mrsimple
Writer
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2018
- Messages
- 251
- Points
- 63
Everyone has an idea that they would like to share. Sometimes they are not thought out all the way through, hence being half-baked. I used to have plenty of half-baked concepts, and tried to write them down, figuring things out as I strolled along with the protagonists and their surrounding characters, but it doesn't always pan out the way I hoped. And those stories end up being incomplete because I want a better ending rather than the bland dish I cooked up for everyone to enjoy.
For example, I have a work that I wrote up, and I was complimented on how good of a start it was, but I never went further with it because I didn't have the right mindset anymore to push on. So what do I do with these unfinished things? Do I let them sit around, unpublished, forgotten, and eventually, lost while I become incapable of completing them anymore?
...I don't know. I have an unknown number of works like those, and I had made an initial statement on at least one of my works that anyone is free to finish this or that thing -- this was on the origin site I've come from. Anyways, I'd like to present a single chapter, a starter, that I don't know how to continue, but it had shown promise. As I've said, there are more like this one, and I've no clue what to do with these...
For example, I have a work that I wrote up, and I was complimented on how good of a start it was, but I never went further with it because I didn't have the right mindset anymore to push on. So what do I do with these unfinished things? Do I let them sit around, unpublished, forgotten, and eventually, lost while I become incapable of completing them anymore?
...I don't know. I have an unknown number of works like those, and I had made an initial statement on at least one of my works that anyone is free to finish this or that thing -- this was on the origin site I've come from. Anyways, I'd like to present a single chapter, a starter, that I don't know how to continue, but it had shown promise. As I've said, there are more like this one, and I've no clue what to do with these...
A Journey’s End
Chapter 1: A Child’s Life…
When I was born back in the early eighties, I was initially raised by my mom.
Before she passed away, my mom used to read stories to me. I was so very little, I doubt I understood a single word my mother read to me. But I paid attention. I know I did, because I remember her slipping into bed with me and reading those stories before we both dozed off to sleep.
I remember, it was on one of those nights that she pulled me in close, and I cuddled up next to her, and she read from a big red book. There was a collection of stories within the red cover of that book, tales of pixies, talking and living dolls, even puzzles for us to figure out, but the one I remember the most was a story about a funny dragon. She read that one to me that night. I knew it was about a dragon because I saw and recalled the colored drawing on the page. She pointed the funny thing out to me whenever she mentioned that magical creature.
I should point out that the dragon was funny because I had an overactive imagination. I honestly visualized the dragon doing the things my mother gestured and playfully acted out.
That night, we went to sleep, but I was the only one who woke up. At that time, I didn’t know why my mom wouldn’t wake up. I just thought she was really sleepy.
One thing I should mention, my parents were divorced and lived in different states. So I was alone with my mom. When she wouldn’t wake up, I dialed the only number I knew would have a voice on the other end: my dad’s.
He was confused by what I told him, but he listened and acted. From one state to the other, he drove to see us. And found my mom…
Not until I was older would I understand what had happened. In her sleep, she’d had an aneurysm.
I should put in here that Dad hadn’t thought out what he’d done. If he’d contacted an operator to inform them of an emergency, they would have responded by sending someone closer to our home, and maybe my mom would’ve still been with us. What happened was a human mistake. He was desperate to discover was wrong and, perhaps, unintentionally doomed my mother on his journey to save me from trouble.
Did I blame him? No. He was my dad and I saw his act as him coming to the rescue. I was sure that was how he saw it too. How could he have known?
What happened, happened...
From that point on, my life belonged to my dad. He took care of me, but he also ensured I had a happy childhood. When I reflected back on those years, I had to wonder if he was trying to get me to forget my mom.
When I was bit older, but still really little, I remember playing with an action figure toy set. The set was a hard plastic fold-out battle scene. The outside half on the cliff of a mountain, I remember it was carved in the shape of a giant skull, and on the inside half was a castle’s dungeonesque interior. At my age, it was an outstanding pastime to play with my action figures on the set. While I had fun, my imagination ran wild.
But what was more cool was that my dad would play with me on that set. He bought it, and he made certain I understood the full potential of what that set could do. It was awesome!
Being with my dad and having fun with him might be the very best reason why I remember that toy set. I have more memories with my dad than I do of anything else. Any time he came home, I immediately became excited and would run up to him at the front door to see what he’d brought home that day. Sometimes a candy bar or soda pop, a movie rental and popcorn for the night, and other times a new toy.
