The year is 1952.

posted by jeremy on December 13, 2003

My father & I are walking south, ever so slowly, down a deserted stretch of beach on the Florida coast. The Gulf of Mexico is a placid blue-silver plain stretched out before us, the white sand brilliant in the evening sun. Gulls wheel & scream & we trundle along, just east of the tidal detritus lining the shore. We are the most intimate of strangers, father & son & I have defied everything to come here. I have spit in god's eye, not to mention Stephen Hawkings. But I'm telling you, I had to do this.

I had to come see my father... before... all of those long sharp years.

I met my dad at a crowded smoky bar last night, where he was drinking with some of his buddies from the Base. I know that he hardly ever drinks & yet there he was, loaded & laughing. I sat down with him & told him that I knew him from... way back.

"Where from 'xactly?" he asked with his faint southern drawl, his startlingly smooth features, his bright young eyes... Images of him, brilliant, clear & warm, flooded thru me; Handing me a knife & wish of good luck. Watching him at my grandmother's funeral. Driving me to school on the coldest mornings. My mother screaming at him in the kitchen. The time he threw me against the wall & loudly considered kicking the hell out of me. Telling semi-bawdy jokes at the dinner table. Burying Anna, our dog, in the garden. Handing hard-earned money over to the desperately poor in the streets of Dayton, Ohio... & then his own slow decline into the ravages of what?

A thousand moments compressed & filtered, beauteous & sad, decades distant.

"Yes... & no." I said, "Hard to explain. Meet me tomorrow & I'll tell you."

He considered this offer for a long moment, the doubt very clear. My father is eighteen years old & he's never seen me before. Product of half his genes, I'm an absolute stranger.

"I've got something important to tell you, to show you. Proof, maybe."

"Proof of what?" he asked me, his curious eyes betraying him.

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I simply say, "I'm your son." & he just stares at me, then nervously, loudly, laughs. "You're older than I am & I... dang..." he pauses, brays again. "...& I think I'd remember if I had a son or not. Yeah, I'd remember that. What are..." He trails off, shaking his head.

"I'm ten years older than you... biologically, but I was born in June of 1975. Mom, Charlotte... had me when she was forty. I was a late surprise. The doctors originally thought that she had cancer but it wasn't. It was me." At the mention of my mother's name, he looks at me hard, the laughter gone from his face. He looks startled, scared, yet filled with the ferocity of a love that will last for over 50 years.

We are standing barefoot in the white sand, facing each other now, almost exactly the same height. He is ten years younger than me, looks healthier, his hair so black & full, his eyes so clear & aware, his muscles strong from the Basic Training, just completed. He could kick my ass up & down this beautiful beach if he chose to. He won't, I tell myself.

He starts in angrily... "How do you know..." but I cut him off & he just glares.

"Look at our feet." I say. "Look very closely." & he looks. We've always had the same feet, the exact same. He keeps looking, his eyes widening slightly.

"You named me." I tell him. "Jeremy Dwight Gilpin." I reach into my pocket & pull out my Oregon state ID card & hand it to him. He takes it hesitantly, then wonderingly. He's never felt plastic like this before, never seen a hologram. The first true digital photo is still 34 years away. Hell, chemical color photography won't even be common until the Seventies.

"Gilpin, Jeremy Dwight, it says, right? Look at the expiration date. Good for another 57 years." & my father sits down hard on the sand, speechless.

"This is for you." I hand him the newspaper I brought back with me, an issue of the Oregonian dated February 1, 2003. Space shuttle Columbia explodes, the headline tells us.

A gull yells out overhead. The warm tide is slowly lapping in. My father never swore but maybe once or twice thru my entire youth.

"Holy fucking hell." my father whispers, staring at the paper.

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The Earth is crawling around the sun, 67,000 miles per hour & we're sitting on the hot beach, smoking, talking, figuring this out. He's stopped shaking finally & we're now drinking the beer (good Oregon micro-brew) that I brought with me in my (futuristic, nylon) pack. My own shivers haven't quite left me alone yet.

