therapy speak only got annoying when it became mainstream. but there are a thousand other strange little dialects floating around, waiting their turn to collectively make us all insufferable. i overheard a guy in the winco parking lot telling his son that farting in the car when the windows cant roll down is "bad praxis." i felt like i casually flipped over a rock just to watch some glow-in-the-dark thumb-thick nub of worm ass retract silently into the depths of the earth. only the tiniest glimmering of the aliens lurking among us. it was incredible. i wanted to ask him if it was better praxis to hold ones farts until outside, or to get all ones farts out before entering the Airtight Fast Box. but my wife would not let me. so i contented myself with buying 45 tomatoes.
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When I did wrestling, my grandpa showed up to most of my wrestling meets. Wrestling was fairly exciting, and it had a lot of action, so I understood why he did this.
When I did cross country, my grandpa showed up to most of the races. That made less sense to me, as cross country is not very exciting to watch. It is like NASCAR if the cars had an absolute maximum top speed of 12 MPH and could throw up. But my dad pointed out that watching long distance running was sort of like watching people volunteer to torture themselves, and if you were the right kind of deranged you could get really into that. Which led me to believe that my grandpa maybe just liked watching people run until they puked.
Then I did Academic Decathlon, which is standardized testing as a sport, and I cannot emphasize enough how boring it was to attend. We'd all go into big, monitored rooms and fill out scantrons and then go back and stress eat for an hour while the sheets got fed into an auto-grader. And my grandpa would show up to that. He'd sit in the hall outside the test room, and he'd wait for me to leave, and then he'd be very enthusiastic about however I said it went. If I said the test was hard, he'd go ah, so then imagine how hard it must have been hard for everyone else. That's good! And if I said it was easy, he'd go, ah, of course it was easy for you Babs. Of course it was. But for everyone else, surely, it was a challenge.
It was actually very sweet, albeit, quite confusing, because I didn't really see what he was getting out of it. And I just kind of left it as one of life's mysteries until the big state meet in my senior year, and then I did ask him, point blank, why he showed up when it was so clearly incredibly boring to watch. And he just looked at me confused because of course it was boring, but what did that matter?
"It's just where I'm supposed to be," he said. "I like being where I'm supposed to be."
My grandpa had always had this sort of alien quality to him that I didn't know how to describe as a kid. I still struggle with it as an adult. But I got part of it then, part of what made him feel so strange, and it was that he found meaning in duty. He liked having fun, but it wasn't why he existed. He wasn't trying to have fun. He was trying to do what he was supposed to do, be where he was supposed to be, and if there was any fun in it, that was just a sort of pleasant byproduct. But doing things for fun seemed as strange to him as sawing boards to make sawdust. Peeling oranges to get orange peel. There is enough work to be done. Fun will make itself along the way.
You would not believe how much I've envied him for that. To be blessed with such an incredible sense of purpose. The Boomers never found anything like it. They saw responsibility as a weight holding them down, an unwelcome burden, and they shrugged it off every chance they got. Now they're old, and the only thing I see them doing is amusing themselves to death. Stuffing their faces full of orange peels and sawdust.
I was still processing that when he gave me a good thump on the back, and asked how the test was. Hard, I said. Good, he replied. Then imagine how hard it must have been for everyone else!
---
My grandpa remained, frankly, in great health up until his late 70s. Even in his 60s, he could hike with me for 10 miles without really worrying about it, or throw a football twice the distance I could. He'd grown up on a farm, and it had made him strangely invincible.
But sometime in those later years, time caught up to him and it was. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he'd aged a year a decade, starting from age 50. Then, he started aging a decade a year, starting at 75. He got tired just walking around the neighborhood. He had to sit a lot. We could sit and talk pleasantly, but he wasn't the machine I'd known growing up.
Then that started falling too. He slept more. If you talked to him, he'd start to get tired just from thinking. He still had his moments. My grandma is frankly one of the few non-autistic people in my family, and she's deeply tied to her communities. She joined the Republicans when that meant being staunchly anti-racism. She participated in the Civil Rights movement, went to protests, took risks. She didn't want to leave the Republicans just because they were "temporarily in the wilderness."
But he talked her into it in a way I don't think anyone else could.
I graduated college in the middle of that. I knew he wasn't doing great, but my first year out, I just kind of jumped into my job and lost contact with the world around me. It's very easy to lose track of things in your first year of being an adult. I don't want to make excuses, I could have talked with him more but it was a fair year for being busy. I scrimped like a maniac to make an emergency fund, to build a safety net for myself, but after that first year I got a job offer in Utah that came with a frankly enormous pay bump. So I went. The downside was that moving was going to eat into my emergency fund.
And… it did. It took my wife longer than she thought to find a new job. The move cost more than I predicted. Things added up. And then, one day, I got a call from my dad, telling me that his dad wasn't doing well. My grandpa had only ever had one kidney (just born that way), and it had been slowing down as he aged. Then, from nowhere, it just turned off. He could've extended things with dialysis, but he was okay with just dying. He just wanted to do it gracefully.
