The Night Bus

Harry Potter has just boarded The Night Bus.

My father alerts, "What is this?"

"Harry Potter"

"It is not."

"Yeah, it is."


"I don't consider this Harry Potter."

Bread Crumbs

It’s one of those days where pithy people would say, “Why, you’d complain if I hung you with a new rope.”

I’d smile politely and you’d be satisfied.  If you were the sort who would see past the slightly sick look on my face.

On the tiny television screens behind me someone’s vacation trip to Venice is burning to    DVD.  One DVD.  The trip of a lifetime condensed down to less than two hours.

That’s my day job.  Your memories.  I salvage them and transfer them from videotape to DVD.  Sometimes I’m too late.  The crumbs you carefully prepared from yesterday’s bread have been eaten.  Or blown away.  Your dog or rats broke into the box in your garage or you didn’t realize the attic got that hot.

My mother used to be one of them.  The ones who shrank from the camera and tried to hide.  Oddly she was also a big believer in photos as memories too.  Our family ended up with boxes and boxes of photos with things written on the back like “Me 1959.”

Me.

Some bread crumbs are made of stronger stuff than other ones.

I’ve never been sure on the subject of memories.   I once transferred someone’s final answering machine message to CD and made ten extra copies.  She hadn’t known what was coming.  It wasn’t as if she said, “I’m never coming home, but remember I love you.”

Ten copies.

It haunted me for more than a week, the thought of her kids ten years from now, listening to that message.

Over and over and over.

Them trying to make sense of that small snippet of their missing mother’s life xacto knifed out of what would have been just another ordinary day had she not died.  A 27 second bread crumb chosen and mass duplicated to help guide lost children to a place they’ve never been to before, a home where mother was waiting.

I can’t remember what she said.  It seems like I should remember what she said.  Something about running late, I think.

In the back of my mind, my mother stands, warm in 8mm colors, in a doughboy pool, a large beach ball, quartered in different splashes of color, blocks her face.  A much tinier version of me, who doesn’t “get it,” circles her and circles her, trying to see what there is to see behind the beach ball.

See that’s the problem with those bread crumbs, you may wish you had whole wheat or rye bread, but no amount of paint or grooming will add nutritious goodness to white bread.  My mother, hiding behind her beach ball, is a memory.  It is one repeated over and over as she hides behind her hand, a rock, or other people in countless other videos and photos.

Little bits of mold cling to your bread crumbs, changing their flavor and taste.  That mold is a scientific principle called “The Observer Effect,” where simply watching a process in action changes both the action and the outcome.  The minute dad gets out the camera and calls for everyone to say “cheese,” the moment he admired and wanted to capture has already exited the room.

I have a picture of my mother from the night I graduated high school.  No one would hand her a beach ball.  Her face, lit by the harsh camera flash outside on a dark night, is blindingly white.  Her eyes are wild with fear.  I have never been one to hide from a camera.  I stubbornly set my jaw and face the lens, but even without a beach ball, perhaps especially without one, I see my mother’s face look back at me from the glassy print.

If I handed you the photo, said this is me when I was younger, you’d be satisfied.   If you were the sort who would see past the slightly sick look on my face.

As If Underwater No. 2

I sit in my parents’ living room.  It’s hot and it’s stuffy.  Anyone else in the room is asleep.  My only company left is “Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles,” a version I first saw, with my father in this same room, just two weeks ago.   When it started playing, just after I showed up at the house, I told my father, “Oh look.  We saw this movie a week or two ago.”  For anybody else, it would have been a subtle hint.  For my father, it was a bone of contention, an argument.  

“No we didn’t.”  

“Sure we did.  Remember?  See look at that guy, remember him?”  

“No.  Who is he?” 

“Well I don’t remember the actor’s name.  But look at him, doesn’t he look familiar?”  

My father turns from looking at me to looking at the television set, already drifting to a negative head shake before he even completes the turn.  

“I remember.” I say.  “Richard E. Grant!  If I’m right, the opening credits will list Richard E. Grant.”  

We stare at the television.  The opening credits begin, peppered liberally with scenes of a murder and the body being found.  Finally, right at the end, the words “and Richard E. Grant” scroll down the screen.

“See?”  I say, turning to look at my father.  

“See what?”

My mother once told me that when her parents died, she felt like she was doing something wrong simply by staying alive.  Or that’s how I interpreted what she said.  What she actually said was that, when her parents died, she felt as if she had stayed in a place, like a room or at a party, after her parents had vocally disapproved of it and left.  I suppose if I had been in an argumentative mood, I could have challenged her.  After all her father died more than 25 years earlier than her mother.  Get your story straight.  They died so far apart, you couldn’t really have been worried about “both” of their approvals.  So who was it?

An excellent argument in debate class, but hardly the answer to give when your mother is confessing something so deeply twisted, it can only be a measurement of how much therapy you may stand to need to pay for in the future.  

No matter, whichever parent, she must be in his/her good graces again.  After her death but before his stroke, my father wore his loss and how much he missed her like a deodorant or a cologne.  It clung to him.  He was never without it.  Now she never comes up.  

Well once.  When I asked him why he watches so much television.  He gave me a look as if I had asked the dumbest question imaginable.  

“Because I can watch whatever I want now.”  

The woman he used to tell me was the love of his life reduced to the woman who hogged the remote.   

On the television screen, Dr. Watson accompanies Lord Baskerville to his family estate.  I look longingly at the remote sitting on the coffee table in front of my sleeping father.  I can’t bring myself to change the channel.  For one thing, I know that the minute I rise from my chair, the sleeping spell that has taken the room will be broken.  For another, I know I am here to visit my father, not watch television.  Somehow, sitting watching something he chose, even if he is sleeping through it, fills that criteria.  Changing the channel to something I might like to see, does not.   

The thermostat, apparently unaware the room is already hot, triggers the heater and as it comes on, my eyes snap open.  I haven’t even been aware they were shut.  I lean forward, my elbows to my knees and focus on the television in an attempt to stay awake.  

After awhile, my father rouses.  

“You know?” He says, catching my attention.  “I think I’ve seen this before.”

I turn and stare at the screen as if all of the possible responses I might give were written there.  

“You know?”  I say, turning back to face him.  “Me too.”