The dirty little secret about life is that it speeds up as you grow older. You put things in cruise control and watch the miles tick by without stopping to look at the scenery. It’s a secret no one bothers to tell you until you’ve actually succumbed to the time warp, feckless and coma-like, as people younger than you have “retro” eighties parties and DJs label your favorite songs as “classic” rock. Why is it an eternity between Christmases for a child? Because the time between Christmases is half of a two-year-old’s life, a third of a three-year-old’s life, a fourth of a four-year-old’s life, and downward it goes until you can’t distinguish one holiday from the next. Hell, I’m twenty-eight years old, so my next Christmas is a mere thirty-six hundredths of my life away. Think about thirty-six hundredths of a second. It’s an eye blink, a flash of light, an impulse. Time is all about context. Years become days. Miles become inches. Life becomes death. You start taking things for granted, at least the things that matter. You fail to notice your wife’s new haircut—again—but Catherine Zeta Jones’s major motion picture debut in The Mask of Zorro leaves you smitten. Seriously, can somebody prescribe me a fucking pill to slow this shit down? Like Rip Van Winkle, I feel like I’ve missed a significant part of my life, or at the very least 1997 and 1998. Sasha turned three today. I don’t believe it, but that’s what Beth keeps telling me. Jack played her “Happy Birthday” on his recorder. Is there a reason school systems still insist on imposing the recorder on our troubled youth? Throw in its archaic cousin, square dancing, and I’d rather take my chances with methamphetamines, bullying, and hate crimes.
Mom called me today to say the divorce was final. It started when Leon tried to get Mom to sign all her financial assets over to him after we won the wrongful death lawsuit against the Indianapolis Auto Auction. He told Mom that he was “just better at moving money around” than she was. Then Leon’s mother died, and he sued his siblings for their inheritance—at the funeral. But I think the last straw was when she caught him not only hitting up Jeanine for some weed, but hitting on her with a four-hour erection powered by Canadian pharmaceuticals.
Mom and Leon were married, and then they weren’t. Vagina Head just disappeared. Yesterday he hopped on a plane to Amsterdam with a cashier’s check for one-point-five million dollars, roughly half of my father’s estate. I’m trying not to be too hard on myself, but I keep thinking that my ambivalence and hostility toward Mom cost our family half of Dad’s blood money.
Sorry, Dad. I let you down again.