He was only semi-lucid at the time of the call. My dad told me there was a good chance he wouldn't be lucid at all by the time I arrived. He was surrounded by his kids. His wife was there. He already had a small army of grandchildren present. My dad wanted me to know so it wouldn't blindside me, but he wanted me to also know that I didn't have to be there. That I wasn't expected to be there.
I wasn't a full time hire yet. I was still a contractor. I could have taken the time off, but it would've been unpaid, and my savings had been shrinking at an alarming rate since the move. I eyeballed it, and I listened, and I went: Okay. I won't go. I'll sit this one out. Thanks for letting me know.
I didn't feel great about it. But I made my choice. And then something really, really weird happened: My grandpa's kidney restarted. Better function than it had in years. He went unconscious, started dying, then woke up okay.
I was so relieved. We'd both been given a second chance.
I made it back to Arizona for the holidays that year. Grateful as hell for that. Got the chance to see everyone, but especially got the chance to see him. He was still old, and still tired, but he was fighting it extra hard. Made the effort to sit next to me and chat for a bit. I'd never seen him that unfiltered before. I think it was too tiring for him to think about what he was saying. He just had to say it.
When he got married to my grandma, her family was a mess. It's not exactly my story to talk about, but he came from a loving, caring, functional home, and she came from an impoverished, abusive, chaotic one, and he worked hard to show her what a better life could look like. And I'd made a similar choice with my wife. I cannot overstate how horrific the home she grew up in was. Her father belongs in prison. He's currently being prosecuted for it. And my grandpa just sat down with me and said that working with that background was hard, but it was worth it, and he was proud of me. That one day, I would be surrounded with as much love as he was at that moment, based on the choices I was making today.
My grandpa had the kind of autism where he didn't much like physical contact or shows of emotion. But he hugged me for almost a minute when I saw him last. I think he knew we wouldn't get another chance. I think I did too.
---
It was not totally unexpected. I called my dad frequently, and he'd give me updates on his dad every time. My dad retired early, and was able to do a lot with his dad in those final years. My grandpa never had to spend time in a nursing home because my dad was there anytime he needed help.
But he needed a fair amount of help.
He had some falls. Had his kidney slow down again, enough that he started getting major swelling in his legs. He got oddly anxious. His whole life, he'd been almost unnaturally calm and then at the end he started getting afraid.
One day, that kidney just went off. He went to the hospital. I got a call from my dad. Similar to the time before: He's likely to be unconscious when you get there. He has an army of people around him. You don't have to drop everything to be here. He's a very loved person.
And I took him up on it again. I'd rebuilt my safety net, but my dad was serious when he said that he didn't think my grandpa was ever going to wake up, that he probably wasn't conscious, that there just wasn't much to do. My dad was a former ER doc, he'd seen a lot of people die. It wasn't a mystic moment to him. If you lived your life right, the last day or two didn't matter a whole lot. Like the last twenty seconds of a test. He'd told me this many times. I thought I believed it. I went to bed, and tried ignoring how odd I felt. Repeated that the whole next day. It wasn't until I got a call from my dad the day after telling me that my grandpa had passed that I realized what the feeling was.
It was the feeling of not being where I was supposed to be.
---
For a fairly long time that was the story. My grandpa died surrounded by his loved ones. I could have been there. I wasn't. It was okay. I didn't feel okay about it, but it was okay, and the feelings were bound to match that eventually. I could wait for that eventually.
I waited a very long time. It turns out that eventually is not particularly fast.
I thought about it a lot. There was a lesson in it, you know? Sometimes you don't get do-overs. Sometimes, being right isn't enough. Sometimes, intellectualizing doesn't work. These were all important things to learn. I think my grandpa would be proud to see me learn them. I hoped at least. And coped.
Then, around a year ago, my job gave me a chance to do a business trip to Germany.
Apparently, the normal thing to do on business trips is to visit a lot of restaurants. But the trip was for education purposes at a conference, and the conference was an intensely social experience, and by the time it ended every day I didn't want to see another human for several hours. So I wound up going to the corner grocery store and buying snacks I could hide in my hotel room so that I would not need to leave for dinner. I could stay in and snack and recover from the horrifying ordeal of interacting with academics.
It turns out that fancy cheese is quite cheap in Germany. Cheap enough for me to buy several large wedges of gorgonzola. Cheap enough for me to get back to my hotel room after one particularly strange day of feeling both oversocialized from the conference, and undersocialized from the language barrier, and eat all the cheese in one sitting. Maybe I was also eating some grief away too. I don't know.
Then I fell asleep.
I truly don't remember the dream very well. I remember running, and it feeling like I was running at freeway speeds. I ran all the way down Utah, then back to Arizona, then into a hospital, and I pressed a button, and the elevator went to a floor, and it opened, and there, predictably, was my grandpa.
