4th of July After-Action Report and Year in Review

From the Year of the Flu and Race Riots, Too, so you know it’s got to be special. Like Special Education students are special.

First off, I’m sounding off on a peeve of mine, namely, the expression “I hate to say this, but—” Stop lying, dirtbag. You relish this. You can’t wait to see the hurt on people’s faces when you say what you supposedly hate to say.

Such gross dishonesty really grinds my gears. And, now, the news....

One month after moving out for his new job, our son came down to visit us for the 4th of July weekend. The first night we stayed up and drank and listened and talked about music and stuff. We hit the bar around the corner on the Fourth itself, then walked to the convenience store a mile down the road like a couple of bored teenage dudes on a summer evening’s adventure, then walked home. 

We didn’t shoot off any fireworks. There are at least three houses on my side of town good to shoot off an arsenal each on these occasions. On Sunday, my son changed his oil in our garage before driving to the southeastern Colorado town where he’d be working the next week.

Angel came back to visit for the first time since just after Spooky died. He looked much better than he did the last time I saw him. Angel even came by my upstairs office window to cadge treats, something he hadn’t done since autumn. This whole weekend was one big sunbeam break from the clouds.

Thus ended the best weekend we’d enjoyed since Labor Day weekend, which marked the last weekend Otis T. Cat could control his bladder and bowels. If 2020 has been nothing but darkness since March — and it most certainly has — the twilight began that first day Otis missed the litter box in September. What might likely have been the Last Normal Autumn of the United States was just the usual stuff in between cleaning up after an aging cat who was not getting any better. There was nothing special about my birthday or Halloween. Thanksgiving went well. Christmas wasn’t quite a disaster, but it would have helped if I’d waited a while before getting into my cups on Christmas Eve. 

Thinking back on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, it occurs to me there was no excitement about that last third of 2019 from Labor Day until then. We were simply marking time. A particularly bitter and ugly irony occurs to me when I realize I should have had Otis put down in October, to spare him the loneliness of not sleeping with us upstairs that was his fate for the last six months of his life. Putting Otis down in October would have definitely “enlivened” (the best word I’ve got) those perfunctory final months of the year.

Instead, we did what we did, and January and February went slow, gray and ghastly, as they are most anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. At the last of February we realized we could wait no longer. So Otis was put down on 3 March, and when the Great Pandemic Panic and lockdown got going two weeks later, it was just another sad and awful thing in a sad and awful year following a long prologue. 

Ginger Tom took sick and died in late April; I found Spooky dead by the side of the road in early May. I buried three kittens born of two different litters among the ferals. Then my son, who had quit his job sometime back, I forget, decided he was ready to go back to work. As of the first of June, my wife and I were empty-nesters again.

But my son came down to visit last weekend. We’re not alone and forsaken. That’s something. A very huge something, for which I am grateful.

My forward progress with The Wrong Kind of Dead has exploded entire finished pages at a time since then, in glorious contrast to the depression-enforced writer’s block that crushed my fingers when we left our grown children behind in Colorado Springs four years ago. More on that later. Meanwhile, I’m counting up the blessings and keeping my brave face properly starched and ironed. So far, so good, and here’s hoping you’re the same.

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.