For Christmas this year, my brother gave my parents, among other things, the same thing he did last year: a custom-made DVD. Being not only the giver of the almighty Playstation 2, which has ever so conveniently removed any need for me to have a life, he’s also quite the talented filmmaker. He edited a series of old home-movies into a 15-minute or so montage of moments from our childhood: various parties, silly skits, and sporting events that document a time and a place that seems now further away than ever.
Several of these clips centered around our times playing baseball, better known as “The Dullest Way A Homo Sapien Could Ever Spend 3 Hours”. I don’t know how my folks did it. In those days, a team that had more than one person who could hit generally won the championship. The other seven players in the lineup could barely hold the bat up. In the field, they’d sooner be picking dandelions than turning a double-play. And yet, at every game, one of my parents was there. If only one were there to watch me, it usually meant the other was watching Casey play simultaneously somewhere else.
The majority of these games were held in a park in South Lowell, off Boylston Street. From the early Spring until the late Fall, this park teems with life and color. It features not only three baseball fields, but a large oval track surrounding a soccer/football field, with tennis courts adorning various outskirts of the overall park.
Boylston Street is also the one I took Sunday to my father’s new apartment. I took a quick glance at the park in which I spent quite a lot of time in my pre-pubescence. It was cold, grey, speckled with snow. Lifeless. Patches of mud mixed with dead grass. No joggers, no impromptu flag football games, no mixed doubles matches in Court 6.
It’s a week to the day everything changed and here we are, three McGee men, trying to decorate an apartment. Casey’s brought a few framed photos he took in college; I’ve framed a theatrical poster from my theatre days. These are added to the collected of Target’s finest art, recently purchased by the patriarch. We lay out each room by putting the framed pieces along the floor below where we want to hang them. We starts out at the world’s greatest mockery of “Trading Spaces” somehow begins to gel, and by the end, it doesn’t look half bad. We even almost fix a cabinet door, and if you know the building acumen of us McGees, you know the miracle involved there.
It’s a week to the day and the work keeps us busy. Keeps the conversation light and reserved to topics such as “Should this go a little higher?” and “Where the f$ck did that nail go to?” My dad’s got screwdrivers and hammers and the flat-headed knife. Each family has their own secret fix-alls, and ours is the flat-headed knife. My father could either fix the problem with a flat-headed knife or at least go down swinging. Screw loose? Get the flat-headed knife. Light bulb blew out? Get the flat-headed knife. Entire ceiling caved in? Well, get two flat-headed knives, just to be sure.
It’s a week to the day and it feels like nothing so much as the honeymoon of the divorce. And that sounds weird but I can’t think of a better way to put it. The feeling is only enforced when my brother and I leave to spend an equal amount of time with our mother, three miles away. It’s soda and pizza and football and the kitchen table and my mother smoking her cigarette in the corner where the stove and the microwave cohabitate. The only thing truly unusual is that neither of her sons have brought laundry home on this particular Sunday. Dad usually works Sundays, so this particular trio felt unforced and, when you weren’t thinking about it (which wasn’t too often), eerily similar.
But it’s a week to the day, and any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental. But this is what people do. It’s what we do. You keep on keepin’ on, like a bird that flew. Tangled up in blue and grey and cloudy skies and unspoken hurt and framed art and empty pizza boxes. You woke up, you drove down, you tried to be the best son you could be, you drove home. And you'll do it again. And again. As many times as needed.
And the bad days will come, as they always have, even before the splintered state in which we four have started this new year. But they didn’t come this weekend, and they probably won’t come for a bit. And when they do, hey, we’ll deal.
Even if we don’t have a flat-headed knife handy.