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OK Boomer!

Dan Swain

    He looked out across the campus, or at least as far as the buildings would allow. It wasn’t a panoramic view, but Harradin Hall stood below him in a shallow bowl of land, the parking lot cut above at the level of the library and academic halls across the street. What he saw below him was a small square with concrete benches surrounding a mounted garden plot, now grey from the works of autumn. The sky was blue and he was waiting for his daughter to finish striking the set of a play she’d had a leading role in. His daughter was, as much as his wife, the love of his life and he waited for her now with the same patience and anticipation he’d done her entire life. She was never a disappointment and his only regret was that she was no longer his ear.
    In his waiting, he’d had time to think about the changes her going to college had wrought and the one that stood out the most was that when she left, nobody was his ear. It was the loneliest quality of growing old, the one he would never have imagined as he’d watch her change from baby doll, to chattering toddler to vivacious girl to musical adolescent and now to... To what? Not adulthood, not yet, but certainly no longer that connected being who had waited each moment of her life for his approval, not that she didn’t have it, nor that she might not have known that, only that she’d come to realize she no longer had to do anything in particular to deserve it and...she was no longer his ear. She now had the whole world to listen to and she was eager to shed the limitations of her father’s intellect, which had once seemed to romp with the mind of God, brought down finally by the banality of life itself. What time and age had brought him to was that the ear that he’d always looked forward to filling was no longer his.
    This idea hit him suddenly a week before on his long commute home from work and as depressing as it may have seemed at the time, it was also enlightening. As he was driving he was having an argument in his head with a Jewish friend about how socialism was not the answer because it put both political and economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer people (his commute had recently become silent after he grew tired of NPR, its litany of America’s past and present sins, and the classical station faded half way home)..., then it struck him, the conversation would never take place. Jim’s was the ear he was talking to, but Jim was no longer his ear. Jim had taken a professorship at a private Eastern college, while he was mired in teaching inner city special education in Chicago and though they still talked on the phone, what they talked about was only the pilpul of daily life. The ranging late night arguments they’d both relished in graduate school were gone and Jim answered the phone surprised at the call and seldom seemed compelled to call himself. He talked of other friends and other minds more in aligned with his own and they never caste into the heated but wonderful debates about foolish things no one but they cared about like fraternity in America or the Christian dialogues of Martin Buber.
    It was then that he began to wonder whose ear was his. Certainly not his wife, though he loved her with as deep a passion as he ever had and knew that she had settled in, to a love that, even if it didn’t rise to the same passion, satisfied her need for a spouse. She both approved and disapproved of him at the same time, satisfied by his employment and parenting and completion of domestic chores (though at times she still felt compelled to lecture him about those), but she had never invited the type of silly intellectual debate he often worked over in his mind when he was alone. During courtship and early marriage and the birth of their children and their raising, he had certainly had her ear—her ear for the trivia of living. Who else would have taken such an interest in bowel movements and first steps and babbling words and cute confusing statements from their toddler or stories of their daughters’ triumphs, disappointments, first teeth, braces, inoculations, first days of school, petty fears etc. He would hardly be home before she would begin. They had suffered through his being fired, buying a home, surviving bankruptcy and finally his getting a teaching job and the family growing to a second child, three dogs, the death of pet rats, goldfish and on and on. But then in time their girls had grown to a certain age and the conversations became rote. He noticed that the same story she would tell him would be repeated on the phone with her girlfriends, with greater detail and certainly more enthusiasm and she began taking vacations alone to visit those that had moved away— “just to talk” she would say and he realized their ears were certainly more important than his. And that was not only ok, but somehow satisfying—she took him for granted and he recognized that there was really no greater accomplishment for a husband than that.
    He was listening to the classical station while he waited: a little Mozart, a little Beethoven, a little too much Elgar, but he had the window down and it was that middling temperature outside that pleased so much. It was as if the air had a certain piquancy to it, a certain snap like cider, just as it begins to ferment. It was—well—nice and he was glad to be a part of it and only wished his daughter would hurry. He was here to see her, with the same anticipation he had felt waiting for her in Kindergarten.
    But piquancy was the perfect word. He looked it up later, because he wasn’t sure that he used it right, he’d just liked the sound of it, but the definition proved even better
    1. Pleasantly pungent or tart in taste; spicy
    2. a. Appealingly provocative: a piquant wit.
        b. Charming, interesting, or attractive: a piquant face.
    3. Archaic Causing hurt feelings; stinging.
    The last part clinched it. The moment was all of that and he was glad he thought of the word at the time, even if he wasn’t sure of the definition. The moment would mean a lot to him in his memories. He loved his own ineptitude as much as he did his brilliance.