Or best of all, he’d come home and offer me an afternoon motorcycle ride through the countryside. If I remember correctly, it was a Honda Shadow. Anyways, I’d slip up and get in back of him before wrapping my small arms around his waist. After kicking the stand up, the bike balanced upright and the motor would roar to life. And off we’d go!
Other times, when my dad would drive around in his car, a two-door convertible… maybe a three-hundred ZX? The interior was made of black leather. If he didn’t put the cover over the car, my buns burned! But, yes, despite being cooked alive, I’d tag along, and my head would be happily stuck outside the window like a dog. My tongue didn’t hang out, but like a dog’s ears flapping in the wind, my long blonde hair swept back during the cool ride -- back then, mullets were the look everyone had.
None of what I’d done was legal, like not wearing a motorcyclist's helmet or being cautious about where I stuck my head, but the countryside didn’t have many lawmen to keep me in check. I enjoyed that sweet wind of freedom with my dad.
And I took it for granted…
As I grew up, it might’ve been in the late nineties, I came to realize my dad had been going through difficult and harder times. He owned an outdoor business that was booming a decade ago, but he didn’t get with the times. The retail housing world had visited our countryside, and my dad took a repair and siding business. But the issue was he couldn’t advertise. The countryside was open and vast, and thought to be the very place to hold his kind of business. It initially worked out, houses sprang up, but there weren’t many who called our home, well, home. So he only had our few neighbors who needed a fix here or there and maybe an upgrade.
He had to travel long distances to find any kind of work. I stopped tagging along when he had to pass the state line. The stress only built up, and there was no escaping it.
Correction: I was an escape for him, just as much he was a paternal idol for me. When he’d feel the need to hit the road, I was there with him until he cooled his jets. I never knew he was upset. Back then, I was just a happy kid who got to do everything with my father.
Now I know better. He required an outlet. I was thankful that he never vented his frustration out on me and that he found a positive way to softly ease himself down before the night.
But that couldn’t last. While he’d be working, I was either at school or home with the babysitter. When I was older, school was still there for me, but the computer became my new babysitter.
In fact, there were quite a few changes as I grew up. No more greeting my dad at the door when he got home. I stopped going out with my dad on his bike or car rides. I no longer shared my playtime with him. Instead, I lived my life taking on one daily milestone after another. I devoted time and study into the available education at school. I earned pocket money from the sparsely populated neighbors across the countryside. When I could, I savored the life in the open wide outdoors, and when I couldn’t, I immersed myself in various novels. And in the eventual years of technological progress, whatever I found countless interests on the World Wide Web.
I distracted myself into oblivion, and I didn’t comprehend what I was doing to my dad. As I mentioned, I realized what I had meant to my dad, but I was selfish. As I became older and more or less aware, I thought my time was mine alone and that was how I was going to spend it. And Dad took that to heart pretty hard.
He changed, too. When he came home, he’d curse about nearly everything that had gone on in his day. “Swear up a storm,” was how he’d put it. Sometimes, I’d be alerted by a loud thump on the wall or floor from an object unlucky enough to be in his reach when he exploded.
Witnessing his downward spiral, I would wonder in fear if he’d someday direct his destructive attention at me. What then? Would he finally see me as a means to vent all of that bottled up anger?
On the mention of a bottle, I knew it was only a matter of time. When would he do more than take a taste? I knew why he would. He’d want to clear his head of the daily grinding routine he had to endure. But he’d leave some of his senses at the bar if he did. And what then? Would he have less restraint about knocking something around in the house -- or someone?
There was a smidgen of fear in me when he came home. My imagination never ceased, so I always wondered if today was the day he’d crack and find me old enough to take a beating. Maybe not physical, but verbal abuse was not something I would want to endure either.
I was really selfish. After all that time, I still took him for granted and never thought about what I could do to help him. I was stupid.
My idea wasn’t to seek help for him, but for me. There was no plan yet, just an idea to get out of the house while he was like that. And I didn’t mean staying at a friends house or running away. I was being reasonable, but was I being rational?
Maybe. Here was why: I had a year before I turned eighteen and that would’ve prompted me to consider my future. The concept of a future without my dad around was still scary, but I knew it would eventually happen. In my mind, I was killing two birds with one stone.
