This afternoon my dad had a pretty massive bike accident and broke his hip and his femur. After my mom called with the news, I wandered around the apartment for a few hours, picking things up and putting them back down without remembering what I intended to do with them in the first place. The soccer captain, two hours home after a business trip to an adjoining state, tried to draw me back to reality by getting me to show him some old photos, but I couldn’t concentrate. He went home while I was soaking in my third shower. Finally I knocked on Greg’s door to ask what he thought I should do. Greg very sensibly pointed out that since I couldn’t manage to get closed toe shoes on, I probably ought to just go home and be with my dad instead of trying to work.
Consequently, I spent the late afternoon and evening on long stretches of Texas highway loving tiny towns with bold and arrogant names: West, Corsicana, Italy, Ennis–towns that lack the New Mexican panache, I mourned, of Los Lunes, Quemado, Belen. I saw about 8 moving vans wending their way from Indiana and Tennessee and Minnesota to wherever home was becoming and thought about my own impending journey (before my dad broke his hip, I found an apartment this morning–it’s all really happening), I saw herds of people on the ground watching flocks of bats taking off out into the deepening pink sky, I listened to my entire extant Tori Amos catalogue and remembered how much I LOVE her, I drove into orange heat lightning splitting the horizon into jagged halves.
My parents are aging and becoming fragile–my mother the lovelorn, the heartbroken, my father the stooping old man. I don’t know what to make of it.
A. said,
May 31, 2009 at 7:21 am
Oh, shit. I hope your father heals as quickly as possible.
jskah said,
June 2, 2009 at 4:28 am
aw honey! hugs & x’d fingers, these things are so strange & disconcerting. israel & i’ve got some parenty stuff going down this way too & it’s just so weird-funny? i mean, being the children & all. my parents & i aren’t close, but still. glad you got yrself to where you ought to be, hope wherever you are now it’s the same. xoxo
unreliable narrator said,
June 8, 2009 at 11:48 pm
!!!
Just drove to and fro SF (NM) in tears through the stunning red mesas and blue skies, and thought at the last minute to take a seldom-used iPod with me, and wound up listening to Under the Pink, Pele and Choirgirl. I only wish she were aging with more assertive womanhood (cf. Patti Smith) and not trying to turn into, I dunno, Liberace. Can’t even listen to the last two albums.
And speaking of aging assertively? I really, really wanna sympathize about these “frail” parents of yours, but honestly my mouth flew open at BIKE and stayed that way. Because I mean…yeah. I’m sure my parents were last on bicycles in roughly 1987. Au fond I just hope you are all okay and that you got some damn fine Tex-Mex takeout at some point.
Corsicana is, of course, my hometown. Well—or in between Ennis and Corsicana is a town called Rice, which is closer to my parents’ farm. But I went to junior college in Corsicana, and acted in plays there, and ate the terrible mall pizza there, etc.