I don't know what I'd expected in a hospital, but I hadn't expected to see him.
My grandpa had this thing in real life, where he seemed to anchor the world. I often have this sort of waking-dreaming feeling, and it always went away around him. Like the dream either ended, or at least became his dream. And it felt like that there. All the fuzzy logic of running to Utah and going to a floor that was entirely just one man's hospital room just went out the window.
I asked him something along the lines of Where is everyone else? and he answered something along the lines of Already gone. It's just you and me now, and I am tired of sitting in this bed.
So I picked him up, which I could never have managed in real life, and I carried him into the elevator, and we left the hospital to go walk along a canal. I've had a lot of important talks along canals. They're part of my internal iconography at this point.
And we just talked. I talked with him about how proud I was of him for powering through those last months, and how much his goodbye had meant to me, and how much I was gonna miss him, and how much I wanted to never feel like I had missed my chance to be where I was supposed to be, ever again, and he listened, because he was always good at that, and at some point I stopped and I said that I didn't know what else to say but that I didn't want it to stop.
And he said, very kindly, that he was glad he'd had a chance to put all of those last trailing emotions to rest, but that he was also ready for me to put him down. And he gestured at the canal for that too. There's some deep symbolism in the brain, tying the flow of rivers to the everafter.
So I walked down some stairs carved into the concrete walls of the canal, and I lowered him in, and I watched him drift down the canal until he went out of sight. And when I woke up my pillow was wet with tears. I actually don't think I've cried that hard at any other point in my adult life. It was like all of my guilt and shame and grief was moved through in one night. In my head, I know that it was the cheese. But in my heart, somehow, I got my chance to say goodbye for real. I got my second, second chance. I don't know if I even deserved the first one.
But I have tried very, very hard to pay it back. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it. Trying to be like Hank.
And while it has not gone perfect, I do have a lot of time left to learn.
Thanks for reading! This was made a response to this post which I made while I was very sleep deprived.
Another story about Grandpa Hank for those interested.
A fictional piece I wrote shortly after his death.
convinced my local hospital designs desk chairs to be as painful for your tailbone/low back/whatever as possible
why would they do this. they are doctors. they know about ergonomics, in theory.
and yet.
by the end of tomorrow, i will have spent about 12 hours this week alone sitting in awful hospital desk chairs. i'm not even being paid. why.
in my experience doctors dont make chairs. occasionally, doctors buy urgent cares, which forces them to make chairs for maybe, two hours, tops, but eventually their backs start to get sore and they remember that they have several children who Yearn For Money. this is, of course, an opportunity for a win-win situation, so they go home and they make a deal with their kids that's like, hey, ill give you $8 for every chair that you build (because it's been taking them about 45 minutes a chair and $11ish an hour was actually very generous for a middle schooler back in the 2010 era). of course the kids agree, because hell yeah, moneyyyyy, and then mr. bigshot doctor leaves for a few hours to go important dad things, such as Ace Hardware, or Lawn, only to come back around noon and have all of the chairs done in one morning.
the average was maybe 15 minutes a chair.
perhaps someone else would have been suspicious of this. maybe. but mr. bigshot doctor has a lot on his mind at that moment, what, with the urgent care that he just bought, and the Ace Hardware and Lawn he just did, so he's really mostly just relieved that the chair building is all done and he won't have to hurt his back anymore. maybe he doesn't really think about it, and all those kids get a very big, very fat payday, which they then spend on kid things, such as Video Game, or Gum.
of course, eventually all those chairs wind up being wobbly and squeaky. and for a while mr doctor is not exaaaactly sure why. but a detailed inspection of one several years later mayhaps reveals that no washers were used on any bolts, ever, and that actually, several not stricly necessary but definitively stabilizing bolts and/or metal crossbars were strategically skipped. perhaps to make building them faster. perhaps. its hard to tell. he asks his kids about this and they shuffle their feet a little and say that they dont really recall. its all a blur to them. whose to say that anyone built those chairs. perhaps they sprung into the office, fully formed from their fathers brow. like athena. chairthena. perhaps patients stole the crossbars and the washers for their own chairs. patients are always doing strange things like that, and who can blame them? they're sick, the're delirious, they do strange things all the time.
maybe it was even a bird.
(there are, hypothetically, four kids that this doctor has. and it is hypothetically the oldest who suggests the bird while the other three nod their heads thoughtfully. i mean, who really knows what birds are up to these days? perhaps sabotaging chairs.)
the children are lying of course. but maybe lying is a proud tradition in that family. maybe its been around ten years. maybe the gum is already chewed and sly 3: honor among thieves has already been bought and the urgent care is already sold and theres really not much left to be done but laugh.
When I was in 2nd grade, my school started a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. I want to emphasize that I started out very excited for this program. I was a small, visibly autistic child on a playground with fourth graders on it. In theory, this program might as well have been called The Rescue Babs Initiative.
