I find myself in a fable or so I have felt since de-planing the aircraft in Saskatoon a mere few days ago. As stated earlier, I was apprehensive for this trip as I was just learning to stand my ground in my own life and was fearful this skill would be too fragile to handle a home coming quite so early. With Dad’s surgery this worry was pushed instantly aside naturally and a plane ticket purchased.
Prior to my arrival my sister and mother had filled my head with this image of dad as fragile and quite ill. Instead a man very much alive greeted me when I picked him up at the hospital after he finished his pre-op procedures and tests. I was relieved. Once in the car he described the surgery he was about to have and I was confused as what he described and what was illustrated in the supporting paperwork the hospital provided was a procedure routine and not as evasive as I was led to believe. Though again relieved that the scope of what was ahead was reduced I was also equally angry and frustrated. Using my biting-down-on-tongue-to-not-rage-nice voice I said to him many times “I am confused, on the phone you said this, you said that etc” and after a few emotionally twinged words he just looked out the window of the car almost as if to ignore me.
I wasn’t about to emotionally attack a man on the eve of an evasive surgery no matter the scope or scale. Yet I was angry for being lied to.
The surgery went smoothly and now the man is on the road to recovery with a few minor disturbances to his mobility. Pending test results, he seems like he will move past this and resume life as normal. For that I am grateful and even though frustrated, I was glad I was here.
Now back to the fable.
Normally when I come home I figuratively go underwater. I wade through the time here with blurred vision and the muffled sounds of a man submersed as it was just easier to handle all the rocky sea on the surface, its volitility for me unmanagable.
This time however I decided to brave the waters above and float to the suface. I am glad I did as I now see and hear everything for what it is and stand with strong sea legs.
My family lives and breaths on the hyperbolic emotive energies and large scale morality battles usually found in the pages of a medieval adventure tale. People are either saints or sinners, and the decisions they make have the corresponding polarity in right and wrongness. “That Doctor is so smart, oh to be that brilliant must be amazing, oh he is simply brilliant you can tell”, “That neighborhood kid, you can just tell he is trouble, I mean he was up till midnight drinking with his buddies making noise, you can just tell he is a trouble maker” etc. They all do this even my younger and world travelled sister; it has nothing to do with age. Collectively they sit and around a meat heavy dinner table and foster the longevity of myths and tales about mere mortals they know. They seem happy so I guess they are not hurting anyone as each one is in on the game.
So why do I care? Well here is the thing, I pay some one 80 dollars a week to work through a childhood that now I see was a living breathing elaboration full of fabrications. They aren’t lies and weren’t lies but rather truths seen through eyes of those in love with legends. I am a man that inherently gravitates towards the authentic and the elegantly simple, I do not like ego and foster no fable in my world intentionally. With this new found observance, instead of getting angry I giggle. I now realize now that the early chapters of my life were as jarring as they were because Dr. Seuss was trying to play with the Lord of the Rings.
No comments:
Post a Comment