Before my summer vacation ended, I asked my dad if I could do something I never thought I would: to move out. It wasn’t like I never wanted to see him again, and I told him that. I also didn’t mean to move out of the house permanently, not initially.
My idea was to live and learn, and the best way to do that was to stay on campus. A boarding school.
The idea set him off. He furiously told me how much it would cost him to simply have me live someplace else, let alone the services a boarding school would charge him. I must not have had a realistic concept of how much money he could afford, otherwise I would’ve never brought it up. I didn’t want to see him like that, let alone hear him direct his rage at me.
But since I had experienced him getting in my face, incoherently shouting, so angry with me that he stammered and spat, I wanted nothing more than to get away. To try life on my own, while still getting an education, suddenly sounded like a tangible dream I could reach for. I just had to reach him first. So I argued, brought up my perspective on our household events, and told him what he was doing right there and then was exactly what I wanted to escape.
What I didn’t realize then was that the following silence, after I told him my reason for wanting to move out, would hurt. He didn’t have to say anything. I saw the expression on his face soften, then drop, and the confusion that followed grew on him until he appeared completely lost. My dad looked around, aimlessly staring at anything and thoughtlessly trying to practice speech, but without any direction; he floundered.
I was right there, but he couldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t speak to me until he knew what had to be said. My dad was unable to find the right words, and kept his painfully long silence.
When he’d finally left me alone, gone outside and drove off, I knew that night was his step away from recreational drinking toward an alcoholic problem. I thought I had made a fatal mistake and provoked the worst outcome to appear.
During the first hour of that horrible revelation, I dove onto my bed and sought comfort to sleep away the issues. I thought that maybe I could pretend I hadn’t committed a monstrous error and plainly sleep, dream up something new, and have an idea what the next day would bring.
But I couldn’t. The moment after my head hit the pillow, I turned and surprised myself when I shoved my face down into that very pillow: I cried. I thought that was it, as some would say, “This is the End.” I’d fucked up and pushed my dad away. He was out there and had found another terrible way to relieve his stress.
I didn’t want to be here when he failed to realize what he thought a draught would do for him. So I wiped my tears away and got back up. I wasn’t going to take what was coming lying down.
I was back on track.
While he was busy drowning himself in his cups, I looked online for the cheapest boarding school I might be able to afford. There was a savings account I could always request my dad to open up. He’d argue again, but my fear factor had gone up a notch since I knew he’d be drinking. I’d read, heard, and seen too many stories of drunk fathers that abused their children. Those stories poured me a really bad cocktail of stubborn and stupid.
My dad was nothing like those dramatized stories of horrific parents.
How did I know? The next day, he waited for me in the dining room. He had called off work, made us breakfast, and offered an apology for last night. I accepted it, but that was the only thing I said to him until we finished our meals.
As I was washing the dishes, he told me where he had gone last night and what he did. He admitted to drinking, but nothing like whiskey or scotch or... nothing hard. He couldn’t afford to risk a traffic accident or running into a checkpoint.
He swore, it was a light drink. I don’t know if I believed him, but that wasn’t what I remember mattered that morning. It was what I found online during his nighttime visit at the bar.
I brought up the subject of boarding schools. He was silent, so I took that as permission to continue.
What we went over were the few state-run schools that permitted students to live on campus. Colleges and universities, yes, but I had another year before I graduated and could’ve given those beauties a shot. Then I brought up the independent schools and their hefty fees.
I agreed with him, they were expensive as all Hell. I asked him if he would like to look with me, and he agreed. We went to his room and cracked down on what was available within our nation’s borders.
As I mentioned, my dad was not a bad man. He helped me look and went over what all was available for the school year. We even made a list of schools that he said could be within his budget.
I did bring up my savings, but he explained that wasn’t to be touched until I was an adult. In other words, I still had a year to go.
Since I would have to rely entirely on my dad’s funding, I secretly vowed to pay him back. I may have been his son, but I felt wrong to have him pay for something he had no desire to see happen. If I were in his shoes, I’d have thought the money was being thrown away.
That brought up a good point from a different perspective, so we took a break from searching for schools and focused on the benefits of attending and lodging at a private school. There were two highlighted bonuses: living on campus meant I could focus better without as many distractions, like electronics, and the second was that I’d perform better as well due to my new environment being entirely academic.
I supported those two major points, which seemed to encourage my dad a little.
