he walked in, shoved the film up into a light, and sighed. going in we expected something minor, an annoyance. a pain in the ass, but nothing major. but the way he sighed, the doctor, my cousin, the way he sighed, i got a bad feeling.
he sighed again.
if it wasn’t for bad luck you people would have no luck at all.
my brother and his wife had gotten some bad news about their kids. i knew what he was trying to say. our branch of the family had run out of luck.
&&&
i think the end of summer leaves a lot of us struggling. people talk about the expectations of the holidays, but, at least up here in the great northeast, where at least two, and sometimes three of the seasons, bring too much of too many bad things, summer bears heavy expectations. summer, it seems, is supposed to bring overdue apologies for the sins of snow and rain and gray and cold.
summer, it seems, is the season burdened with the expectation of washing away its far less pleasant cousins. we’re supposed to wash the rest of the year away in pools and lakes and sometimes even the ocean.
summer, it seems, is supposed to give us the excuse we need to live here the rest of the year.
and then labor day comes, summer ends. it gets dark early all of a sudden. life goes on as before, last summer solved nothing and you have to wait nine more months before it comes around again.
&&&
i had not even begun to adjust to the news my cousin had given us, that my wife had a brain tumor, when, early on the morning of the day after labor day, my father called.
he didn’t even say hello.
john’s dead, he said.
overdose? i asked. one night in a cemetery, a few years earlier, as we smoked bowl after bowl, he told me he knew he would die young. i’d partied pretty hard in my youth, and i knew some people that could party hard, but i’d never, ever seen anything like him. he just could never seem to get enough. drink, weed, whatever, he seemed bottomless.
no, my father said. he had an accident.
same thing, i thought to myself.
&&&
at the racetrack, the day before, closing day, my oldest son sat with me in our seats out near the sixteenth pole. the pa system played sinatra’s “summer wind” on repeat. i thought of a fifteen-years younger version of myself, singing that song to his mother, my wife, in a bar i sadly can no longer remember the name of. it was p.j. something’s, i think, just off broadway, on the night we always called our first date.
later on we went to gaffney’s — still there, and i still remember the name — and we ate popcorn from the machine by the bar and i asked her, so what was your favorite night of 1992, now that it’s a few days from being over, and she laughed and said, well, tonight of course, and we laughed. it would be another couple hours before we finally admitted it was true.
&&&
we go to protests, we give until it hurts. but as labor day approached, i decided to take a few days off. a luxury, to be sure. some of us can’t take any days off, and i feel guilty about it. but, for my sanity i said, i took a few days off. i ignored the dotard’s tweets and i dove into the ocean, shockingly cold, but refreshing none the less.
the older brother off at college for a second year now, and the younger one, the one who had just turned one when we found out about the tumor, on our fourth day out there, he stood in the cold water as the rain started to come down, and me and the older one suggested coming in, giving up, he said, well, we’re already wet, and it’s not that cold, and it looks sunny over there, he pointed to some blue sky off in the distance, we might as well stay in, he said.
and we waited, as the waves lapped up against us. and then the rain stopped, the sun came out again, and he smiled and said, told you guys.
&&&
and eventually we came home, and i tuned back in to the shitshow, the nightmare.
earlier tonght i watched him, watching a football game on the television, dad, are you ever gonna let me play football, he asked, and i thought, no, son, i love you too much for that, and instead of telling him the truth i said, well, i doubt it, but we’ll see.
his mother, gone nearly eleven years, would never stand for him sacrificing his brain for a silly game.
his mother, jesus christ. his mother. she has haunted my dreams of late. i can’t sleep much, now that i have tuned back in and remembered how dire the situation is, we live in grim times, a nation that never even existed as anything more than a prayer and an unrealized promise now stands on the precipice of death, the way she did on labor day, 2007.
and we couldn’t let ourselves believe she would die, and i can’t let myself believe we will die, but she did, and we might, and i can’t sleep.
i pour myself another beer and press replay on a song that brings me comfort. i think of labor day weekend, 2007, of john, of lauren, i think of my little son, standing in the ocean, the rain falling down on us, and his naked belief: that the rain would stop, and that the sun would shine.