It’s Mardi Gras again, which means I am sitting on my floor cutting little square shaped holes in cardboard boxes, and then painting said boxes a glossy black. Though I have work tables, I end up on the floor. Like I was Japanese in a past life. I sit cross legged, or knees in a “w,” and let a relatively uninteresting youtube video play on and on about an Australian cult leader who forced LSD on 14 year olds. I stab boxes. This year, it is the rooftops of London we are working on, so that my yard is a lovely view of a European capital, and my stairs take you to Neverland. It will be great.
But honestly the best part is planning and making a million things out of cardboard, random thrifted items like the live/laugh/love signs I have purchased, sanded clean, and repainted with things like, “LOST BOYS ONLY” (with backward “s”s becuase “s”s are hard).
My dad was diagnosed with an illness recently, like one of the bad ones. What can I do but quietly tread through 10 minute walking videos on the aforementioned resource, youtube, in my room, at 8 pm, or sit on the floor with cardboard boxes and cut tiny windows into them.
I take a representative box to my dad’s, where we will eat lunch together and decorate his house for Christmas. He is assembling the stable he built for his beloved half-of-life-sized creche. “Are you going to be able to do this when I can’t do it anymore?” he asks. This is how we are handling it. Really matter-of-factly, for us. Together, in silent terror, or together, matter-of-factly, or when I’m alone, I realize no matter how many 10 minute youtube workouts I do (and I try to do six… six!), the pain of my dad being ill, and mortal, won’t go away. It will never go away.
I go to my work Christmas party, chat up my coworkers’ significant others, drink a glass of wine, play pickleball. I’m happy. I’m possibly my most social, at a party where I know everyone and know what to say to them. Usually at parties I park myself and let my chat-prey come to me.
We go on. I set out the croissants the night before, to rise. I wipe the countertops
I have friends over to drink coffee and eat croissants and wrangle Mardi Gras materials.
I go to a meeting and talk with other teachers about such subjects as Missouri’s law that tells me what I can and can’t talk to my own students about. I eat a couple of cookies.
I scoop a scoop and a half of food for my elderly cat, pull up his insulin, stick a heart pill in his mouth, and smear his eye ointment in his eyes, on the ends of a q-tip. Now and then he wheezes, but mostly, he’s hungry and affectionate.
At my dad’s, I set the table at my dad’s, the right small bowls, the right plates, the water pitcher. I lift and carry box after box after box up from the basement. This is the childhood home of mine that is left, though I moved in age 12. It is where my brother was hauled around as a baby, by each of his five sisters. Where I measured his growth, in my closet. Where we made movies with a VHS camera, where I loathed my dad’s loud TV and where I mournfully felt the moonlight on my face and dreamed of being someplace else.
We go on. I do laundry, still a treat in my first in-unit washer and dryer. My clothes will wear out faster now because I wash things just because I can. I have my first dishwasher, too, and I load it, run it, unload it. These devices are much loved.
We have lunches and dinners and do the dishes and fill tupperware with leftovers. We accept a constant stream of gifts and treats from my stepmom. We never leave without food and lovely things.
Then I’m back sitting on the floor, cross legged, cutting or painting or using a random piece of paper to draw a straight line instead of a ruler.
And who’s going to put together the stable? Maybe you’ll just set it on fire, my dad says. So we laugh.
Once the stable is up, Mary, Joseph, and the kid move in. I don’t put my Jesuses out until Christmas Day. My dad starts early.
Going On 