Looking Down Memory Lane

Episode 12 for your reading amusement. I’ve decided the title now is going to be “Looking Back”.

Once you start down Memory Lane it is hard to find your way back to the present. That’s why it is attractive and also why I don’t want to remember. It is true that you can’t escape your past. Until I’m in the last stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s, I’ll carry around a lot of baggage. I don’t talk about my parents too much anymore. I used to blame them for lots of stuff that wasn’t really in their control. I also blame them for things that were totally their doing. Foremost is my wretched name. Secondly, I really didn’t know my dad. My sister has lots of fond memories, my brother has some too. I can only remember once when he wasn’t scowling or criticizing me. It was a little thing and when I brought it up once, he didn’t even remember. He had worked late and I had fallen asleep in front of the TV. Everyone had gone to bed and just left me there with the TV spewing static. I heard him come in. He wasn’t being quiet. He made himself something to eat and came into the family room to read the paper. I was awake but pretending to be asleep. He turned off the TV and covered me up with one of the blankets draped over the back of the sofa. Before he picked up his plate, he leaned over and kissed me on the top of the head. He then quietly turned off the lights and disappeared into the kitchen. I think that was the only time he ever showed some affection or positive attention to me. I used to watch the other kids being picked up or dropped off at school and how their mothers would hug or kiss them. I was jealous. I spent a few years trying to figure out what they did or said that made them more lovable than me. I never figured it out until I was an adult. The problem wasn’t that I had no value; it was that they were cold. Of course by then I was so emotionally distant that the chasm would never be bridged. I didn’t cry when they died.