deceived are the looks that my eye has beholden
and here is some brown
for the back of my words
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Saturday, August 06, 2005
mushroom-like translucent cloudiness
Before my child was vaporized I had been mostly happy. I had some version of an American Dream, however force fed, and at the time I think I even liked it. Some form of the bliss of ignorance maybe, or perhaps it was just the gratification of having what I wanted, even if it wasn't always what I wanted. But at the time it was what I wanted so I reveled in it, my life that is, until my only child was vaporized.
This may seem vague, and for that I apologize, but my thought strings are disjointed now. I have a hard time...recounting?...or maybe relaying what I think about...things. Take for example this story that I am trying to tell. I know that it happened to me, my family, and so on, and I can see the events as they unfold in my head, but somewhere between memory and recounting it, it gets scrambled. I lose...focus.
Here it goes. As best as I can tell it.
The ranch was everything we had talked about, Maureen and I, we had spent long hours in our cramped studio apartment as broke college students posturing over how many horses we'd keep and painting elaborate word portraits to each other of the far flat landscape in whispered early morning voices. We used to sleep on an air mattress in front of the stove at night to keep warm because our heat was always being shut off. We used to be in love.
We both finished school and got our degrees and went off to be real people with real jobs and no more daydream morning whisper paint voices and no more of the ranch talk. That was when we were in our twenties. We still loved each other but we were young and interested in the world, and the scene. The Chicago scene was money and pomp and everything glitzed up and swingin. We were hungry kids with money now. Our bellies weren't hungry but our ego's were. We wanted recognition I guess. Recognition for dues paid being human. Now we were ambitious robots, programmed by markets, in search of economic booty and acceptance amongst the other machines.
Chicago is a machine. It is a artificial biosphere built of wires. The business, the politics, the social scene, all of it articulated by a master formula. We all just plugged in to it and soaked it all up like sin deprived demons. We had had our holy time and called it youth. Now we were grown and yearned for depravity. We found it just fine, but then couldn't lose it. Not for a while. And so it goes. I guess we all need our chance to swim in rivers of sin, maybe to give us the opportunity to repent, or just to see if we are waterproof. But water has a way of soaking in. And after all this I am still not the slightest religious.
So we had our marketing degrees and we had our cars and our friends and all our bullshit. We had all this crap and somhow didn't know each other anymore, yet somehow didn't realize it. When we had met it wasnt like this. Maybe we were innocent, or at least I'd like to remember it like that, and so when we saw each other over the crumbling mountain of naval oranges at the super market we couldn't help but smile. Innocence knows know future, and cares not to. It was natural for me to ask her out, natural for her to accept, and natural that things would progress quickly. We were open then and understood honesty as virtue.
We were naturally in love. I like to remember it like that anyway. So we supported each other through life for a time; through hard hurdles. Her mom died of cancer, and I stayed up with her each night while she cried in a pillow that still permeated the lavender smell of her mother's perfume. When I slipped on the sidewalk in front of our apartment on Western Ave. and broke my ankle she drew an intricate mural on my cast. The mural was a perfect illustration of me slipping on the sidewalk and breaking my ankle. She said it was so that anytime anyone asked me what happened, which would turn out to be several times a day, I could just point to the picture on my cast and it would explain it all. We laughed over that for weeks. We used to have a sense of humor. We used to be a "we".
Maybe it was when I got hired at Brown and Stratton that things began to sour. Maybe it was before that and I just didn't notice, but whatever. Brown and Stratton is the biggest marketing firm in Chicago. I got a job there through the recomendation of one of my professors at UIC. The suit I wore for the interview was a hand me down from my Uncle Randolph who used to own a diner on the west side. It was his only suit and at the time of the interview became my only suit as well.
I was promoted fast and had plenty of suits after a while. I used to wear a different color each day.
It was the hours that killed us. I was never home, and when i was Maureen wasn't. She was working for a bakery. This wasn't like your local bakery though, it was actually a corporation who manufactured snack cakes and distributed them worldwide. She designed their packaging. Well her and her team of equally machinated marketing graduates. We were all just machines then.
After a while we forged a life that mirrored our environment. Our lives became the same as the people we knew, which were the people we worked with, and so that was our scene. It was all pomp, and glitz, and fancy spending on the things we thought we wanted because we had the means to have whatever our whim decided. But we forgot how to communicate and so we died. We died in our twenties long before the "we" officially died.
Then all that stopped. Maureen had gone to the doctor during a two hour window between business meetings. The doctor was candid. "You're Pregnant."
She didn't tell me for two weeks. When she did I cried. I think I was afraid of becoming human again.
After the initial shock wore off we talked for the first time in years. It was then that I realized we hadn't cared about each other since college. We had been lost from each other, yet lost together. I swam through her eyes and found myself soaked again in the simplicity of who she was. I saw the woman I had fallen in love with through her modern costume. She saw me though mine just the same and we made love on the floor in front of the stove of our half a million dollar condo.
Through the birth of our son, Emery Vincent Owens, our "we" was reborn.
