This is so true! We think we are smarter than those that went before us. The truth, of course, is we are the same people, using different tools, but still fundamentally the same people as our predecessors. In families this is especially true. You could call this statement the maxim of the eternal parent.

I am my father's son, and he his father's son. Each of us believed we would grow up to be different: better, smarter than our own parents; more loving, stronger. Each of us made small steps, perhaps mostly invisible to our spouses and children. But in times of difficulty we fall back on what we learned from our fathers: we become stoic, analytical, silent. This is what we learned from our fathers during times of difficulty in our childhood, and it is part of who we are. But our kids can't see that; they hear a loud voice and cower, just as we did when we were kids; they try to impress us, just as we struggled to prove ourselves. My dad and I. His father and him. Me and my children.

Through the vehicle of parenthood we learn there is no such thing as free choice, nor is there such thing as predetermined life. My kids are here, now, each an organ plucked from their mother to blossom into full organisms with their own unique beauty, desires, foibles and passion. Yet they are unquestionably still a part of me, my wife, our parents and grand-parents, and thus related to everyone. Nature versus nurture wasn't a fight; our nature is to nurture, and nurture is natural. It isn't a question of free choice or predestination, but rather an unbroken interconnected web of life. It's just hard to be mindful of this when your kid won't do his homework, or knocks the TV to the floor.

So how do you stop the promotion of a bad idea through this interconnected web of life? Is it simply an incremental process that will take another thousand years to sort out? Or is progress itself an illusion, and really you have up generations and down generations? I'll let you know when I have grand-kids.