Sitting here, late on Friday night, the teevee's on. Cheers! as it turns out. The episode opens with the dark haired one coming in, somehow becoming the center of the episode.
Ordinary enough. Except that I'm remembering a question my younger daughter asked me some twenty five years ago. To make any sense of this you'd have to know that I had two daughters, one blond and one brunette. The younger one was the brunette.
It turns out that I'd been away from my daughters, to tell you the truth I'd been in prison, but that's an altogether 'nother story. The point is that my kids, my beloved daughters, were growing up with me altogether out of their lives (their mother refused to allow them to visit me in prison, and frankly, I agreed with that decision, much to my regret).
As things would have it my ex-wife had remarried, to what I thought at the time my relief. I was genuinely glad that the woman had found somebody else to turn toward.
I had no idea that the man she married would be a child molester. That he would, over the next years, repeatedly rape the pubescent daughters his new wife brought him. That she would be so craven as to cherish the "fine" life he provided more than the fruit of her own womb.
That, when presented with the facts of what he was doing she'd take his side, that she'd call my daughter (only the younger called him out) a liar. That she'd drive her out of their home.
I learned a lot, certainly not all, of this while I was still behind those forty foot walls, not an eighth of a mile from where my kids got on the school bus.
The s.o.b. child molester had the decency to die, of cancer, little more than a week before I got out. Anissa, the younger daughter, once told me quite frankly she was glad he had, if only because she knew I would have killed him (make no mistake, it would have been the easiest thing I've ever done), and she didn't wish his trouble on me.
Anyway, Anissa, the younger, brunette, daughter asked me once, in what for me was a regrettably unguarded moment, which Cheers! character I preferred, Diane or Rebecca.
Gawd, I was clueless! I treated it like a straight question about television characters, which one I preferred. "Diane," the bright one, of course, who happened to be blond. It was a long time before I understood the impact of that answer on my brunette daughter, the not as academically proficient one.
Some years later, after Anissa hung herself in a county jail cell rather than go back to Women's Prison over a cocaine habit she couldn't shake, I ate those words.
I eat them damn near every day.
I don't know All Saints from All Souls. I saw Cheers! tonight and I thought about Anissa.