It’s early morning in my car and I’m driving some kids to school. Charlie, 10, is riding shotgun and my stepdaughter, Milla, 13, is in the back. She tucks into her phone as I look at the morning sun. Off to our left and behind us, she’s a burning bullet hole where the ridge meets the sky. Charlie is pulling gummy bears out of a Ziploc baggie and popping them in his mouth. With this in motion, I see that his fingernails need clipping again and I make a mental note to do that. He hates the feeling of the clippers for some reason, refuses to do it himself. In time, I guess he’ll have to, but for now I help him out when I remember. Which isn’t as often as I should.
I’ve been meaning to corner Charlie so I can ask him some stuff. He shows signs of anxiety sometimes. There are times when he reveals a kind of troubled agonizing more typically reserved for later in life. Maturity sucks when you’re young. People push it too hard, I think. Maybe I’ve pushed it him at times too, I don’t know.
Charlie is the happy-go-lucky sort, but sometimes those types hurt harder because they feel the need to keep tampering it all back down into the shadows. He can get really down on himself and say things that indicate he is struggling at times. It’s not an everyday thing, and of course most people are hard on themselves here and there, but this feels different. It feels more… involved. Some of his words, they seem to tell the tale of a beautiful kid who might not feel like he adds up to much. It reminds me of myself even now. And probably at that age too.
In school, he’ll also occasionally struggle with the big emotions when he’s knocked out in gaga ball or dodge ball. I don’t see a lot of cruel fire in Charlie/ not a lot of mean-spirited lashing out when he’s trying to find his way through a tricky moment, but I do see him lose his cool, get down on himself. Kicking the floor, talking trash on his own existence, that sort of thing. And I’ve been there as well. Oh, I’ve been there alright.
I make my lame attempt at kickstarting a talk with Charlie, my words shattering all this screaming silence of the ride so far. There was the steady blowing of the defroster and the hypnotic hum of the Honda’s tires on the road beneath us, but each of those sounds are silence in their own way. So, when I finally get up the guts to emerge from the shadows of my driving gig, I know I’m about to challenge the kind of deafening quiet that smirks at fools because it understands the odds of a moment like this even taking hold at all.
I bite my bottom lip a little.
Charlie is usually in the back because his older brother isn’t into giving up his coveted front seat position. Even when there’s four kids here, Henry makes it well known he does’t want to have to squeeze into the back like the rest of them do. I let it slide, mostly because I have my own issues and I don’t want to end up in an argument with a kid. I know how that sounds, how small it makes me seem as a dad and a man. A man should be able to set things right with his kids when he sees injustices and whatnot. But, like a lot of people, I suspect, I live in these murky gray spaces on the fringes of all that downtown black and white parenting chatter. If the world of parenting is a big town built on the premise of a right way and wrong way to handle children, then I live out by the airport. Across the tracks. In a tarpaper shack. Or in a van down by the river.
I do get there though, in case you’re wondering. I break the wall/ start talking. My voice? It’s like an old bird gun going off in the next room. And there’s not much I can do about that.
Our valley, Penns Valley, is majestic first thing on winter mornings. But sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one taking it in. Not that I’m any kind of gifted noticer of the wild blue yonder, mind you. I never seem to land those kinds of gigs. But still, slews of spectacular skies often seem lost on the people who live around here. Sure, the sunsets get passed around on Facebook when they’re the thick orange marmalade kind. Framed in ceruleans and violets and sooty clouds, the sinking stars light from behind the shreds of clouds often seems painted just for me by some true dead master. And look, it’s entirely possible that all the farmers and their wives and the Amish and their kids, maybe a lot of the valley people, maybe they do notice more than I give them credit for. Hell, maybe the bus drivers in their school buses clock it all too; the kids back in their seats: the same elaborate sky hovering over them all as they each see it all at once.
I could be wrong.
I often am.
But these skies won’t let me be.
I love the stars at night too, don’t get me wrong. And sometimes in the afternoon, when the whole complicated system is wired up in such a way that the sun is slanting her beams down through these midwinter filters and the projector lens is so lightly frosted that it just barely dabs the tired fields and mountains below with this strange and glorious central Pennsylvania mystical cottonsphere, the world appears forgotten and abandoned. As if I’m all alone in it. Roaming. Forever rambling/ just to live. I find this inexplicably comforting, this winter outside my ride.
It’s unfortunate in a way; there are a few people around here who detest resettlers from downstate. Folks like me. Interlopers, they call us. People who weren’t born here don’t belong here, they say. People who move here from places closer to the big cities only ruin this place, they say. Out on a limb, I understand where they’re coming from. Nothing scares a person like a stranger with his own set of ideas about stuff. But what can I do? Between me and you, I don’t even know how the hell I got here. Everything becomes a blur in the wake of so many days unfolding.
Once upon a time I was this other guy.
Now he’s mostly gone.
And in his place?
This collector of the clouds.
This watcher of the wind.
That hoarder down the road, house bursting from all them suns he stole.
We find our groove, me and Charlie. Milla chimes in as well and before long the three of us are zipping by meadows and pastures and paddocks and pens, our words meeting mid-sky inside the car. We are flying/ speeding/ racing towards town as we blow by old bank barns and fences gilded with sparkling hoarfrost. Crows rise and fall from the dead in the road. I steer us around a freshly killed raccoon. And then a skunk not far from that. As we speak I wonder if the kids noticed the animals. Then I wonder if those two animals ever crossed paths back in the strip of woods that creates a boundary between the two fields near where they died. I’ll never know, but these are the sorts of things I’d rather examine. Life being so short and all.
My spirited lectures to the kids, I’ve come to see them as a bit on the goofy side. I mean well, of course, but I get carried away sometimes. Perhaps endless hours in vans with musicians fostered some kind of misdirected skill within me. Maybe what once served as useful time-killing voice over to an endless documentary about my life and times has given way to this other thing. This very different film with kids in the starring roles and me/ the familiar character actor whose been around forever/ trying to find ourselves down in this raw stirring screenplay we seem to have lucked into.
Refrain and restraint though, when it comes to these young fuckers, does not come easy. I have to remind myself to shut up. I have to ask Charlie questions in order to cut myself off and I do and it works so don’t judge me like you might if I wasn’t watching you watch me. I nudge myself from outside myself. A triple rib cage of white clouds moves me as we move. I feel lifted by Charlie’s smile as I tell him how much I love him. As I tell both kids here with me this morning how proud I am of them both. I don’t know how much it means to either of them. Honestly, I’m overcome with a sense of self-ridicule as I tell them the truth from inside my heart because I often feel idiotic in thinking that my kids care about what goes on inside my head. Or my heart.
But that right there, that’s precisely what I’m chasing here. Do you see it? Do you feel me? Me bashing myself in the face at the tail end of saying things that a dad should say and needs to say to his children is exactly the same thing that finds Charlie saying he isn’t worthy of being loved/ in the middle of a chuckle/ as we sit on the couch watching a movie on Saturday night. Out of nowhere he is down on himself. And out of nowhere I am crushed for him.
Did I do this?
Is this my DNA at work/ my depressive blood working through his veins?
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
