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RAPTUREby Jeffrey Hannan © 2010 |
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"Mind yourself," said my companion Horace as we arrived at the airport and unloaded my baggage from the back of his old jalopy. "It’s not like it used to be."
Horace is an unhappy man; it was in drunkenness that he offered to drive me to the airport and in a hungover state that he reluctantly fulfilled his promise. He and I get together for card games on a regular basis and once in a while seek the bottom of a bottle of scotch. I would call him my friend except I don’t much care for him. Like most of us relics who have lost all our friends, the company we keep in these shadowy days is often utilitarian.
"The friendly skies are full of misery and unhappiness," Horace cautioned.
"In which case it will be a seamless segue from here to my daughter’s house."
"Do you need a wheelchair?" he asked.
"Fuck no, I can walk."
I have a daughter named Holly who is approaching fifty and lives in Portland. She’s married to a man in his early 40’s and they have a son who is just finishing college. The boy’s father claims to be a writer. His wife says he writes for an online magazine. I tell her there’s no such thing; a magazine is not a magazine unless you can hold it between your hands and splay it open with your fingers.
"Pop, come visit," Holly said over the telephone. Clearly she’d been drinking. Like her mother, overtures of affection come only after she’s been hitting the sauce.
"Say again?" I tell her.
"Danny’s graduating college and we want you to be there."
"Rapture."
"We’ll pay for the ticket."
"I should fly two-thirds of the way cross-country with terrorists lurking in aisle seats just to celebrate a college graduation?" I hadn’t flown in a plane since my ex-wife and I went to her father’s funeral twenty years ago to weep crocodile tears and eat cucumber sandwiches in winter.
"Pop—."
"Why don’t I come for something legitimate," I tell her. "Every garbage man has a Bachelor’s degree these days. Call me when the boy gets a Doctorate. Better yet, call me when he gets married. Call me when he finds a woman who will torment him for twenty years before she steals all of his savings and divorces him, and then I will come drink your liquor and laugh at how much money you threw away at that ridiculous dead-end of a circumstance."
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