Dates and Times

Rearrangement. The inevitable fade of even color-fast fibers overtime, tamped down, subdued by familiarity. Impressions left by furniture’s burdens, the cavernous cistern outside always hiding some stage of emptiness or fulfillment.

We are sitting in the room which used to be my teenaged father’s bedroom. It has been a living room as long as I can remember however, from the times of my childhood when the carpet was a short, sheared green, and multi-colored woven rugs, soft as old t-shirts, rested in front of my grandparents’ recliners.

“Does October 19^th mean nothing to you?” my father asthmatically wheezes, glaring ahead at the TV screen, swaddled in his housecoat.

“Well…” my mother scoffs at his dead-pan condescension, tucking her straightened auburn hair behind her ear “she wants to know the first time we met…that’s not the first time.”

She and her family had moved in next to my father and his parents in 1972. Separated only by young Maple saplings and the winding gravel driveway, her family soon sauntered over for a visit. They sat in what is now the dining room on that Sunday afternoon in August, my mother nervous because she had brought the family dog along, a wily Scottish terrier named Elfie. My paternal grandmother did most of the talking; my father had to be coaxed out of his adjoining bedroom, being marginally sociable for only twenty minutes or so.

My mother looks over her shoulder into the room. She volunteers, pointing, that there may have been a loveseat there; maybe there were slip covers; maybe the carpeting was the same as the archaic remnant still in the hall closet, olive green and blue and yellow, splotched by geometric shapes. My father squints, square-jowled, not moved to contribution or even correction.

He mutters something about the time they first saw each other, pre-formal introduction, if she remembered that. She does.

It was May, 1972. My mother was standing at the bottom of her parents’ driveway, waiting for her friend Maria to pick her up for high school commencement rehearsal. It was pouring down rain. My mother was wearing a neutral knit cap with a brim, protecting her brown locks that she had curled around empty orange juice cans the night before. Then my father came speeding by.

He was driving the 1954 two-toned green Chevy, baring patches of primer paint in spots where his handiwork was incomplete. He craned his neck, tugging the wheel in a double-take. He said she had a sweet, innocent look, and he said, that’s the one for me.

“But you need more than that to make a story, don’t you?” my mother winced, adjusting her legs folded beneath her on the brushed blue couch.

October 19^th, my maternal grandmother nudged both my mother and Elfie through the orange-crowned Maple trees onto my paternal grandparents’ property, where my dad was cruising along on the riding mower. She pretended Elfie had gotten loose; she needed my father to catch him. That’s when the real conversation began.

“So there”, my mother concludes.