    As he waited, he could imagine how she would flounce into the car and gush out whatever was on her mind at the moment, and he would interrupt every so often and if he was interesting enough she would listen for a while, but a lot of the time she would breeze through whatever he had to say and continue on with her monologue about all things interesting to Dakota. He loved her moments of self-centered worldly views. She would cast off on topics of earth shattering importance and that could run from Ebola to Bernie Sanders, to veganism, to the person she always talked of as one of her best friends who, for no reason whatever, began to treat her so bad in front of Brad and now he didn’t even like her. And he would guide the conversation to a level of ideas and she’d talk about theater and how much she was learning and they’d share stories of plays they’d seen and what the great parts for an actress were and she would have to admit she felt proud standing in front of an audience and becoming another person. She has already told him how thrilling it was when the audience joined the actors and began laughing, up to the line “Then they dragged me out of town and stoned me to death” and the entire audience went mute. It was wonderful how she felt fully at ease bragging in front of him. She would also make corny jokes and laugh at his equally corny ones—stupid shit they’d shared her whole life. It was in their DNA. And then she’d talk him into spending money on her and he’d leave for home, the end of Daddy/Daughter weekend.
    He watched as she emerged from the theater with a new friend she’d introduced him to earlier, but whose name he couldn’t remember. They stopped near one of the concrete benches, her hands moving in front of her and the friend nodded and then laughed, and he felt almost as if he were witnessing something he should feel guilty about seeing, her life without him. Finally, she trudged up the hill and when she entered the car, the world changed from inside his head back into life itself. He took her for sushi (her only concession to meat now that she had become a vegan) before dropping her off at her dorm, slapping twenty dollars in her hand for “beer money”, telling her how proud he was of her, watching her walk to the front door and waiting until she was completely inside before turning the car for home.
    It was the trees in the afternoon light that made him begin to think again. They hadn’t been as beautiful on the way there, but now, two short days later, they had bloomed in earnest, orange and red and yellow blossoms, big bouquets of color, fully leaved and ready to shed. At times the landscape rolled and there were portions that soared down into broad valleys and he could see an extended length of trees that folded over a lumpy surface, entire hillsides freckled in yellow and red. He liked driving. He liked smoking and that’s what he did—and drank pop and coffee, stopping off for sweets along the way and listening to classical music; there was this great station out of some college affiliated...anyway it played classical music, some Mozart and Beethoven, good stuff...still, they could play at least some Vivaldi, he thought. They should have just looked out the window and they’d immediately have thought Vivaldi...he was the one that made violins sound happy...but outside of that it was a great trip.
    The sun slipped under a thin coating of clouds and they lit up yellow and orange in the rear-view mirror to mimic the trees in front, but then the landscape ahead turned a solid color, hints of shade, fading to orange and brown, teasing to darkness. In his mirror it seemed a great brightness, but ahead it was moving to night and glowing less. He switched on his headlights and plowed on. He had to move ahead and get some sleep.
    He had to teach in the morning and there were IEP’s to get done. Once home, he’d feel stressed and thoughts of Fall and his daughter would fade to a world of grading papers and raking the very leves that gave him such pleasure now.
    He was well educated, experienced and thorough as a teacher. He just wasn’t well liked, and all his education and experience did is make him too expensive to feel secure in his position. But he had to admit that in the end teaching was not his passion. It was a job and it supported the only true passion he’d ever had in life—his family.
    The only quality of family he struggled with was this final change, this movement of a child to an adult—not even that; the moment was inevitable and in his mind from the time she arrived home from the hospital, he’d envisioned her as an adult, relished the idea of sharing her world, feeling the pride at what a magnificent creature she would become. It was just that he had never recognized that this creature would float away and he would become, in her mind, the same as his parents had become—interesting perhaps in that they were responsible for certain beliefs, attributes, paranoias and a generational history, but in the end, less crucial to her self-definition than the yellow bike she rode around campus. He was only that part of her life she had to push past to become a true adult.
    Her part in the play had been Saint Joan, a story he knew was apocryphal at best, but allowed for good drama. She came sweeping in for her entrance, resplendent in her authoritarian robes, that face (the same one that had looked up at him on her first day home from the hospital) peering out from the outlandish, over the top paraphernalia of Popedom. Everyone who knew her would later say how amazed they were that she could become another person so completely. She never did for him—she was always, in every phrase, in every look, through every emotion as familiar to him as always, Pope or not, this was Dakota and as always, she was as perfect as God had the skill to make. She drank, she swore, she intoned Latin, she laughed and she seemed less to play a role than to believe she really was the character. She was a Freshman in college and theater was still a lark, something she excelled at without trying. The fact that she had gotten the part had already made her a target for jealousy from her fellow thespians and this tickled him a good deal but didn’t surprise him. To him, that was what all the world should feel, that is, awe or jealousy. After all she was Dakota and...
    In the waning light, the road dropped and he descended into a small valley scooped out of the endless prairie that was Illinois. Nestled in a crook, where the valley formed an elbow before narrowing into a thin gulley, he found a copse of trees beneath which a small whitewashed house huddled and next to which stood a simple red barn, so cliched in color and form it could have been painted by Grandma Moses. It didn’t blend in at all, but stood out as man’s addition to the vista and the symmetry of it all pleased him a good deal.