The Internet only provided generic descriptions of what to expect, which would’ve been the only thing I told my dad to believe. Connecting the world wasn’t entirely a new concept, but there were a number of questionable websites that hadn’t been verified and wouldn’t be scrutinized until years later. With that in mind, I suggested an alternative: we’d go and pay the schools we listed a visit. Like scouting, looking around the place before we commit ourselves to anything. Once we knew the schools were real, then we would’ve begun the talks with each other and on the phone with the community board of directors. Eventually, we had an appointment, kinda like an interview… but that’s getting ahead of myself.
With that initial plan put into action, we inadvertently started having our car rides again. Once or twice, my dad let me take the wheel. At first, I was really nervous about it because the ZX wasn’t automatic. But after a few tries, I thought I handled myself well… although I felt uncomfortably bad for grinding the gears during my learning curve. He didn’t blame me; I was new at the whole three pedal and stick shift. He might’ve just been happy to pass on a skill to me.
On that note, we did take the convertible hatches off of the roof and had the wind cooling our heads. Just as it was when I was a kid, it was really cool to experience those nostalgic trips.
Another noteworthy thing to mention: I no longer had that God-awful mullet, but I did grow my hair out. I grew up with the hair’s weight pouring over my shoulders. So that meant I got used to it. Still, I enjoyed having long hair for the look and feel of it, but I excused it for a utilitarian reason: my bangs could be pulled back with and in my ponytail. That kept my vision from being obscured and my face from being irritated by stray hairs. Albeit I had to care for my hair, otherwise new hairs would sprout much shorter than I could manage. I didn’t want to get into the habit of cutting those small hairs, so I simply looked into and acquired the ingredients I needed to keep a healthy scalp and the durable golden threads that went with it.
But since I already went the distance with my hair, I thought not going the extra mile would’ve been a sign of laziness or neglect. I had an excuse to use my allowance and neighborly wages on skincare products, like non-abrasive soaps and rejuvenating creams. Believe me, once I started and really got into it, I was never agitated again by an itchy scalp, chapped lips, dry palms, or any of that grit. It felt like I could clearly breathe in a whole new way.
So the sensation being in the car with Dad was amazing. If I had felt the experience of freedom when I was little, I came alive with the tingly sensation of the open road washing over me. I wouldn’t have minded at all if we had kept on that long stretch through the countryside to God knows where we’d wind up. The journey there was what would’ve thrilled me, and I knew my Dad felt similar.
But I would learn all things come to an end.
We’d found one school after another and searched around the location. I could go into great detail about each one, but there was just one of those schools that was worthy of mention: the one I’d attend. My next year would be centralized around a school called Clarus Hall.
Appointments had been made, greetings and meetings established over the phone, and we played the waiting game until we had the chance to sit down with the people taking charge of my future.
The day arrived for us to actually meet the teachers and staff in person. I was offered another opportunity behind the wheel, and I took it. He explained that when it was time for me to move, he wanted to be the one to drive me there. That’s where I was at, a welcome collision course between deciding I’d made the right choice and the happiness that Dad supported my decision.
I was so fucking stupid…
Chapter 1: A Child’s Life…
When I was born back in the early eighties, I was initially raised by my mom.
Before she passed away, my mom used to read stories to me. I was so very little, I doubt I understood a single word my mother read to me. But I paid attention. I know I did, because I remember her slipping into bed with me and reading those stories before we both dozed off to sleep.
I remember, it was on one of those nights that she pulled me in close, and I cuddled up next to her, and she read from a big red book. There was a collection of stories within the red cover of that book, tales of pixies, talking and living dolls, even puzzles for us to figure out, but the one I remember the most was a story about a funny dragon. She read that one to me that night. I knew it was about a dragon because I saw and recalled the colored drawing on the page. She pointed the funny thing out to me whenever she mentioned that magical creature.
I should point out that the dragon was funny because I had an overactive imagination. I honestly visualized the dragon doing the things my mother gestured and playfully acted out.
That night, we went to sleep, but I was the only one who woke up. At that time, I didn’t know why my mom wouldn’t wake up. I just thought she was really sleepy.
One thing I should mention, my parents were divorced and lived in different states. So I was alone with my mom. When she wouldn’t wake up, I dialed the only number I knew would have a voice on the other end: my dad’s.
He was confused by what I told him, but he listened and acted. From one state to the other, he drove to see us. And found my mom…
Not until I was older would I understand what had happened. In her sleep, she’d had an aneurysm.