In practice, however, zero-tolerance programs almost always sink into madness. The motivations never line up right - too many incentives for cheating.
The first victim of the program was actually my friend, Sam. I was standing next to him in line when one of the fourth graders gut punched him. There was no reason for the punch, he was just small and in arm's reach. Sam got the wind knocked out of him, but he managed to gasp out the phrase stupid motherfucker right as the playground aide ran over to keep the peace.
(Sam had an incredible vocabulary for a 2nd grader. Consequence of his dad being a recently divorced mechanic.)
Puncher got a two week suspension. That was fine. But Sam got a one week one for verbal abuse, which was beyond the pale. But that’s just what zero-tolerance is, right? No hitting became a rule everyone had to follow, and it didn't stop when someone hit us. So our options as kids were to somehow make like Jesus and ascend up to heaven… or solve things ourselves.
We started solving things ourselves.
I'll be honest, I think that was always the plan. A school can do a lot of things to reduce bullying, but if the goal is zero, there's only one path forward: Shoot the messenger.
---
My part in the story was a few weeks after that. Long enough to know that the school's new unofficial policy was to suspend kids that reported problems, short enough to have no idea how to defend myself. It turned out the 4th grader that hit Sam was part of a trio, and that trio had their sights on me next.
I asked some of my classmates what to do, and they said that the best idea was to just ignore the bullies. Refuse to give them a reaction. That was dogshit advice, but it was common enough in the early 2000s and it's not like I can fault 2nd graders for not knowing much about life.
Anyway. I took the advice and I ignored my bullies. I ignored them when they said nasty things about my mom, and I ignored them when they bounced soccer balls off my head, and the one time I broke was when the biggest of the trio grabbed my arm hard enough to leave finger shaped bruises. We were watching a movie in the gym when he did that, and I leaned over and told him he could hold my hand if he was scared of the dark. Which worked, thank God. The grip hurt bad enough I had to excuse myself for a bit to keep my composure.
I think a more mentally flexible kid would've changed strategies by then. Clearly, things were escalating. But it's hard for me to change my mind, so I stuck to my bad strategy, right up until the day the big kids caught me after school. I was crossing the baseball field when they got me. It was just one of those places you had to walk through to make it to the bike rack.
The big guy, again, was the instigator. He pushed me down then stood over me, yelling for me to get back up. But I knew that if I got back up, he'd just push me down again, and for whatever reason, their Bully Code didn't allow for kicking a kid that was already down. So I stuck to the grass, and they tried a bunch of things to goad me into standing back up. Eventually, I started kicking at them while on my back, and one of them took the opportunity to grab my leg. Second bully thought that looked fun, so he grabbed my other leg. Kicking me like that was off limits, but dragging wasn't, so they just started pulling me around that way.
They were so much taller than me that I was almost vertical during the pull so all my weight was put on my shoulders. And the fields were just made of unkind stuff. There was crushed gravel all over the place, spilled out from the divider between the big kid playground and the little kid playground, so every time they dragged me over a piece it just ripped a new gouge up my back. The ground itself was sunbaked caliche and dead crabgrass. There was a grit to it, like sand stuck to the outside of a clay pot.
It grated all the skin off my upper back. Everything between the bottom of my neck to the bottom of my shoulder blades. I don't know at what points I went from yelling, to screaming, to just crying, but I did, and I know they seemed almost giddy every time it changed. Eventually they finished off with one loop around the baseball diamond and that hurt the worst. The dust there stuck to the snot and spit all over my face and made it into a foul mud, and the same happened in my shirt. The dust stung like salt, and the gravel in the lines tore open a few more cuts for dirt to pour in. I remember them stopping, and actually crying again I was so relieved. It was done. Thank God, it was finally done. They were done hurting me.
They left me on my back near homebase. They'd finally got the reaction they were looking for.
It took me a few minutes after that to stagger back to my feet. I was able to wash the snot-mud off my face in the bathroom, but I couldn't bring myself to touch my back. It just felt like it was on fire. Then I made it back to the bike rack.
That’s where my older sister, Liz, was waiting for me. She was just a grade ahead of me but it always felt bigger than that. There’s some deep weight associated with being the oldest. She could see that I was dirty and tear soaked so she asked what happened. I didn’t know how to put it in words, so I just tried lifting my shirt to show her. It made a sticky, tacky sound coming up - like the plastic coat coming off a slice of American cheese. Tchhhhk.
I didn’t know how bad they’d got me before I heard that noise.
She looked at my back for maybe two seconds before telling me to put my shirt back down. I never actually looked at it when it was fresh, but I still had straggling scars by the time I got to highschool. Long silver-grey lines, visible mostly for the dirt still stuck in them. She looked a little sick when I turned around, but she kept it cool, which I really appreciated. I always hated crying in public, and I was half a hair from crying all over again. I don't think I'd have been able to keep it together if she'd freaked out too.
