In prog ( posting as backup...)The Curmudgeon ...
In prog ( posting as backup...)
The Curmudgeon
When Dale Linton was in the first grade, Miss Comstock read a picture book aloud that would stick with him for the rest of his days, though its title and author would not. It told the tale of a lonely old man who walked to the mailbox every day, a considerable distance, only to find it empty. The journey to and from was a formidable task at his advanced age, the rewards always scant. At the tender age of six, Dale found the story sad, no doubt the desired effect, being a cautionary tale of sorts. But more than that, he found it haunting. The good part of a century later, he would become that man. He’d tell himself it was not because he was unloved, or because old age rendered you invisible and therefore forgotten; it was that the world had changed. No one used the post anymore. No one. Only advertisers. It’s a funny thing how the images that stick with you are the ones that will come to define your life, though you have no way of knowing it at the time. Still, they haunt the corners of your psyche, like red flags thrown into your path by some future self. When Dale was nine, the family dog had birthed a litter of eight puppies. Exhausted from licking up the afterbirth of the first seven, Flicka, a black lab, ignored the eighth, would have left it to suffocate on mucous or placenta or whatever the muck was, had his older sister not stepped in and cleared an airway with her finger. The image of the silently gasping pup would remain indelible. Only years later would he connect it with the fact that he himself was the youngest of his mother’s brood, that he’d always felt neglected, that nature made sure runts are always left to die. At eleven, he learned a new word in English class: jaded. He vowed never to become it, even wrote the promise down. He saw jaded in many, if not all, adults: the vacant look in the eye that said all that mattered had been stolen over time. Oh, he hadn’t the life experience to understand the anatomy of disillusionment, how it chipped away at ideals; he only knew he’d never let it happen to him. He would never become his father. He kept the self-made promise for a good portion of his long life, preserved his innocence—that’s what it was, after all, this belief in principle—against all odds. At seventeen, he finished his first sci-fi novella. He’d started plenty of ideas, scrawling them on the corners of notebooks or rumpled napkins, even outlined some. But this was the first he’d carried to completion. The novella was a parable—even with little-to-no literary training he knew as much—about an old man who scarcely recognized the world around him. Cities had expanded exponentially, outgrowing the continents and forcing man to develop the ocean floor. Trapped in a biodome simulation, the old man was left to reminisce fondly about what once was, recalling vast skies spotted with buttermilk clouds, the licking of chocolate-raspberry ice cream cones under a deepening twilight spangled with awakening stars. He dwelt on time-smattered tableaus of carnivals and cotton candy, Ferris wheels and joyously nauseating teacups and somersaults across stickery summer grass. Piles of fallen autumns leaves and the smell of pollywog puddles and honeysuckle and innocence. It was all a metaphor, of course. At fifty, Dale became convinced time was an illusion, that the same soul resided behind the eyes of that six year-old who identified with the lonely old man and his empty mailbox, and the nine year-old gasping for puppy breath, and those that had just begun to droop with gravity. At sixty, he admitted to himself he’d become all he once vowed not to. It’s then he began to drink. To numb the realization that despite all the self-talk, all his efforts to preserve innocence, life had turned out to be cruel once the powers of self-invention had worn off, the stardust of youth. The alcohol kept some of his regrets at bay, but not all. He found himself lamenting the past, wondering how his life might have turned out had things been slightly different: a microscopic detail here, a circumstance there. He rode the train daily, gazing at young lovers, hands clasped, or long-married couples with a rich history and likely children and grandchildren, and longing for what he’d not been afforded. What if his first love had been stronger, had believed a bit more in love and not caved to the doubts of the world? What if the man had not let those voices in, as if through cracks in a biodome? What if his own parents had held him back? He’d been born in November, so he was younger and smaller than the other kids, all through school. They should have held him back, instead of reinforcing the feeling he was a runt. Today, Dale was watching a man and his son across the aisle from his own seat on the train. The car rattled across uneven track, past the autumn-tinged thickets of upstate New York. But it was all a blur; the only thing in crisp focus was the man and the boy, fixed amid a flurry of diffused strokes and umber shadows. The boy was all of six, tiny legs dangling from the cracked vinyl seat. He was dressed in soccer gear; the season was nearly over and the two were headed home from practice. Tiny orange socks were pulled up over tiny brown calves, and the boy held a soccer ball against his side lest it escape with all the rattling. But his other miniscule hand was in his father’s, delicately tracing fleshy palms, imbedding tiny fingernails in callused flesh. There was no need to hold hands; the boy was not at risk of escaping with the soccer ball. Nor were the two on the high seas during a squall, in danger of being separated by searing tides moving in opposite directions. Still, the boy’s hand traced his father’s, heroic in scale by comparison, like that of a bronze Rodin sculpture. The boy’s unflinching gaze was riveted up at his father, who returned it with equal attention.