I should put in here that Dad hadn’t thought out what he’d done. If he’d contacted an operator to inform them of an emergency, they would have responded by sending someone closer to our home, and maybe my mom would’ve still been with us. What happened was a human mistake. He was desperate to discover was wrong and, perhaps, unintentionally doomed my mother on his journey to save me from trouble.
Did I blame him? No. He was my dad and I saw his act as him coming to the rescue. I was sure that was how he saw it too. How could he have known?
What happened, happened...
From that point on, my life belonged to my dad. He took care of me, but he also ensured I had a happy childhood. When I reflected back on those years, I had to wonder if he was trying to get me to forget my mom.
When I was bit older, but still really little, I remember playing with an action figure toy set. The set was a hard plastic fold-out battle scene. The outside half on the cliff of a mountain, I remember it was carved in the shape of a giant skull, and on the inside half was a castle’s dungeonesque interior. At my age, it was an outstanding pastime to play with my action figures on the set. While I had fun, my imagination ran wild.
But what was more cool was that my dad would play with me on that set. He bought it, and he made certain I understood the full potential of what that set could do. It was awesome!
Being with my dad and having fun with him might be the very best reason why I remember that toy set. I have more memories with my dad than I do of anything else. Any time he came home, I immediately became excited and would run up to him at the front door to see what he’d brought home that day. Sometimes a candy bar or soda pop, a movie rental and popcorn for the night, and other times a new toy.
Or best of all, he’d come home and offer me an afternoon motorcycle ride through the countryside. If I remember correctly, it was a Honda Shadow. Anyways, I’d slip up and get in back of him before wrapping my small arms around his waist. After kicking the stand up, the bike balanced upright and the motor would roar to life. And off we’d go!
Other times, when my dad would drive around in his car, a two-door convertible… maybe a three-hundred ZX? The interior was made of black leather. If he didn’t put the cover over the car, my buns burned! But, yes, despite being cooked alive, I’d tag along, and my head would be happily stuck outside the window like a dog. My tongue didn’t hang out, but like a dog’s ears flapping in the wind, my long blonde hair swept back during the cool ride -- back then, mullets were the look everyone had.
None of what I’d done was legal, like not wearing a motorcyclist's helmet or being cautious about where I stuck my head, but the countryside didn’t have many lawmen to keep me in check. I enjoyed that sweet wind of freedom with my dad.
And I took it for granted…
As I grew up, it might’ve been in the late nineties, I came to realize my dad had been going through difficult and harder times. He owned an outdoor business that was booming a decade ago, but he didn’t get with the times. The retail housing world had visited our countryside, and my dad took a repair and siding business. But the issue was he couldn’t advertise. The countryside was open and vast, and thought to be the very place to hold his kind of business. It initially worked out, houses sprang up, but there weren’t many who called our home, well, home. So he only had our few neighbors who needed a fix here or there and maybe an upgrade.
He had to travel long distances to find any kind of work. I stopped tagging along when he had to pass the state line. The stress only built up, and there was no escaping it.
Correction: I was an escape for him, just as much he was a paternal idol for me. When he’d feel the need to hit the road, I was there with him until he cooled his jets. I never knew he was upset. Back then, I was just a happy kid who got to do everything with my father.
Now I know better. He required an outlet. I was thankful that he never vented his frustration out on me and that he found a positive way to softly ease himself down before the night.
But that couldn’t last. While he’d be working, I was either at school or home with the babysitter. When I was older, school was still there for me, but the computer became my new babysitter.
In fact, there were quite a few changes as I grew up. No more greeting my dad at the door when he got home. I stopped going out with my dad on his bike or car rides. I no longer shared my playtime with him. Instead, I lived my life taking on one daily milestone after another. I devoted time and study into the available education at school. I earned pocket money from the sparsely populated neighbors across the countryside. When I could, I savored the life in the open wide outdoors, and when I couldn’t, I immersed myself in various novels. And in the eventual years of technological progress, whatever I found countless interests on the World Wide Web.
I distracted myself into oblivion, and I didn’t comprehend what I was doing to my dad. As I mentioned, I realized what I had meant to my dad, but I was selfish. As I became older and more or less aware, I thought my time was mine alone and that was how I was going to spend it. And Dad took that to heart pretty hard.