Instead, she just asked me some questions. Who did this, how long they’d been doing it, what I’d been doing, if I’d told anyone. Some 4th graders, a month, trying to ignore them, nobody.
She mulled those answers over. I could see her trying to chart a course forward - trying to figure out what it would take to solve this problem for good. She's always had this weird, sad, blank face that she'd make when she found a solution she didn't like. She'd make that face, then think some more, then make the face. Then think.
Eventually, she just made the face.
Don't tell the parents, she said. I can fix this. But only if you don’t tell them.
I believed her. She was the most capable person I knew, and her word was gold. So I didn't tell our parents. I biked home, and every drop of sweat that rolled down my back felt like acid on my skin. I remember getting home and beelining straight to the bath, because I needed something to put the fire out. Took that as my moment to cry it out again too. First time I'd cried was from pain, but the second time was from the cruelty. Second time took longer, but the nice thing about a cold bath is that the water never runs out. I could just pop the plug out with my toes and just keep rinsing and draining and rinsing and draining until my mind was as clean and empty and stark as the tub itself. Then I could go fill that emptiness up with Calvin and Hobbes.
It worked.
Mostly.
---
I spent the whole next week feeling nervous anytime I was outside and Liz wasn't nearby. Some days she'd beat me to the bike racks, and I'd be relieved as hell to just go home. Other days, I'd be the first one out, and then I'd have to spend a few minutes worrying about what I'd do if the big kids showed up. But they never did. Liz always got there just a few minutes later, and I'd pretend I hadn't been planning escape routes.
Friday, I was sweating by myself when she showed up a few minutes later than normal. She unlocked her bike but she didn't move to leave. She had this big, long cable-type lock, maybe six feet of braided steel. She folded it over in her hands so it looked like a swatter and swung it a few times in the air. Made it whistle like a falling anvil in a cartoon.
Today's baseball practice, she said. All Our Guys are on the baseball team.
Our Guys. Odd phrasing. Also, I actually hadn't known that about them, but I nodded along anyway. She wasn't really looking at me as she talked - she was inspecting the lock.
My plan, she continued, is to wait here until baseball's done. Me and you. When it gets time I'll send you outside the bike cage.
The cage was a chain link fence, maybe six feet tall, built all around the rack. They’d lock it after school as an extra precaution against bike thieves.
Your job, she continued, will be to hold the gate closed after they're all in. Keep em’ stuck. Think you can do that?
She was being very frank, which helped me think clearly. I didn't think I could actually hold the gate closed if all of them ran into it at once, but I knew where a big half broken cinder block was, and I knew if I could wedge it in there, it would hold. So I told her that.
Great, she said. Do that.
Then I went to go get the block. She gave the cable a few more experimental swings, right as I made it around the corner.
I'd been thinking in straight lines before that. Just meeting goals. It wasn't until that moment that I really allowed myself to know what was happening. That I allowed myself to have a choice.
I chose to jog a little faster. I wanted revenge.
---
I came back with the block a few minutes later, then we just talked like nothing was happening. The sun was shining, and we’d both gotten into bionicles, and it was easy to talk and be people. Normal, happy people.
But that feeling went away when I heard the coach tweet a long whistle. Me and Liz both knew that was the signal that practice was done. I walked out and got my bric while she folded the cable in half in her hand again. Then we both waited.
Eventually I saw the kids that drug me around the baseball diamond emerge from behind the portables. I watched them make a straight line back to the bike rack. They were laughing together, having a good time. Being normal. Like me and my sister. I realized I could let things be normal too. I saw my chance to let things go softball pitched to me, nice and easy, and I didn't even bother to swing. I didn't want normal anymore. I wanted this. I knew why my sister had that lock, and I'd thought about it, and I liked it.
God help me, I think I needed it.
The kids went inside the bike cage. I gave them ten paces head start, then put the cinder block under the gate. That was the signal Liz had been waiting for.
She blitzed those boys. There were three of them, and the smallest still had two inches on her, so they probably would have kicked her ass if they ever had a moment to think. But she never gave them that moment. She picked the biggest kid, and decided he needed the first blow. I remember how much muscle she put into that swing - the cable was so heavy, and she was so small, that it kind of swung her back as she made that first half spin. Like a dog getting wagged by its own tail.
It was a perfect connection. Flawless. She swung through her target, not at it, and the resulting slap that the cable made bouncing off the biggest kid's stomach was loud enough to echo through the cage. It brought a tear to my eye. It brought a tear to his eye too.
The trio split after that, bouncing around the cage like fresh broke billiards. I can't describe how Liz did it, exactly, but she managed to chase the boys back together so she could hit them all more efficiently. She had a real knack for getting them right between the shoulders, so I never got to see the real perfection of her work, but she wasn't above swinging for the arms or legs if that was all she had. Those marks I could see, and they were brutal. The welts were wider and thicker than my thumb, like giant purple worms were trying to burrow out of their skin. Some even bled. I cheered on every hit.
