Finding Father II

A Memory of Rabbits

 

The day my father killed the rabbits was humid. Wet. Uncomfortable.

My parents are ritualistic in their waking. My mother sounds her arrival to the house deliberately, shouting to the animals, making mom-smells in the kitchen. But dad is softer. He paces. Opens doors, then closes them, and opens them again, searching for hypothetical intruders in the garden.

The sound of my parents talking in the early morning makes me feel home.

My father mumbled to my mother, made something clang as he moved, and moved outside. I watched him from my bedroom window, silent in the purple light of dawn. His eyes were tired. I remember turning away, terrified that, for the first time, my protector-dad may be afraid of something.

Mom was smoking in the kitchen. My pyjamas had grown moist in the heat of sleep, and my hair wormed its way across my childchubby cheek. She pursed her lips and clicked her tongue at me, trying to better my appearance. Then she ordered me to carry breakfast cereals through to the table.

We were put to work all morning. My brother, sister and I stole concerned glances to each other, each acknowledging, but misunderstanding the tension in our home.
We wanted to know why all the curtains were drawn. We wanted to play with our rabbits.

Finally, as the last surface had been polished and the sausages put out for eating, my father entered the house. He was carrying a shovel. His brow was sandy, crusted by sweat. He nodded to my mother and left the room.
She said they loved us, but the rabbits were sick. They had to go.

 

Highly Evolved

 

 

Just me?

Or are kids these days older than they should be? Smarter? With sharper wit? Streetsmarts? Third-eyed and forked-tongued? It used to be that one’s twenties were the time for exploration and examination and revelations of self. Now, now we are breeding mini rocket scientists; pint-sized Plato’s discussing Sid Vicious and Sandra Dee as they are breastfed skinny decaf cappies and seek identity in Woody Allen’s prose. Claiming adult spaces. Baby beatniks toddling toward some new form of angst, only it isn’t that at all because what was maudlin has become something else ahead of us, us left trailing in the dust where conviction met irony met cyberspeak, what? Something is going on. I heard Sean Penn say in a film once, that the world is run by a computer and seven women. It doesn’t matter what film it was; it was silly and solely highlighted by this line, trust me. And it is a funny and sort of creepy idea, but largely untrue. Because, actually, our universe is run by tweens. Terrorist toddlers, with their eyes on the prize and their thumbs on Mxit. We’re breeding superhuman children who adapt to trend and technology faster than we can say ‘Blu-Ray’ (which really doesn’t take very long to say at all, so that wasn’t a great analogy; it’s just, I’ve recently discovered what Blu-Ray is and wanted to appear current, I’m sorry.) If Charles Darwin were sitting around today in, oh I don’t know, say, Vida, writing an addendum to The Origin of the Species, I bet there would be a significant chapter covering our young’ins.  This is survival of the fittest and the twelve year-olds are winning.

Things are not as they were. Like the tide, it is the cycles in our existence which, largely in retrospect, offer up meaning. Childhood changes. Adulthood becomes the playground of kids. It’s a www.jungle for us new-age apes as we struggle, against all the odds, to lust for life. William Kentridge suggests that things become false when they are declared ‘fact’, rather than moments in a process. We thirst for and dream of the ongoing now, where we are so very much involved, so passionately part of the living of our lives, that we find humour, extract profundity and seduce some higher way of being. We chase meaning. Many believe that it is this chase which separates us from the beasts. I’d argue that Hummers, Justin Timberlake and the chemical peel are also significant dividers, but still. The world is becoming smaller. This we know. We’ve transcended borders and geography to prance in network playgrounds. Cultures turn in on themselves and out on each other. The once un-hip becomes the tragically cool. Age shifts, roles reverse and we stand doe-eyed in flux. What comes next, we’re not so sure. We look back on what we were with the eyes of what we are now and what is still to come, and can only be gracious in our dealings with memory. Everything is starting to become something else and all we have is the chase. The lust for life. We’ve come a long way, Charlie Brown.
We struggle to reach higher. That’s what makes us highly evolved.