He changed, too. When he came home, he’d curse about nearly everything that had gone on in his day. “Swear up a storm,” was how he’d put it. Sometimes, I’d be alerted by a loud thump on the wall or floor from an object unlucky enough to be in his reach when he exploded.
Witnessing his downward spiral, I would wonder in fear if he’d someday direct his destructive attention at me. What then? Would he finally see me as a means to vent all of that bottled up anger?
On the mention of a bottle, I knew it was only a matter of time. When would he do more than take a taste? I knew why he would. He’d want to clear his head of the daily grinding routine he had to endure. But he’d leave some of his senses at the bar if he did. And what then? Would he have less restraint about knocking something around in the house -- or someone?
There was a smidgen of fear in me when he came home. My imagination never ceased, so I always wondered if today was the day he’d crack and find me old enough to take a beating. Maybe not physical, but verbal abuse was not something I would want to endure either.
I was really selfish. After all that time, I still took him for granted and never thought about what I could do to help him. I was stupid.
My idea wasn’t to seek help for him, but for me. There was no plan yet, just an idea to get out of the house while he was like that. And I didn’t mean staying at a friends house or running away. I was being reasonable, but was I being rational?
Maybe. Here was why: I had a year before I turned eighteen and that would’ve prompted me to consider my future. The concept of a future without my dad around was still scary, but I knew it would eventually happen. In my mind, I was killing two birds with one stone.
Before my summer vacation ended, I asked my dad if I could do something I never thought I would: to move out. It wasn’t like I never wanted to see him again, and I told him that. I also didn’t mean to move out of the house permanently, not initially.
My idea was to live and learn, and the best way to do that was to stay on campus. A boarding school.
The idea set him off. He furiously told me how much it would cost him to simply have me live someplace else, let alone the services a boarding school would charge him. I must not have had a realistic concept of how much money he could afford, otherwise I would’ve never brought it up. I didn’t want to see him like that, let alone hear him direct his rage at me.
But since I had experienced him getting in my face, incoherently shouting, so angry with me that he stammered and spat, I wanted nothing more than to get away. To try life on my own, while still getting an education, suddenly sounded like a tangible dream I could reach for. I just had to reach him first. So I argued, brought up my perspective on our household events, and told him what he was doing right there and then was exactly what I wanted to escape.
What I didn’t realize then was that the following silence, after I told him my reason for wanting to move out, would hurt. He didn’t have to say anything. I saw the expression on his face soften, then drop, and the confusion that followed grew on him until he appeared completely lost. My dad looked around, aimlessly staring at anything and thoughtlessly trying to practice speech, but without any direction; he floundered.
I was right there, but he couldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t speak to me until he knew what had to be said. My dad was unable to find the right words, and kept his painfully long silence.
When he’d finally left me alone, gone outside and drove off, I knew that night was his step away from recreational drinking toward an alcoholic problem. I thought I had made a fatal mistake and provoked the worst outcome to appear.
During the first hour of that horrible revelation, I dove onto my bed and sought comfort to sleep away the issues. I thought that maybe I could pretend I hadn’t committed a monstrous error and plainly sleep, dream up something new, and have an idea what the next day would bring.
But I couldn’t. The moment after my head hit the pillow, I turned and surprised myself when I shoved my face down into that very pillow: I cried. I thought that was it, as some would say, “This is the End.” I’d fucked up and pushed my dad away. He was out there and had found another terrible way to relieve his stress.
I didn’t want to be here when he failed to realize what he thought a draught would do for him. So I wiped my tears away and got back up. I wasn’t going to take what was coming lying down.
I was back on track.
While he was busy drowning himself in his cups, I looked online for the cheapest boarding school I might be able to afford. There was a savings account I could always request my dad to open up. He’d argue again, but my fear factor had gone up a notch since I knew he’d be drinking. I’d read, heard, and seen too many stories of drunk fathers that abused their children. Those stories poured me a really bad cocktail of stubborn and stupid.
My dad was nothing like those dramatized stories of horrific parents.
How did I know? The next day, he waited for me in the dining room. He had called off work, made us breakfast, and offered an apology for last night. I accepted it, but that was the only thing I said to him until we finished our meals.
As I was washing the dishes, he told me where he had gone last night and what he did. He admitted to drinking, but nothing like whiskey or scotch or... nothing hard. He couldn’t afford to risk a traffic accident or running into a checkpoint.
He swore, it was a light drink. I don’t know if I believed him, but that wasn’t what I remember mattered that morning. It was what I found online during his nighttime visit at the bar.