Liz, for her part, just had a sort of grim, single minded determination to her. She was so angry she was shaking, and so scared that tears just kept running down her face, and she was grinning all the way back to her molars, but the grin didn't get any bigger after a solid hit than a glancing one. When the kids started blubbering, she didn't change her process. I'd spent my time crying, she'd spent her time crying, of course they were getting theirs in too: That's what violence does. It brings tears. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Eventually, one of the kids split off from the main herd and scrambled up the fence, gecko-style. Liz let him go. It was either that, or take her attention off the other two. Easy choice.
Now, there were two kids left, the big one, and one of his smaller friends. Smaller friend did the same trick. I was worried he was gonna turn back, fight me and open the gate for his buddy, but he just fled for the hills. I remember thinking, damn, I hope they never forgive each other for this. I hope this ruins their whole friendship. I hope this festers into something awful.
The one kid that was left really was trapped though. He wasn't built for climbing and he had no one to work as a distraction for him. Every time he started trying to make it up the fence, my sister would just twist up like a spring, then swing the cable with both hands right into his spine. The slap it made every time she did that was loud enough to hurt my ears. He never made it more than two hits like that before hopping off the fence and just trying to run around some more. He could get Liz tangled up in the bikes for a bit if he really tried, but it never bought him enough time to actually get out. She'd always find her way out of the thicket, swing the cable, and send him running again.
Eventually, he just couldn't run anymore. He sat down, and my sister hit him a few times, telling him to stand up. He refused. He knew he was gonna get hit either way, so he might as well get hit sitting down. He put his arms up after a bit and let those take a beating too. Eventually he just started begging her to stop. So she did.
He cried he was so relieved. I remembered how that felt: It’s done. Thank God, it’s finally done. They’re done hurting me.
Liz told me to come in and show him my back. I took my shirt off, and I showed him a scab as large as a dinner plate. Cracked up like dry river mud.
He looked sick. Started babbling about how he didn't know. Said he thought I was crying because I was just a kid - that he didn't know he was actually hurting me. That he'd just wanted to get a rise out of me and didn't know it would take so much.
He didn't know he'd gone too far until it was too late.
And suddenly, it was like looking in a mirror.
Two snotty, welted boys, crying alone in the dirt. Backs burning like fire. Ashamed. Trapped. Realizing that they'd just done something awful, and worse, that they’d dragged the people that meant the most to them along for the ride.
I hated him more at that moment than when he drug me over gravel. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill anything but their own brokenness reflected. Looking at him was unbearable. Like staring straight into the sun.
I could've hit him again if I hadn't just gorged myself on violence. But I had. I was fat with it, sick and aching - anything more and I would have puked. So I just told him to get his bike and go. Please. Just go.
He did. He staggered to his feet, and he grabbed his bike before running away like all the demons in hell were following behind. All bar two. There was a swingset nearby, and once he was fully out of sight, Liz and I walked over to it. We picked two seats next to each other and sat for a while, talking until our hands stopped shaking. Can’t remember about what. We didn’t really know how to process what had just happened. Still don’t, to be honest.
Then we went home.
---
Thanks to @elisabethdeep-blog, @foldingfittedsheets, @amateurmasksmith, @caramel-catss @arataya, and @rozenkingdom for being my alpha readers.
And thanks @lizardho, for being my first friend, my best friend, and my childhood bodyguard. I know it took a toll on you. I'm truly sorry.
I was playing in the barn, but I was also hiding from my grandpa. I was aware that this hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what else to do. Every year I’d ever visited him before, he’d seemed kind of mad at me, but I’d hoped still that year was the year that we’d finally be friends. I even made a list of things to do together.
Unfortunately, the list did not fix things¹ so I'd been forced to acknowledge that if he couldn't be happy with me there, and he couldn't be happy with me gone, then perhaps he simply could not be happy. At least, not until someone invented The Secret Third Thing.
(But I was only nine. So. That someone would probably not be me.)
Fortunately, being happy is a task that I've never needed to delegate - I’m actually quite good at it. I’d been sad in the barn for maybe an hour or so, but eventually that got boring, so I invented a new game where I would chase big clouds of shiny blue flies off the sun-warmed horse-poop and try to shoo them towards a corner of the barn that I knew had a large spiderweb in it.
I was perfectly aware that this is not ideal for the flies, but I had just read Charlotte’s Web, so my empathy function was very biased towards spiders, who I perceived as patient and compassionate and slightly maternal women. Who just happened to have eight legs.
(I, like most nine year old boys, would have personally been willing to fight a war for every patient, compassionate, slightly maternal woman I had ever met. If you, personally, have ever hugged a little boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his friends after skinning his knee, know that there is a child in this world that would kill in your name.)
(Now live with that knowledge.)
