"
It's the old Gestapo headquarters. They're digging it up, researching the past. I don't know how anyone of my generation could accept that --Gestapo crimes neutralized by archaeology.
"
-Ian McEwan, Black Dogs
We are the walking, breathing past, not come to life as in the movies, but refusing to submit to rest. But not all of us. Don't flatter yourself; you may be as old as I, and although the stampede of history tramples us all, rarely do the wildebeest deeds of our lives make eye contact. Rarely do we come close enough to feel the breath from hot history's nostrils.
My two-year old nephew comes to visit me today. I told my brother that I would watch him while him and his wife went on a date. They are going to the same restaurant they were in eleven years ago when he proposed to her. I remember him asking me about it, if I thought it was wise, if I thought she'd accept, and what could I say? Would they have enough money? How did our parents do it? I had half a mind to follow him to the restaurant that night and watch from the corner as he sweated in his new collar, making small signals to the waiter.
And after they got married, our parents kept asking when the grandkids were coming, as if they could think of no better way to elbow their way into our lives any further. My brother and his new wife said they weren't ready yet; they were both still in school, and wanted to have enough money before bring a kid into the world. I wondered if there were some stupid book of these conversations that normal people memorized, quoting and playing the part with lack of gusto when the scene was set. 'And what of your brother', they asked him. 'Tell him to stop screwing around. He's the oldest son and he still doesn't have a girlfriend, much less a son to carry the name.' Where do they get this stuff? My brother sticks up for me as best he can, but it's a losing battle.
By the time that Jonas, my nephew, was born, my parents were in the ground and sea. My mother wanted to be buried, returned to the earth and all of that business. My father wanted to be scattered into the waters of the Pacific Ocean, presumably to make the swim back to his homeland. Even to their deaths, my parents were of firm, if not stereotypical character. How is it that my mother wished to be reunited with that great natural mother of all of us, while my dad thought he could still conquer the vast expanse of azure wilderness? I'm telling you, if there is some guidebook to staying in character, I did not receive one.
My brother tells me maybe I can start Jonas on the guitar early, haha, and maybe he'll be great musician one day. Like I never was, my brother is mindful not to add. And technically the guitar is partially his, as he lent me money to buy the 54-year old guitar, money which I have yet to pay back, though he has long since forgotten about it. I have not touched it in at least a month, to be honest, but probably closer to six weeks. The strings, no doubt need to be changed. And what the heck, why was I even considering all of this as if Jonas was actually going to sit down and play the damned thing, which sits, older than both of us combined, in its humidity-regulated case more often than not.
Jonas is dropped off shortly after Angie gets off work, as my brother swings by on his way to picking her up. I eye his slick black car, barely a year and a half old, and wonder how long it will be before they decide they need an SUV, or a minivan. Or maybe they'll have enough money to keep the date car, loaning me the minivan when I need to run errands.
"Thanks for watching Jonas, bro."
"No problem," I say, thinking of whether or not he was welcome.
"We'll probably be back before midnight, after the concert."
"Oh, a concert, too? Who's playing?"
"Oh, I don't know. Nobody you'd like. Angie got the tickets. It might be an orchestra?"
He sped off down the street, and I could picture him straightening his shirt, and delicately playing with the spot on his nose where he had a mole surgically removed when he was 24. It messed up his mojo, he said. You still got it, old man? he joked with me. I told him I hadn't had a date in six months. He laughed and told me maybe he'd try to set me up with someone he knew, maybe someone in his program. I don't need a green card girlfriend, I told him. He laughed again and drove to the hospital.
I never had the nerve, or desire, to renovate my face, but I held no qualms when it came to my house, an old duplex my parents had bought so I could have a convenient home while I was in school. They had rented out the other side, but since they died, it sat vacant while my brother and I circled around the idea of trying to rent it or sell it. You could move in with me and Angie, he said. I told him I could probably fix it up a little and then we could play it by ear. Sure, let me know if you need help.