I brought up the subject of boarding schools. He was silent, so I took that as permission to continue.
What we went over were the few state-run schools that permitted students to live on campus. Colleges and universities, yes, but I had another year before I graduated and could’ve given those beauties a shot. Then I brought up the independent schools and their hefty fees.
I agreed with him, they were expensive as all Hell. I asked him if he would like to look with me, and he agreed. We went to his room and cracked down on what was available within our nation’s borders.
As I mentioned, my dad was not a bad man. He helped me look and went over what all was available for the school year. We even made a list of schools that he said could be within his budget.
I did bring up my savings, but he explained that wasn’t to be touched until I was an adult. In other words, I still had a year to go.
Since I would have to rely entirely on my dad’s funding, I secretly vowed to pay him back. I may have been his son, but I felt wrong to have him pay for something he had no desire to see happen. If I were in his shoes, I’d have thought the money was being thrown away.
That brought up a good point from a different perspective, so we took a break from searching for schools and focused on the benefits of attending and lodging at a private school. There were two highlighted bonuses: living on campus meant I could focus better without as many distractions, like electronics, and the second was that I’d perform better as well due to my new environment being entirely academic.
I supported those two major points, which seemed to encourage my dad a little.
The Internet only provided generic descriptions of what to expect, which would’ve been the only thing I told my dad to believe. Connecting the world wasn’t entirely a new concept, but there were a number of questionable websites that hadn’t been verified and wouldn’t be scrutinized until years later. With that in mind, I suggested an alternative: we’d go and pay the schools we listed a visit. Like scouting, looking around the place before we commit ourselves to anything. Once we knew the schools were real, then we would’ve begun the talks with each other and on the phone with the community board of directors. Eventually, we had an appointment, kinda like an interview… but that’s getting ahead of myself.
With that initial plan put into action, we inadvertently started having our car rides again. Once or twice, my dad let me take the wheel. At first, I was really nervous about it because the ZX wasn’t automatic. But after a few tries, I thought I handled myself well… although I felt uncomfortably bad for grinding the gears during my learning curve. He didn’t blame me; I was new at the whole three pedal and stick shift. He might’ve just been happy to pass on a skill to me.
On that note, we did take the convertible hatches off of the roof and had the wind cooling our heads. Just as it was when I was a kid, it was really cool to experience those nostalgic trips.
Another noteworthy thing to mention: I no longer had that God-awful mullet, but I did grow my hair out. I grew up with the hair’s weight pouring over my shoulders. So that meant I got used to it. Still, I enjoyed having long hair for the look and feel of it, but I excused it for a utilitarian reason: my bangs could be pulled back with and in my ponytail. That kept my vision from being obscured and my face from being irritated by stray hairs. Albeit I had to care for my hair, otherwise new hairs would sprout much shorter than I could manage. I didn’t want to get into the habit of cutting those small hairs, so I simply looked into and acquired the ingredients I needed to keep a healthy scalp and the durable golden threads that went with it.
But since I already went the distance with my hair, I thought not going the extra mile would’ve been a sign of laziness or neglect. I had an excuse to use my allowance and neighborly wages on skincare products, like non-abrasive soaps and rejuvenating creams. Believe me, once I started and really got into it, I was never agitated again by an itchy scalp, chapped lips, dry palms, or any of that grit. It felt like I could clearly breathe in a whole new way.
So the sensation being in the car with Dad was amazing. If I had felt the experience of freedom when I was little, I came alive with the tingly sensation of the open road washing over me. I wouldn’t have minded at all if we had kept on that long stretch through the countryside to God knows where we’d wind up. The journey there was what would’ve thrilled me, and I knew my Dad felt similar.
But I would learn all things come to an end.
We’d found one school after another and searched around the location. I could go into great detail about each one, but there was just one of those schools that was worthy of mention: the one I’d attend. My next year would be centralized around a school called Clarus Hall.
Appointments had been made, greetings and meetings established over the phone, and we played the waiting game until we had the chance to sit down with the people taking charge of my future.
The day arrived for us to actually meet the teachers and staff in person. I was offered another opportunity behind the wheel, and I took it. He explained that when it was time for me to move, he wanted to be the one to drive me there. That’s where I was at, a welcome collision course between deciding I’d made the right choice and the happiness that Dad supported my decision.
I was so fucking stupid…
