A lot of people are like a soft summer rain. They blow into your life and everything is refreshing and exciting. But eventually the clouds move on and you are left wet and miserable.
Category: Short Stories
Revenge of the Nerds
Oh orange man, don’t you understand that someday the ‘Nerd’ countries of the world will band together to put an end to your bullying. Do you even care that we turn our heads in shame every time you open your mouth to speak.
How many more languages must we learn to say, “Please forgive us, we were not paying attention while a child ran away with the gavel.”
Fathers Day Introspect
With the rusting of time, our memories can turn ordinary actions into heroic deeds; heroes become legend and eventually, a myth is born.
My father had lived for 92 years and for more than fifty of them I had called him my friend. I’d heard him say many times how he’d grown up in a simpler and certainly less complicated era. I know that the problems I’ve faced in my lifetime are nothing more than a mere drop in the bucket of what his eyes had witnessed. He’d lived through two world wars not to mention a few others that most people would just as soon forget. He saw first-hand, the ‘great depression’, and too many so called recessions. He’d witnessed oppressions and knew the amount of cruelty that men were capable of inflicting on their neighbors.
He’d faithfully followed the rule of 15 presidents (more faithfully to the Republicans than those airheaded Democrats) as they each gave him a promise of prosperity. Though one way or another that prosperity somehow had always managed to evade him. He never gave up hope for his family, himself, or humanity. He’d raised fifteen children to maturity and had been a devoted husband for over seventy years. He’d witnessed over a hundred births into his extended family and sorrowed over an untold number of deaths, including his wife and three of his own children.
Now don’t get me wrong. I know he wasn’t a spectacular man. At least not in a superhero kind of way. He didn’t discover the cure for the common cold, win a Nobel Prize, or anything like that. He wasn’t famous, he definitely wasn’t a Saint, and it doesn’t take a person with too many brains to figure out that he wasn’t a rich man either. In fact he’d spent his entire life fighting the struggle against poverty until the day he died.
He was however an honest and hard-working man. He was a good friend, a good neighbor, and a person that people could count on when things got a little rough. He’d give you all he had and never expect a thing in return…except friendship. I suppose though when you really think about it, what other definition of a superhero is there.
So it was at his funeral that I suddenly came to the startling realization; that for me the road that I’ve already traveled is a much further distance than what is left of my journey not yet taken. My aches and pains constantly remind me of my age and of my ultimate mortality. My body has become a symphony of creaks and groans and it seems that everything about me only functions with the help of some sort of device. Glasses, hearing aids, pills to control blood sugar, blood pressure, high cholesterol and Viag… well by now, I’m sure you get the picture.
After his funeral, back in my comfortable house surrounded by my familiar things, my granddaughter crawled onto my lap. She looked up at me with those big brown eyes filled with the innocence of youth and asked,
“Papa, did you know that man they were talking about this morning?”
“Yes I did sweetie. That was my father, your great grandfather.”
“What was he like,” she asked, “I don’t think I remember him.”
I was certainly shocked. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. It was as if those words jumped up and kicked me right between my eyes. As I searched my mind for some answers, I began to understand that old saying, ‘we only live as long as someone remembers us’. I quickly realized that if my father, a truly great individual, could fade from memory after only one single generation… I sure as hell don’t stand much of a chance.
So here’s to you dad. I know that if there is a Heaven, yours will be laying on the side of a tree covered hill looking out over an open meadow. You will be watching the moon cross an unclouded sky and listening to the sound of your dogs singing their music. So pass around the jug to all our friends that have joined you on this Father’s Day and know that you are in our memories and our hearts.
Warriors of 1972
We called ourselves warriors. But we were just another group of stale, complacent, and bored little boys who were too old to be kids but too young to be men. Stuck in a tiny town somewhere between nothing and nowhere while the rest of the world was in turmoil. We smoked Marlboros… holding the butt between our finger and thumb like James Dean, or just letting it dangle from our lips like Bogie.
We didn’t give a shit about anything beyond the next weekend; because in our minds we were invincible. We were brothers…we always had each other’s backs. We were afraid of nothing and nobody, especially when we were together. The place that we were together the most was a dimly lit, dirty, and damp hole in the wall that had the stink from decades of stale beer and cigarette smoke; a place known to us as ‘Shaky Dave’s Pool Hall’.
Shaky Dave’s was a place where five dollars would buy you a lot of camaraderie and twenty bucks could get you some companionship for the night. But it was just about the only place in town where a boy growing up in the turmoil of the early seventies could learn some of the answers. Even if he didn’t know what the real questions were.
I learned a lot of important things at Shaky Dave’s. Things I thought I needed to know. Like how to cuss, smoke, and chew tobacco. There were a few things I learned about the opposite sex there too. We all knew that only one kind of girl would hang out at Shaky’s…and you definitely didn’t want to invite her home for dinner. These were girls who had developed a reputation of sending more than one high school boy off to face the world as a man.
The men who frequented Shaky Dave’s were hard men who’d been there and back again. Even though I wasn’t really sure where there was, I was at least smart enough to realize that it was a place I never wanted to visit. Honestly, I had doubts as to whether or not a few of them that had been there had ever made it all the way back.
These men had their own handshake that sometimes would last for five minutes, they talked in words we couldn’t understand and wagered an entire week’s salary on a single game. Sometimes, more money changed hands in that place on one day, than my dad made in a whole year. Now those men were real men, tough, mysterious and, in a way, exotic.
We played snooker, because that was the game real men played. We drank because they drank…We fought because they fought. We tried our best to be one of them. Because, that was our great expectation from life, to be one of those men… to someday leave childhood behind and be accepted into manhood. To be able to walk through those doors made of heavy wood, order a Jack Daniel’s and a Budweiser and step proudly up to the Snooker table, and claim our rightful place as men of ‘Shaky Dave’s’.
The Before and After
When I was a much younger version of myself, there was an order to my existence. Life and death made sense to me because science told me the truth about the universe. The one thing I thought I knew was that energy could not be created or destroyed. So the concept of Heaven and Hell were just mythical constructs created by man to rationalize death.
We simply choose to place our loved ones in the Here-After to create the illusion that we might one day see them again. It eased the sorrow we felt at their passing. I understood that and I accepted death as a simple transference of energy from one thing to another.
Death made sense to me because ‘age’ dictated that people had outlived their life span. After all, our bodies are frail things and can only sustain life for a finite amount of time.
Besides, I was young and healthy. Any thoughts of the end were far from my mind. Maybe I would live forever or at least technology would develop to a point where our lifespans would make it seem like forever.
Oh yes, I was happy with my beliefs.
But that was when I was young.
The voices of destiny have started to whisper their harsh words of mortality into my ears. It’s no secret that I am the next to youngest of fifteen children. Now whatever your thoughts on that might be; we can discuss on some future blog. The reason I mention it here is because, much too quickly, my huge family has dwindled from fifteen children to seven.
And now, my body is moving further down that corridor of existence, and I can feel it beginning to break apart. Age is forcing my beliefs to crumble and I find myself spending more and more time (probably too much time) thinking about what the future holds for me.
So, I need to believe that I’ve been wrong all these years. I’m hoping that there’s something more than just the now and that there is some place set aside for me in the after.
Jerry Brotherton 