So it began over three years ago, and I am still in the process of knocking down walls, replacing flooring, repainting. I stayed at my brother's for a week while I was working on the plumbing, but Jonas had just been born and I suspected I wasn't truly welcome. But he had promised, and with the prospect of the duplex being sold, if not collapsing beforehand, he was probably figuring out what he'd do if I actually moved in with him. After all, we were both raised with the unbreakable tenet of family first, and it'd be sooner than later that Mom would rise from the dirt and Dad's ashes would stop midstroke and turn right back around if we were to violate laws of family. 'Do you know how much we went through and sacrificed to give you everything? You wouldn't even be here if your father had gone to school for playing guitar.'
I think, really, I just enjoyed seeing change. I liked seeing the rooms change size, location, the walls change colours, the doors tentatively experimenting with which way to swing. We were told that if there were to be another earthquake, like the one that brought my parents' house down over their heads, we were to try to hide in the bathtub or underneath a door threshold. And why not a bathtub under a threshold, I joked. The lawyer tried to muster a chuckle before getting a papercut on his ring finger from some document or another my parents had prepared in case of their incidental demise. They were ready for everything, I suppose.
Anyway, that was the uninhabited side of the duplex, of course, and despite my satisfaction at the constant and complex rearrangements of structural skeletons, it was a relief to sit down on my couch and be entertained by Jonas. Jonas despised television, which I imagined was something of a vestigial trait from our parents, who bought a TV as a status symbol and consequently banned my brother and I from watching it for more than an hour a day, maybe two on weekends. The first time Angie had tried the electronic babysitter, Jonas burst into tears at the garishly coloured puppets on the big-screen TV, expanded to unnatural sizes. It could have been worse, but Jonas was rather well-behaved, a Golden Child all of Angie's friends joked, before relaying the last post-natal catastrophe. Jonas seemed pretty content to sit around and practice walking and running around most of the time, so long as someone was there to pay attention to him.
Eventually I decided to relocate to the porch, so we could watch as the setting sun painted the sky like an Easter egg. And with the outline of the buildings etched into the horizon, I thought about my little neighbourhood, this small town actually being inside a giant Easter egg, waiting to be found by someone, to be held by new hands, and examined by new eyes.
The librarian girl that lives down the street is walking her dog and stops to coo at how cute Jonas is. She knows he isn't mine and doesn't bother asking. I tell her that her dog is also cute, to which she laughs and says, 'Oh, this old fart? He is far beyond his cute years.' We talk a little longer about the weather and Kurt Vonnegut, before she starts to continue with her walk. 'Before old Woland here decides to crap on your yard,' she smirks as she tosses his ears around. 'Woland?' I ask. 'Oh yeah, I got him long ago right after I read The Master and Margarita and just thought it'd make the perfect name.' 'Ahh. I think I may have just gone with Margarita, personally.'
I would have asked her if she had liked to make some margaritas had I not tried asking her out to a movie when she moved into the neighbourhood. She agreed, but had decided to bring a friend of hers along as well. We had a good time hanging out, and I couldn't help feeling like that Steve Buscemi played in the movie adaptation of Ghost World. They would no doubt talk about how I was an old creeper after we parted ways that night. She would then think of various ways to tell me I was too old for her. She never did.
'Maybe you'll have better luck than me, Jonas.'
He wasn't particularly paying attention to anyone right now, and was playing with plastic ring etched with bite marks. I thought about how terrible plastic was for the environment, and how it would outlast both of us, and this house that we were sitting on the porch of. And yet, it would never receive the baton of history from Jonas, or his potential children, or their potential children. It will remain well-trampled, and utterly ignored by history stampeding by. Looking at Jonas, and the librarian girl disappearing down the block, I felt truly like walking, breathing history, and how we all have our turns to catch the eye of time's wildebeest, before being relegated to nothing more than ink to be written into the memoirs of those following us in the kicked up dust.