Before he was born we decided to leave the city behind and buy the ranch we used to whisper paint for each other on the air matress. We found it in Utah. When we moved there Emery was nine months old. So were we.
Time is like aspirin. We healed together for those first few years on the ranch. It was beautiful, slow, and quiet. It was natural and at times the land felt...human. Everything we needed was there. The oxygen was like glue piecing us back together.
Emery was the catalyst for all that I knew of life. When he was born I thought I could never be lost again. Looking at him made me feel human.
Watching him live and grow; becoming inquisitive and trusting and assertive and proud and empathetic, and realizing how perfectly imperfect he was, our child, our creation, humbled me miles beyond my former capacity. This was life and how it was lived then, on the ranch, we were simple again. We were happy, at least that's how I like to remember it.
Emery spent his first nineteen years surrounded by the vast openness of the ranch. He learned to ride a horse there and how to know when a storm was coming from over the distant hills. He wasn't the class validictorian of his school, but he knew things. He knew how to read people. And he was infinitely sympathetic through his rough exterior. Living on a ranch hardens the look of a boy and turns him into a man leaving the rest of him to catch up.
He was a boy, only nineteen, but he was man enough to decide for himself. When Emery was nineteen he decided to join the army. He spent his last two years surrounded by the vast openness of a middle eastern desert. He learned to drive a tank there and to know when a sandstorm was coming from across the desert. He learned how to kill. He never made general, but he knew things. He knew how to help people. He was infinitely sympathic to the innocent people he was told he was protecting from their rough regime. Living in the desert hardens people, makes them resilient even in the face of destruction.
We got a letter first, then the visit from the officers. The letter was candid, "Emery Vincent Owens died performing his duty on July 27th 2005 after his transport hit a road side bomb on the outskirts of Basra. He was killed instantly." When I read it I recalled a scene from some sixties movie about nuclear war. I pictured Emery's body being enveloped by white glow and then disappearing into nothingness. Vaporized.
No amount of therapy could save us. We could not be reborn again. Through our son we had tasted life and death, and now our buds were spent. Maureen and I tried to support each other, but I think in the end we could only blame ourselves and blame each other. We were tired and so we cumbled. The once rekindled communication was gone and with it our desire to care about anything anymore. "We" died.
When I think of Emery I start to smile, but it never fully develops because I can't shake the image of him being reduced to nothingness. It's always the same. It chokes out all the other memories. It stifles and scrambles them. And I am left choked up and stuttering.
I had a son once. I had a love once. There used to be a we. If I could I would sew together the good memories like a quilt and drape them over the past. It would be Emery, Maureen, and me, happily smiling, arms wrapped around each other, the ranch in the background; innocent and knowing no future. At least that's how I'd like to remember it...but I can't
This may seem vague, and for that I apologize, but my thought strings are disjointed now. I have a hard time...recounting?...or maybe relaying what I think about...things. Take for example this story that I am trying to tell. I know that it happened to me, my family, and so on, and I can see the events as they unfold in my head, but somewhere between memory and recounting it, it gets scrambled. I lose...focus.
Here it goes. As best as I can tell it.
The ranch was everything we had talked about, Maureen and I, we had spent long hours in our cramped studio apartment as broke college students posturing over how many horses we'd keep and painting elaborate word portraits to each other of the far flat landscape in whispered early morning voices. We used to sleep on an air mattress in front of the stove at night to keep warm because our heat was always being shut off. We used to be in love.
We both finished school and got our degrees and went off to be real people with real jobs and no more daydream morning whisper paint voices and no more of the ranch talk. That was when we were in our twenties. We still loved each other but we were young and interested in the world, and the scene. The Chicago scene was money and pomp and everything glitzed up and swingin. We were hungry kids with money now. Our bellies weren't hungry but our ego's were. We wanted recognition I guess. Recognition for dues paid being human. Now we were ambitious robots, programmed by markets, in search of economic booty and acceptance amongst the other machines.
Chicago is a machine. It is a artificial biosphere built of wires. The business, the politics, the social scene, all of it articulated by a master formula. We all just plugged in to it and soaked it all up like sin deprived demons. We had had our holy time and called it youth. Now we were grown and yearned for depravity. We found it just fine, but then couldn't lose it. Not for a while. And so it goes. I guess we all need our chance to swim in rivers of sin, maybe to give us the opportunity to repent, or just to see if we are waterproof. But water has a way of soaking in. And after all this I am still not the slightest religious.
So we had our marketing degrees and we had our cars and our friends and all our bullshit. We had all this crap and somhow didn't know each other anymore, yet somehow didn't realize it. When we had met it wasnt like this. Maybe we were innocent, or at least I'd like to remember it like that, and so when we saw each other over the crumbling mountain of naval oranges at the super market we couldn't help but smile. Innocence knows know future, and cares not to. It was natural for me to ask her out, natural for her to accept, and natural that things would progress quickly. We were open then and understood honesty as virtue.
