For the first 43 Father's Days in the history of me, my father was always within a hour's drive. This made it easy to facilitate our tradition of 1) barbecuing Dad's rosemary chicken and 2) barking at some neighbor kid to stop using our goddamn garage as a backstop.
This spring, however, my folks scraped up 33 years of memories (plus several large pictures of boats) and moved it all to New England. This is mostly a good thing, since the youngest neighbor kid is in his late 50s. But it also meant that, for the first time, Father's Day with my dad's physical presence wasn't possible. And I'm a little frightened about trying to explain Skype to him, as my parents are still navigating their new cable channels. Food Network is like a Mars probe to these people.
Anyway, before they left they made sure to offload a few dozen crates of my childhood--pictures, letters from camp, everything I ever scribbled on anything ever. Because my parents, to their very great credit, are terrific Keepers of Keepsakes. And now I get to show Robert some of the stories I wrote when I was his age, and he can dismiss them as puerile and jejune.
The point is, between my parents' abscondage and my job's gone-dage, I've got a lot of my past and recent present stacked all over my little apartment, which might best be described as the Laid-Off Labyrinth. And the minotaur at the center eats orphaned tube socks.
My kingdom for a less complicated kingdom.
