Treason of Words

There Ought To Be, in My Opinion, and in the opinion of every Right-Minded Citizen of This Great Nation, a one-week moratorium on festivities between holidays. A few days to cleanse the palate, to pack away the decorations, finish the leftovers, and to return to some sort of “normal” before the next wave of celebration. The Hallothanksmas effect smears one occasion into another, leaving the anticipation, the much-vaunted “season”, of each holiday not only a bit muddied, but stretched out over too great a time. A two-week buildup whets the appetite and excites the senses; a two-month barrage of indistinct sentiment leaves one weary when the big day finally arrives.

What I’m saying is, the Christmas decorations won’t go up ’till Saturday.

We needed yellow paper. It was a bit past 10pm and we needed yellow paper. In suburban America, it was a bit past 10pm and we needed yellow paper.

Naturally, we headed out to Wal-mart.

We went the “back way” to avoid construction. Even the “back way” to Wal-mart is six lanes wide. We sat in the left-turn lane as cars rushed past on the right and the left. The three oncoming lanes were busy with cars travelling from the shopping centers beyond the new tollway before us to the neighborhoods behind us. One truck, though, was in a hurry to get to Wal-mart.

It was a Ford F-150 King Ranch Edition, sage green. Such was its hurry that it deemed it necessary to turn into the parking lot from the center lane. For a moment, the small, nondescript black sedan in the right lane went unnoticed. We saw the truck as it was intercepted by the car, its forward motion interrupted by a force that sent it back into its original lane, then into the left lane as its front axle collapsed and its frame rails gouged the asphalt, emitting a shower of sparks. It finally came to rest just feet from us, on the other side of the grassy, concrete-bound median. The truck had traveled just far enough down the road that from the turn lane, we could finally see the source of the unexpected force vector. In the right lane, the black car sat, overturned.

All over, flashers came on, and men emerged from cars. Cell phones appeared. We converged on the dark, dripping, disheveled heap. A dozen hands on the scarred sheetmetal lifted. The passenger slid out, dazed. Petrochemicals were dripping, filling the air with fumes. From my position at the front of the car I looked right, toward the cabin, as the former vehicle stood on its side. A dark, glistening blotch spreading on the arclit pavement turned my stomach, and I quickly looked back at my own car, still in the turn lane beyond the now empty truck. I recruited a replacement and recrossed the road, directing traffic as I went.

The pebbles of glass crunched under the tires as we finally parked. Christina went to complete our errand, and I walked back to the site as sirens drew near. Under a small tree, neatly ringed with wood chips, I met an old friend in an new uniform. APD Officer and Hays High alumnus Eric Deba took down my account of the accident. We left just as the trucks carrying the remains of the vehicles did.

On my next commute to the office, a small gray woman in a large red van almost reenacted the same scene with me when she mistakenly believed her lane permitted left turns.

Be careful out there.

Yesterday, I worked from home, performing labor that would scarcely be recognizable as work to a man whose career was spent in a chemical factory. On my way there, after dropping Christina off at school, mom called to let me know he had passed in the night. It’s not as if it was unexpected; on the contrary, the only suprise in his declining health was that Grandmom preceeded him in death. I started to calculate how to sort out my schedule to make the inevitable trip back east. I had a pretty clear picture by that evening when mom called again as I stood on the wind-whipped western steps of the Carver Library. She commented slightly cryptically that there wouldn’t be a service; for a moment, part of my mind raced to bizarre soap opera/comic book possibilites, while another part readied a quip about checking for a pulse. But it wasn’t some dramatic misjudgement. His body has been left to science, I was told. The memorial won’t be held until they’re done and the ashes are returned, a morbidly ironic state for such an avid producer of ash.

We only ever had one real conversation. They came down to Cape May the summer of 1998, when Angie and I were there on vacation at the house her family rented for a couple weeks each summer. Grandmom stayed inside to talk my future parents’- and grandparents’-in-law ears off, as she was given to (and quite skilled at) doing. We walked out on the porch, he and I. The afternoon was overcast and warm, but a steady breeze blew in off the Atlantic, only yards away at the end of the block. Away from the chatter, we talked. In those fifteen minutes or so, Grandpop and I spoke more than the rest of the 28 years we shared combined. My world must have seemed rather alien to him, but he soaked up the answers to his questions about my studies and my work and my life in general. His voice was always quiet, creaky and rough, beaten into submission by a smoking habit adopted in early adolescence. I think he approved of how I’d turned out, even if the details of how exactly that was were a touch hazy. By the time Grandmom emerged from the front door to suggest that I take Angie and get lost until dinnertime, we had fallen silent, watching the breakers and enjoying the breeze.