“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.”
~ Mark Twain
3…2…1… GO!
The lobsters skitter across the floor, this time far less interested in playing our little game. The first lobster abandons his lead, then turns around and starts back toward Daisy.
“Ahh!” Daisy shrieks, backing out from the kitchen and falling into the tiny dining room overlooking an outside garden still showing plenty of color in the crisp January air. Daisy’s cry isn’t real. It’s just a cover of the same one she’s been playing for the last twenty minutes… two thirds of the lobsters’ last half hour alive.
“One more time?” I ask.
“Of course,” she giggles.
Daisy hops over the giant sea roach then squats down to adjust the finish line while I herd the lobsters with the wrong end of a broom toward our awkwardly assembled starting gate.
3…2…1… GO! The lobsters are off for the evening’s final race; the last one of their lives. The lazier of the two lobsters somehow finds its final wind. It scratches across the linoleum at a sudden pace we didn’t know it had. The second lobster appears to take the turn of events personally and recovers his lead by climbing over the first.
The moment strikes us about a mile and a half past funny. We try to catch our breath, fail, and collapse on the floor in a single breathless heap.
The water is now ready; a rolling boil of a billion bubbles. I leave the kitchen to the sound of searing air whistling through shell.
I retrieve my glass and head to the sofa. ”Happy Birthday,” I hear from behind. I turn around just as the camera’s flash sweeps the living room with a one second swath of light.
“Thanks for the lobster,” I say, raising my glass, “and the wine.” I collapse on the couch, feeling it for the first time as soon as I say the word.
“My pleasure.” Daisy falls next to me on the couch, her arm around my shoulder and head on my chest, each of us, smiling as we replay our private version of the last five minutes in the exclusive theater of our own mind’s eye.
The next five minutes felt like a neat slice of forever, though they were the last I truly remember from that memorable evening. Even those details might have dimmed were it not for the black and white photograph; the one where I’m smiling, slightly off guard, in sunglasses unwrapped just twenty minutes before. The picture isn’t old enough to be a legitimate black and white, Daisy and I just happened to be in the midst of a phase where we preferred black and white to color, before the days when hues could be bleached with the click of a mouse.
Writer Dad, this story obviously takes place well before you were a writer or a dad. What’s your point?
I do have a point, I promise, but this is only the first part of a longer tale. The rest I’ll spill on Friday. What I will say is that this particular celebration has been elevated to the stuff of legend, at least in the eyes of one particular person; the story now bestowed with the sort of magic found mostly in fairy tale.
Sometimes fairy tales are written down, sometimes they are passed from mother to son or father to daughter. Sometimes, fairy tales are born from a single moment captured and framed in an old photograph.
On Friday, the rest of the story. Until then…
Writer Dad
Hire Ghostwriter Dad to help turn your memories into forever.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