We were naturally in love. I like to remember it like that anyway. So we supported each other through life for a time; through hard hurdles. Her mom died of cancer, and I stayed up with her each night while she cried in a pillow that still permeated the lavender smell of her mother's perfume. When I slipped on the sidewalk in front of our apartment on Western Ave. and broke my ankle she drew an intricate mural on my cast. The mural was a perfect illustration of me slipping on the sidewalk and breaking my ankle. She said it was so that anytime anyone asked me what happened, which would turn out to be several times a day, I could just point to the picture on my cast and it would explain it all. We laughed over that for weeks. We used to have a sense of humor. We used to be a "we".
Maybe it was when I got hired at Brown and Stratton that things began to sour. Maybe it was before that and I just didn't notice, but whatever. Brown and Stratton is the biggest marketing firm in Chicago. I got a job there through the recomendation of one of my professors at UIC. The suit I wore for the interview was a hand me down from my Uncle Randolph who used to own a diner on the west side. It was his only suit and at the time of the interview became my only suit as well.
I was promoted fast and had plenty of suits after a while. I used to wear a different color each day.
It was the hours that killed us. I was never home, and when i was Maureen wasn't. She was working for a bakery. This wasn't like your local bakery though, it was actually a corporation who manufactured snack cakes and distributed them worldwide. She designed their packaging. Well her and her team of equally machinated marketing graduates. We were all just machines then.
After a while we forged a life that mirrored our environment. Our lives became the same as the people we knew, which were the people we worked with, and so that was our scene. It was all pomp, and glitz, and fancy spending on the things we thought we wanted because we had the means to have whatever our whim decided. But we forgot how to communicate and so we died. We died in our twenties long before the "we" officially died.
Then all that stopped. Maureen had gone to the doctor during a two hour window between business meetings. The doctor was candid. "You're Pregnant."
She didn't tell me for two weeks. When she did I cried. I think I was afraid of becoming human again.
After the initial shock wore off we talked for the first time in years. It was then that I realized we hadn't cared about each other since college. We had been lost from each other, yet lost together. I swam through her eyes and found myself soaked again in the simplicity of who she was. I saw the woman I had fallen in love with through her modern costume. She saw me though mine just the same and we made love on the floor in front of the stove of our half a million dollar condo.
Through the birth of our son, Emery Vincent Owens, our "we" was reborn.
Before he was born we decided to leave the city behind and buy the ranch we used to whisper paint for each other on the air matress. We found it in Utah. When we moved there Emery was nine months old. So were we.
Time is like aspirin. We healed together for those first few years on the ranch. It was beautiful, slow, and quiet. It was natural and at times the land felt...human. Everything we needed was there. The oxygen was like glue piecing us back together.
Emery was the catalyst for all that I knew of life. When he was born I thought I could never be lost again. Looking at him made me feel human.
Watching him live and grow; becoming inquisitive and trusting and assertive and proud and empathetic, and realizing how perfectly imperfect he was, our child, our creation, humbled me miles beyond my former capacity. This was life and how it was lived then, on the ranch, we were simple again. We were happy, at least that's how I like to remember it.
Emery spent his first nineteen years surrounded by the vast openness of the ranch. He learned to ride a horse there and how to know when a storm was coming from over the distant hills. He wasn't the class validictorian of his school, but he knew things. He knew how to read people. And he was infinitely sympathetic through his rough exterior. Living on a ranch hardens the look of a boy and turns him into a man leaving the rest of him to catch up.
He was a boy, only nineteen, but he was man enough to decide for himself. When Emery was nineteen he decided to join the army. He spent his last two years surrounded by the vast openness of a middle eastern desert. He learned to drive a tank there and to know when a sandstorm was coming from across the desert. He learned how to kill. He never made general, but he knew things. He knew how to help people. He was infinitely sympathic to the innocent people he was told he was protecting from their rough regime. Living in the desert hardens people, makes them resilient even in the face of destruction.
We got a letter first, then the visit from the officers. The letter was candid, "Emery Vincent Owens died performing his duty on July 27th 2005 after his transport hit a road side bomb on the outskirts of Basra. He was killed instantly." When I read it I recalled a scene from some sixties movie about nuclear war. I pictured Emery's body being enveloped by white glow and then disappearing into nothingness. Vaporized.
No amount of therapy could save us. We could not be reborn again. Through our son we had tasted life and death, and now our buds were spent. Maureen and I tried to support each other, but I think in the end we could only blame ourselves and blame each other. We were tired and so we cumbled. The once rekindled communication was gone and with it our desire to care about anything anymore. "We" died.
When I think of Emery I start to smile, but it never fully develops because I can't shake the image of him being reduced to nothingness. It's always the same. It chokes out all the other memories. It stifles and scrambles them. And I am left choked up and stuttering.
I had a son once. I had a love once. There used to be a we. If I could I would sew together the good memories like a quilt and drape them over the past. It would be Emery, Maureen, and me, happily smiling, arms wrapped around each other, the ranch in the background; innocent and knowing no future. At least that's how I'd like to remember it...but I can't
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