1987 was a tough year for America. There was Dutch's implication in the Iran-Contra affair, Black Monday blew the economy to hell, and then our good friend Eli Lilly released Prozac to help America cope with all the bad news. The two hardships I remember from that year were my Mom's constant absenteeism and Dad losing his job. Even when mom was around, she didn't really listen to me, which sucked because she was my best friend. I know, I know -- I'm a Momma's boy. Mom told dirty jokes, loved to collect lizards in the backyard and never kept secrets from me. Not even the big adult ones, probably because she knew I couldn't really understand them at the time anyway. That and I always kept my mouth shut. She was even my soccer coach until we ran so low on cash that year that I had to quit the league. Dad by contrast was always around so I kind of got sick of hanging out with him.
Mom was gone so much because she was helping her best friend through a particularly loveless marriage. The big secret was that Mom's pal was having an affair with an older reclusive man who lived up the mountain. Mom's friend was a tall lithe brunette that even at the tender age of ten I knew was beautiful. I saw the guy once. It was in the side yard at the Junior League. He was pacing furtively behind the pyracantha waiting for Mom and her pal to get out of meeting. I still remember catching flashes of his ocean blue eyes bouncing between the lacunas in the hedge. Strange the things you remember.
Mom's friend ended up running away with the guy to Paris for a time. Apparently it didn't last. I say apparently because Mom lost touch with her friend after we left Texas. There was the odd holiday card or late night phone call, but like so many friendships built on the clandestine, it just fell apart once Mom wasn't there to take her daily confessions. The story would be a dead end, except that years later the old man decided to peep his haunting Celtic eyes back into my life. It was Christmas day. My family had just polished off the second bottle of Champagne, and nearly a third of the carton of Tropicana orange juice. We start out drinking mimosas, but at some point we forgo the citrus and just stick with champagne. Nevertheless, we still call them mimosas. The exchange went something like this.
(Dad opens my present while Mom cleans up some mess in the kitchen. It's a book -- but from Dad's bemused reaction, you'd think I'd gotten him an extra-terrestrial translation of a VCR manual. Dad reads, but rarely beyond the C's -- Clancy, Coonts, Cussler etc . )
Dad: Wow a book! Thanks kiddo!
Me: You won't be able to put it down -- I promise.
Dad: I'm sure I won't.
Me: It's a Western. You know like Louis L'Amour? But more -- literary. Like getting your desert and your vegetables all at once.
Dad: Sounds -- Ah-ha. I'll put it at the top of my list.
Sis: You know he won't read it. He never reads anything we give him.
Me: You never know. It has all these great descriptions of ranches in it, a few gunfights, horse chases. It's a western you're going to love it.
Dad: I'm sold.
Mom: Who wants more mimosas?
Everyone raises their hand. Mom fills all our glasses with champagne. My sister stops her short to leave room for orange juice. She feels like we're all alcoholics for drinking straight champagne at 10am, while the rest of us -- don't. My mom returns with orange juice for Sis, but drops the bottle when she sees the author's photo on book jacket. It turns out that in all the conversations with her best friend back in Texas, Mom was never given the old reclusive man's name. She saw him a few times by accident, but never made the connection that he was the world famous author who reputedly lived in our town back then. None of his work had really pierced the mainstream yet, much less been adapted to the screen, so it was understandable Mom never made the connection. So what's the moral to the story?
No idea. It's just a memory that came to mind, and eclipsed everything else. Since I'm still finding my legs in the blogosphere I just wanted to get it out. I'm only giving myself twenty minutes a day to write these. Bet you could tell by the homonyms and spelling errors.
So tomorrow ... how I saw THE SEARCH FOR ANIMAL CHIN and came up with a half-baked plan to fool my friends into thinking I could skate half-pipe.
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