    He’d never understood the “Prairie School of Architecture”, trying to make a house look like a prairie. He found it odd that they decided that the best way to do that was to create buildings with straight lines, square corners and walls you can see through, shapes hardly ever witnessed by anyone who ever drove across the Midwest. The prairie was so endless in the soft rolling nature of the earth (endless sweeps of flatness at times, with small undulations throughout, or the majestic sweep of the prairie into the valleys of great rivers) that people felt haunted by those shapes when they tried to sleep at their journey’s end. It was only where erosion was destroying the prairie that you saw the shapes preferred by Wright—Starved Rock a dramatic scar cut into the banks of the Illinois River, where the layers of shale (the skeleton beneath the mantled earth) were exposed and though beautiful, was little more than the enemy of the prairie. The “Prairie School” created hard, straight lines and cold, collarless walls, neither elegant, eloquent, comfortable, nor homey, only modern and different and celebrated for all the right intellectual (but all the wrong aesthetic) reasons. There was nothing human in what they made. By mimicking a natural scar on the land, they were trying to hide the human footprint.
    When he looked at the little white washed, clapboard house and the barn, ghostly red in the fading light, one word came to mind, home. It was how he always felt when late at night, driving the highway, he would see a single farm light out across the darkness. For some reason it always brought to mind the final refuge after a long journey: in Winter a place of warmth and hearth; in Summer, the voices of children echoing in the yard and seeping in through windows thrown wide to invite the sunshine in. He laughed at himself. He’d never lived on a farm, but for him the farm was the prairie, and when he fully understood that, he could excuse the endless sameness of it all.
    With a last, violent glint of light, the sun fell below the flat Midwest horizon in his rearview mirror and his world became more the lighted Map on his dash guiding him home than anything outside the car. He didn’t need it; he’d merged onto 39 and that would lead to 80 and that would take him home, cruise control would keep the speed and he need only point the car, listen to music and try to put together the loss he was feeling, though loss was hardly the word he was looking for. In no way could he think what was happening between them was unnatural or wrong, was anything more than what it should be, a young woman flexing her own freedom, as he had always hoped she would. Still, it took away that ear and he was loath to imagine anything that could replace it.
    When he merged onto 80, he thought about how this road ran the entire length of the country and remembered how, when his brother had visited from the West coast, he’d waxed eloquently about his trip. He said as he was travelling through the endless wheat and cornfields and saw the land undulating in great waves, that he could almost hear the rumble of buffalo rolling across the landscape. He was a good storyteller and painted a beautiful image, but somehow it left him with a feeling that his brother hadn’t really seen what he was looking at. It was how he, himself, had seen it when he first arrived and for several years he always looked for the mention of Indians or explorers or landmarks to give it a more romantic air, but that wasn’t what he saw anymore. He was looking at it then with an intellectual overlay meant to give it a meaning that wasn’t there. What he saw now in the simplest of farm houses was how man had taken the emptiness of the prairie and made it into home.
    So many thoughts but no ear...he laughed out loud at himself. He still liked driving.
    The clouds overhead blocked the stars and moon and it was a blank world beyond the sweep of his headlights, interrupted by highway signs and billboards, one pointing off the highway and announcing, “Dixon the home of Ronald Reagan”. He suddenly remembered how he and his friends were so outraged at the idea that such a throwback “cold warrior” cowboy could become President and they were quick to quote a line from the “Second Coming” by Yeats, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of wild intensity” and how it had been so important they resist him. Now he seemed almost grandfatherly in memory.
    He realized how most of that had simply died when Dakota was born; the Iran/contra scandal never again rose to the importance of something as crucial as being able to quote a Barney song when he and Dakota were at the Brookfield Zoo, “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree...” They used to go in the middle of Winter and have the zoo to themselves and he remembered how when it would snow, she would sit on his shoulders, rear back her head and try to catch the flakes in her mouth and then they would sing, “If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gums drops, oh what a world this would be,” ignoring the fact that they were snowflakes. Stupidity never interrupted their enjoyment. In fact, what both of them remembered most about those days were when what they did was the silliest and most stupid. It spoke not only of her innocence at the time, but his as well. He missed that. Sometimes he felt as if those were the only authentic moments he’d had in the last twenty years—politics, religion, philosophy, work and literature all seemed little more than the affectations of adulthood and lacked sincerity.
    He finally crested a hill and saw the lights of Lasalle in the valley below, the first mark of reaching home. It was still another forty minutes away, but they shopped in Lasalle and it was familiar enough to announce that his trip was over. From that point on, the reminiscing died out and he began to worry about the unfinished school work he’d left behind. He tried to arrange a schedule in his mind to complete it all, but knew it was too much and hoped the Principal would be too busy to notice. She often was. Despite the melancholy tone of his thoughts before, this was far more depressing, and he despised the immediacy of it all.
    When he finally reached home, he sat for a few minutes, listening to the creak of the car as it relaxed and as soon as he got out, felt the urgency to pee, which seemed to mark the end of every drive he took lately. He pushed past the barking dogs, jumping against his legs to welcome him home, gave a quick “Hi” to his wife and then felt the relief of reaching the toilet in time. When he came out, they talked about his visit and it was nice, making him feel as if it wasn’t really over until they shared it.
    She listened and finally remarked, “Well, I’m glad you two had a good time. You both needed that.”
    He got up and went to fill his coffee and as he came back into the living room she added, “Don’t forget the garbage needs to go out.”
    “I won’t,” he said.

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