moments

I have these moments. I record them here, in the relative safety of obscurity, friends and strangers reading my mind, or what's on it. And I think I end up looking like a sentimental moron, a bleeding heart, which I may be, but not today. I called my son, once the love of my life, and he didn't give me enough attention, so now I'm mad. Mad about Christmas and all the memories I carry alone. Alone. He tells me he is golfing. "We don't golf," I tell him. "People like us don't golf." It's funny. It's like when my friend Madonna told me I should buy a house. I said, "I'm a renter" as though it was a social category. I thought there were two kinds of people: people who own property and people who rent from them. I didn't know you could move from one social strata to another. And, I maintain, golf is reserved for the upper crust, of whom, I maintain, we are not. The Big Book described them when they said, "...that impeccable coat of tan one sees upon the well-to-do." I don't know what page that's on. The leisure time, plaid pants crowd, the flat chested women and short haired men, the days at the club. My son, MY SON, knows how much an annual membership is at the Rogue Valley Country Club. Well, he is white, and could, I suppose, get in. But once they knew his name, his father's name, I guess my fear is that they'd reject him. Now that's codependency at its finest. Kurt Vonnegut said it in Cat's Cradle: there are two kinds of people in the world. People you know and people you don't know. We'll, the people I know don't golf.

So he plays golf now, my little boy who hid in the cracks of some junkies attic while bullets blazed downstairs. Does this mean he's overcome the tragedy of his upbringing? I put too much emphasis on the past. I know. I know. But I was there. And sometimes, I want him to look backward in horror like I do instead of blythely skipping through his good life, drunk as a dog.

I said, "Isn't golf kind of an expensive sport?"
"I make quite a bit of money, Mom." he said.

OH.
Really.
Pay me.

So, he's doing okay, golfing the winter away, and I'm in a puddle up here in happily married land, missing my baby. He's not a baby anymore. He's golfing. He's a golfer. I guess there are worse things. He could be in therapy and tell the stories of his life. Maybe, just maybe, there will be a God who lets the stories die with me, and he can not know what happened to us for so long, and he will have a happy life.