The whole scene was foreign to Dale, but something about it keyed into his longing. Oh, he knew his father’s generation did their best, defined fatherhood as providing a roof and putting dinner on the table and little more. Maybe the occasional brandishing of a belt to fulfill the role of authoritarian. Children
The Curmudgeon
When Dale Linton was in the first grade, Miss Comstock read a picture book aloud that would stick with him for the rest of his days, though its title and author would not. It told the tale of a lonely old man who walked to the mailbox every day, a considerable distance, only to find it empty. The journey to and from was a formidable task at his advanced age, the rewards always scant. At the tender age of six, Dale found the story sad, no doubt the desired effect, being a cautionary tale of sorts. But more than that, he found it haunting. The good part of a century later, he would become that man. He’d tell himself it was not because he was unloved, or because old age rendered you invisible and therefore forgotten; it was that the world had changed. No one used the post anymore. No one. Only advertisers. It’s a funny thing how the images that stick with you are the ones that will come to define your life, though you have no way of knowing it at the time. Still, they haunt the corners of your psyche, like red flags thrown into your path by some future self. When Dale was nine, the family dog had birthed a litter of eight puppies. Exhausted from licking up the afterbirth of the first seven, Flicka, a black lab, ignored the eighth, would have left it to suffocate on mucous or placenta or whatever the muck was, had his older sister not stepped in and cleared an airway with her finger. The image of the silently gasping pup would remain indelible. Only years later would he connect it with the fact that he himself was the youngest of his mother’s brood, that he’d always felt neglected, that nature made sure runts are always left to die. At eleven, he learned a new word in English class: jaded. He vowed never to become it, even wrote the promise down. He saw jaded in many, if not all, adults: the vacant look in the eye that said all that mattered had been stolen over time. Oh, he hadn’t the life experience to understand the anatomy of disillusionment, how it chipped away at ideals; he only knew he’d never let it happen to him. He would never become his father. He kept the self-made promise for a good portion of his long life, preserved his innocence—that’s what it was, after all, this belief in principle—against all odds. At seventeen, he finished his first sci-fi novella. He’d started plenty of ideas, scrawling them on the corners of notebooks or rumpled napkins, even outlined some. But this was the first he’d carried to completion. The novella was a parable—even with little-to-no literary training he knew as much—about an old man who scarcely recognized the world around him. Cities had expanded exponentially, outgrowing the continents and forcing man to develop the ocean floor. Trapped in a biodome simulation, the old man was left to reminisce fondly about what once was, recalling vast skies spotted with buttermilk clouds, the licking of chocolate-raspberry ice cream cones under a deepening twilight spangled with awakening stars. He dwelt on time-smattered tableaus of carnivals and cotton candy, Ferris wheels and joyously nauseating teacups and somersaults across stickery summer grass. Piles of fallen autumns leaves and the smell of pollywog puddles and honeysuckle and innocence. It was all a metaphor, of course. At fifty, Dale became convinced time was an illusion, that the same soul resided behind the eyes of that six year-old who identified with the lonely old man and his empty mailbox, and the nine year-old gasping for puppy breath, and those that had just begun to droop with gravity. At sixty, he admitted to himself he’d become all he once vowed not to. It’s then he began to drink. To numb the realization that despite all the self-talk, all his efforts to preserve innocence, life had turned out to be cruel once the powers of self-invention had worn off, the stardust of youth. The alcohol kept some of his regrets at bay, but not all. He found himself lamenting the past, wondering how his life might have turned out had things been slightly different: a microscopic detail here, a circumstance there. He rode the train daily, gazing at young lovers, hands clasped, or long-married couples with a rich history and likely children and grandchildren, and longing for what he’d not been afforded. What if his first love had been stronger, had believed a bit more in love and not caved to the doubts of the world? What if the man had not let those voices in, as if through cracks in a biodome? What if his own parents had held him back? He’d been born in November, so he was younger and smaller than the other kids, all through school. They should have held him back, instead of reinforcing the feeling he was a runt. Today, Dale was watching a man and his son across the aisle from his own seat on the train. The car rattled across uneven track, past the autumn-tinged thickets of upstate New York. But it was all a blur; the only thing in crisp focus was the man and the boy, fixed amid a flurry of diffused strokes and umber shadows. The boy was all of six, tiny legs dangling from the cracked vinyl seat. He was dressed in soccer gear; the season was nearly over and the two were headed home from practice. Tiny orange socks were pulled up over tiny brown calves, and the boy held a soccer ball against his side lest it escape with all the rattling. But his other miniscule hand was in his father’s, delicately tracing fleshy palms, imbedding tiny fingernails in callused flesh. There was no need to hold hands; the boy was not at risk of escaping with the soccer ball. Nor were the two on the high seas during a squall, in danger of being separated by searing tides moving in opposite directions. Still, the boy’s hand traced his father’s, heroic in scale by comparison, like that of a bronze Rodin sculpture. The boy’s unflinching gaze was riveted up at his father, who returned it with equal attention.
The whole scene was foreign to Dale, but something about it keyed into his longing. Oh, he knew his father’s generation did their best, defined fatherhood as providing a roof and putting dinner on the table and little more. Maybe the occasional brandishing of a belt to fulfill the role of authoritarian. Children
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