I played my game with the flies for a long time. Long enough to get into a rhythm of running and laughing and then panting outside on my back while wallowing in the long green grass.
It was during one of those walks outside to lay in the grass that I noticed my mom. She was sitting on a hay bale, looking baffled. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was too young and confident to even feel odd. She asked me what I was doing, and I just kind of gestured to the ceiling, and said, You know, just. Feeding spiders.²
She nodded. I was feeding spiders. Of course.
We sat there a few moments. It was an amicable silence, but I was still faintly relieved when she broke it.
Your grandpa’s been looking for you, she said. He got some grapes earlier. Wanted to take you to feed the ducks.
I've always really liked feeding ducks³. Visiting them had actually been the next thing on my list.
I was baffled by the effort.
He’s mad at me, I pointed out. My mom, to her credit, looked genuinely confused.
He’s not, she said.
But he was mad when we picked blackberries, I pointed out. And when we went on that walk down to the prairie. And he snapped at me this morning when I asked if I could have some of his dried mangos.
The mangos had been my last straw. The weirdest part was that he didn’t even say no, he just (angrily) said of course you can, as if it was an insult to his hospitality that I was asking when just the year before he’d yelled at me because I ate a tin of dried apples. Apparently, I was just supposed to know that those apples were exclusively reserved for The Apocalypse.
(To be fair, my grandpa has always been very worried about the apocalypse, but mostly in the context of not having enough dried apples for it. There was a period of my life where I thought that The Apocalypse referred to some kind of prophesied biblical event where there would be No More Apples. This thought has stuck with me for a very long time⁴.)
Well. Yeah. My mom said. He’s mad. But he’s not mad at you. He’s just… Mad.
I mulled this over.
What about the mangos? I asked, and she shrugged at that.
Alright, so that time he was mad at you, but that’s being mad one time in three days. Cut the man some slack, you’ve been asking him for permission before eating anything.
I just don’t want to eat the wrong thing, I said. I’ve always been very defensive of my rule-following. Both because rules are important, and also because that #10 can of dried apples ripped through me like a shotgun full of razor blades⁵. That “snack” had 400% the recommended daily fiber for an adult man. And I was very definitely not a grown man when I ate it.
It was a very painful experience is what I am trying to say.
I know, my mom said.
I don’t even like apples, I added. Still defensive.
I know, my mom said again. She’s very good at saying it. It always feels like she’s agreeing with me, and not just trying to rush me onto The Point. Sometimes, people need to make detours from The Point in order to explain things. Like, hypothetically, why they once ate a very large number of dehydrated apples. My mom is wise, and she has always known this. .
I just really wanted to eat something sweet, I continued. They don’t keep anything sweet in the whole house. The day before I ate those apples, I licked all the salt off a saltine just so I could eat the cracker plain. And then the cracker tasted just like a cookie. To me. That’s how crazy I was going.
My mom nodded her head sympathetically.
My first month of college, she said conspiratorially, I ate about a box of poptarts a day.
There was another longish pause as both of us considered what led us to this point.
My parents are crazy, my mom said at long last. It’s a very peaceful statement to her. I'm sure it was stressful when she first realized it, but she's had a long time to make her peace, and she's made it well.
Will you go with me? I asked. To feed the ducks?
He’s not mad at you, she said again. Reemphasizing her point. He’s just mad. It’s just how he is.
But she went with me anyway.
I watched Grandpa Dale closely the whole way to the pond to see if my mom was right. She was. She almost always is. He was angry while he drove, and he was angry while he parked and he was even angry while he strode purposefully towards the park. When we got there, he took several grapes, and he angrily put them in his hand, and angrily extended the hand towards the ducks, and he looked at me, and for maybe a tenth of a second he looked okay. Not exactly happy, but a little less mad. Then a duck bit the webbing between his pointer finger and his thumb.
He immediately, without hesitation, without even a second thought, hit the duck with a haymaker⁶. For a human, the punch would have been devastating, but the duck had the benefit of having essentially no inertia, so it just kind of moved sideways and looked perplexed.
You son of a bitch, my grandpa said. This is a funny thing for anyone to say to a duck, but it was especially funny to hear coming from a former Mormon Bishop.
Quack,⁷ said the duck.
My mom started laughing. I'd felt a sort of holy terror at the anger my grandpa was exuding in that moment, but the moment she laughed I realized how absurd it was. I was watching a grown man beef with a duck. I was watching a grown man beef with the world.
I started laughing too. In a better world, maybe my grandpa would've joined. Maybe he would've taken a good hard look in the mirror and questioned why exactly he was so angry. But he didn't. Instead he swore at the duck some more, and he threw his remaining handful of grapes at it overhand, like a baseball, and then the duck ate the grapes out of the water, and my mom actually laughed so hard she started dry heaving a little, and my grandpa had to go sit in the car for a few minutes by himself to regain his composure.
¹ He managed to pick blackberries angrily
² Unfortunately, I do this kind of response quite a bit.
