Father Sows Stress

During my time with my parents ... they never owned a car. They could not afford one .. and therefore could not afford to operate one. I don't know if anyone can appreciate or imagine how small your world is without a vehicle. You are dependent on public transportation, family, friends or taxis for getting about. Going anywhere required advance planning and it was a big deal. That said ... there was a grocery store just up the street .. Anderson's ... and another on St. James Street ... Young's ... the post office was further up the street run through another small store operation ... the bus stopped one house down ... so you could exist right there without ever leaving a 4 block radius .. and a lot of folks did just that .. that was their universe.

I started Saint John High School in the fall of 1965 ... it was located in downtown Saint John .. to get there I had to take a city bus to Market Square .. get off .. and walk two blocks to school .. and reverse that coming home. As a student I had a bus pass .. a card that I showed instead of paying .. I think the card was purchased at a steep discount .. ot ir may have even been free for students having to bus to school.

At some point during the late spring of first or second year .. I don't remember which ... I lost my pass .. I didn't have any money on me ... so I walked home .. all the way from downtown up Main Street on to Douglas Avenue ..across the Reversing Falls Bridge.. around Simms corner ... up Lancaster Avenue to home .. that made me late of course ... my mother naturally wanted to know what I have been up to .. I told here I couldn't find my bus pass so I walked home ... 

The old man was home already and in the bedroom ... they may have even had supper already .. he used to lay down after that ... without even leaving the bedroom there came this loud booming voice ... 'you fucking good for nothing this and this ... get the fuck out of this house ... and don't fucking come back' .. and on and on' .. my memory tells me he never came out of the bedroom during this rant .. I may be wrong ... my mother started yelling ... 'don't you dare talk to him that way' .. and so on ... 

I have no memory of what happened after that ... meaning I don't know .. if I did go out for a while .. or went to the bedroom .. or the basement .. . no memory ... I don't know if the bus pass was found ... 

But that incident was when I finally wrote the old man off as anything meaningful in my life ... that was it right there ... after that he was just some stranger that I was living with ... after that I started getting comments about my weight .. and how I was just lazing around doing nothing ... probably a valid criticism ... and then he started comparing me to a guy my age from the west side .. who was a notable athlete and winning awards and why couldn't I be like that ... and on and on ... 

Both my parents wanted to be able to brag about me and my accomplishments ... they wanted me to do the things they were physically, financially or socially capable of ... and I was a continual disappointment and failure to them in that regard.

The old man at this point had aged tremendously .. he was in his mid 50s .. he looked 80 ... he complained all the time about his 'waterworks' .. walking around the house ... mumbling to himself ... he started talking about dying .. he was trapped in a life and an existence that he hated .. I was simply the lightning rod ... all I did was remind him of himself .. instead of transcending my surroundings ... I was a constant reminder that in his mind ... he had always been a failure ... 

But there was a time when I was still a child .. that he took me to movies .. and tried to do the fatherly thing ... he just gave up on me too early as I turned into a junior version of himself ... in the hospital .. the day he had the heart attack that killed him ... just before he died .. Bernard Lundy told me he was asking for me ... maybe it was to say he was sorry ... we won't know ... but I was away for the day ... 

Maybe though ... it's a good thing I wasn't around ... have you ever seen the movie, 'Magnolia' .. where Tom Cruise confronts his dying father, Jason Robards ... the catharsis scene ... ? It might have been like that ... meaning that might have been the moment where I summoned that kind of courage ... 

I mourned not his loss ... but what I never had ... 

Phil (20 December 2020 - San Patricio de Melaque - 8:07 PM)

Krome Koan - 'Without parents we wouldn't have psychologists'