Sunday, February 01, 2009

This one's for my memoirs

Some months after our dad moved out, and got his own place, my brother and I would visit him on Sundays. Our visits in those days often began with instructions to inquire about the child support check, possibly followed by a heated exchange between our parents. After this, we'd wait for Dad to get ready, and then we'd go to church. I never really liked that church, though I didn't realize it at the time. Our parents were going through a divorce, and I felt a certain shame in that. I also sensed that Dad wasn't exactly an upstanding member of the congregation, and that some of the adults allowed their feelings toward him to be transmitted to Tucker and me, too. I can't even remember a single person my age I felt I could be friends with. I don't know how Tuck felt about going there; I didn't really make an effort to tune myself in to his feelings.

In the afternoon we'd return to Dad's apartment. Dad had his own things he was working through, and wasn't used to having children running underfoot, so often he'd keep to himself, leaving Tuck and I to generate our own entertainment. If we got tired of watching Sunday afternoon television on the tiny black-and-white TV, we'd look through Dad's small record collection. All we really had to go on were the jacket designs, so we assumed that most of them weren't worth listening to. The West Side Story score, however, that had a photo of a young man and woman looking happy, holding hands and running down the street. The music, it turned out, was to our liking, and the album became a perennial favorite. "Officer Krupke" was a great sing-a-long.
We're distoibed, We're distoibed,
We're the most distoibed.
Like, we're psychologically distoibed!

Hm. I'm going to have to think up a better punchline if I want to be published.