³ I got my first kiss from my wife because I managed to capture a duck. They're like, a motif for my life. Very lucky to have that.
⁴ I reference it again in this very weird short story.
⁵ I eat a lot of strange things.
⁶ My wife is concerned people will not know what a haymaker is. It is simply the most redneck kind of punch.
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Massive piles of food have nothing on the one who can eat massive piles of raw ingredients
Back when I was in scouts, our group participated in a mini-triathalon every year. I think it was a half mile swim, then 10 miles on bike, then 5 miles running. So waaaaaaay less intense than a normal triathlon, but still a pretty brutal experience. If I tried to do that today, I would have an extremely bad time.
Traditionally, the night before the triathlon we'd all go to a Golden Corral in the city and eat a few steaks before hand. For funsies. But we arrived late at night that year, and the Golden Corral was closed, so we tried to find a 24 hour buffet, and the only one we could fine was for Chinese food. It had a name like "Jiangs All You Can Eat Spicy Chinese Food."
We went. It was some of the most incredible Chinese food I've ever eaten. I'd only ever had Panda express Americanized Chinese food before, and this was, like, genuine Sichuan stuff in apocalyptic quantities.
So we ate, and we ate, and we ate, and we ate, right until our our entire faces went numb from the spicy, and then at the end, just to polish things off, me and another scout that we'll call Scrapper went and got a plate full of crab rangoons. I think we could fit 5 of them on the plate, by placing them kind of like the dots on a dice.
We were talking on the walk back, when Scrapper said you know, it would be kind of a bad idea to have a full on crab rangoon eating contest like, 4 hours before the race.
(At that point, it was midnight, and the race was at 4 am.)
And I said: Yeah.
Then we walked a little further. And he said: You wanna do it anyway?
My fatal flaw is that I have never met a bad idea I didn't like. Of course I went in. I wouldn't be me if I didn't. I'd say before the contest even started, he ate around 8 plates, and I ate around 6, but when it came to the Crab Rangoon battle, I downed 6 plates (approximatel 30), and he gave up after 5 (approximately 25). So he won on total plateage, but I won on pure rangoon volume. Total amount of rangoons eaten was like, 55 rangoons. Two more and I think I would've been a viable candidate for narcan.
We joked that we'd added a fourth event to the Triathalon: The Crab Rangoon-a-thon.
We later (approximately 4 hours and 15 minutes later) learned that we'd actually added two events to the triathalon. The Crab Rangoon-a-thon, and the who-can-poop-the-fastest chase. There were porta potties set up between every event change, so as soon as we finished, me and Scrapper would bolt to the potties, and if there were sounds of Great Suffering happening in one stall, we'd occupy the one next to it to that one and assume it held the other person. Then we could try and match pace. If we arrived and it was silent, we'd assume that we beat the other out prepare for single combat, knowing we only had a minute or two to set up camp before Terrible Noises would begin next to us.
There were more than two porta-potties between stations, but I think everyone else kind of avoided using them because we sounded so insane. We'd make noises of Godly Anguish, then, you know. Fart. Then we'd laugh. Then we'd scream like wounded animals again as the next convolusion hit us. I've never had poops like that before or since. They folded me in half like a frightened lobster. I'd feel a surge, and then I'd feel this terrible pressure againt my chest, and it would take me thirty seconds to realize it was my own knees. I pooped so hard I pulled my back. I feel lucky to be alive.
Scrapper did wind up beating me by like. 20 seconds though. He skipped the bathroom for the last run and just kind of pain-waddled those five miles, and I just couldn't catch up. It was 13 years ago and I am still devastated. He did soil himself though, right after the race. So. At least I made him pay dearly for the win.
Anyway, yeah, I bet could dominate in a show like that. Sign me up.
so. my wife came downstairs just as i took a bite out of the remaining half red onion on the counter. literally within seconds of just getting away with it. i looked at her, and she looked at me, and we both sat there a moment, all frozen, before she said babs, what the fuck.
i tried to say i can explain but it came out as or corn explorn because such was the onion in my mouth that there was no room for words. its honestly a miracle that she understood me at all. at least, i'm assuming that she understood me because she did let me get my bearings for a few moments. a smarter man would've used that time to think up a good lie, but instead i just chewed as fast as i could because i knew i was gonna have to tell a whopper and i really wanted to be able to use big words again.
big words are instrumental to telling a whopper.
anyway, i totally ran out of time. i barely got my first swallow of onion in before she said well?, and i did at least have an empty mouth to match my empty head. but also i had no lies. so i looked her dead in the face, opened my mouth and waited, every bit as curious as her, to hear what excuse my mouth was gonna come up with.
im pregnant, said my mouth.
great job, mouth, said my brain.
mmmmm onion, said my mouth.
better you than me, said my wife.
then she went upstairs. it has been two hours she still refuses to kiss me. im devastated. im shook. im crying a little, i think.
