5. BURN THE BOATS, Part 1

Reason for Being in the World

For my father, for me, the past really was a foreign country, and it really wasn't dead or even past. He had a view of it I couldn’t make out from where I stood, but I tried to populate a village in my imagination.

Some people memorialize time’s remnant. They revere it. Most simply forget it, in general obliviousness. They disregard it. They think they live free of it. When they think of it at all, they call it childhood and memory, nostalgia, bad things that happened once and nag at you as life gets lived. It’s personal.

At some point, Mom shared with me information I no longer recall, with reasoning now lost with the information, that was her basis for believing my father was really born in 1909, not 1910. I was persuaded.

"Do you really think he was born on Christmas Day?" she had added. "Nobody knows when he was born. Goldie was two."

I suppose Aikah knew. No one thought to ask her, cared to. Oblivious. I think I met her only once, at some cousin’s house, to whom I also paid no mind, …