"We made it to the moon." he exclaims. "The moon..." he says again, wrapping his tongue around the thought & right now I'm trying to remember if NASA even exists in 1952.

"Hell, they're talking about Mars sometime in the next decade. A manned mission, I mean. There's already been several unmanned missions there. Probes. Robots & shit. Fly-bys. We've sent probes all over the solar system, flew them past comets. One's even headed out of the solar system." I tell him, thinking of Voyagers cold forever journey out through the Oort clouds.

My dad... Dwain... seeing the headline, had asked me about the future of America's space program & so here I am, trying to fill him in on a half centuries worth of space exploration. I tell him about the race with the Russians, the unfortunate ICBM's, the Apollo missions, the Viking missions, the slow/quick development of satellite technology, the Very Large Array, the Challenger accident, the Pathfinder mission, The Hubble Space Telescope, the slow assembly of the International Space Station, soon to be the brightest object in night sky, besides, of course, Luna.

Anything I can remember & he listens, enraptured.

He interrupts me to ask if we found any Martians & I tell him about the ancient chunk of Martian asteroid found frozen in Antarctica & how it contained petrified microbes that scientist think might be non-Terran. I tell him that this is still fiercely disputed, that contamination of the rock by Terran microbes is a distinct possibility, that we might never know, unless we go there with Humans or better robots & find out.

" ...But big smart bugs with plasma rifles running around on the red planet? Sorry, no." I have to say.

He comes back at me with the science-fiction of the day. "What about Venus though? I read how it could be jungle or something." & I break the dispelling news. "Venus is an inferno. An example of what happens at the extreme end of the greenhouse effect, the atmosphere nine times denser than ours & hot enough to melt lead." He looks so disappointed that I tell him there's still a chance we might find life on Europa. I explain how Jupiter exerts a tidal pull on the core of that small eccentric moon & creates volcanic heat that leaks up thru vents underneath all that ice & water... & with the conditions of heat & water in a carbon-rich environment something might have evolved into existence. "Microbes possibly, worms maybe." I say.

He seems content with this & I bum another smoke off of him.

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Dwaine is looking out at a barge that's creeping along near the horizon. He opens his fifth beer & ask me "What about the commies? What about the war? Who wins? What happens? Has anybody dropped an atomic yet? They might still send me out, you know. I don't want to go there. Char's expecting, coming along... & I can't go there. I cannot go there. "

He looks horribly close to tears. He's getting drunk again & the intimacy of this revelation hurts him. I know it. He is... will be... a proud & stoic man.

I want to tell him that everything works out OK. You get pneumonia right before your unit ships off to the war. You end up having to repeat Basic, at the end of which the Army offers you a choice between being a tank commander in Korea or a clerk here in the States. You know what you will choose. You name your first child David. He's a good guy but I don't know him that well. I haven't actually seen any of my five older brothers (six, if you include the dead one) in over six years & you, my dear father, only once in that same span. We occasionally talk, briefly, on the phone.

We don't know each other, Dwaine. You've called me a stranger for years. You've never got me. You have always been too old & me, too young. Too much cultural lag, societal static vibrating between us. I came here so that I could actually know you, at least a little.

I suppose that maybe this is every son's dream.

What I tell him is this... "The Soviet Union falls in 1989. Falls right the hell apart, bankrupt & rotten thru. The whole country is run by the Mafia now, weird as that sounds. Everyone agrees that that's pretty much the truth. No one has used the bomb yet, at least not in actual warfare, Japan aside. Bombed the hell out of bunch of deserts & islands. Fucking nuclear testing. Korea is a bust. America does not win. Nobody wins. 23,000 Americans die. A million Koreans die. Korea splits for good along the thirty-eighth parallel & North Korea turns into a communist shit-hole & South Korea turns into a capitalist shit-hole.... Then we get into a war in Vietnam & that turns super-hellish. 57,000 American draftees die in the space of a decade & who knows how many Vietnamese. It was a bloody fucking mess. It nearly tore America apart."

My father looks torn & sad, the implications heavy, the immense loss of life, all of it sneaking up, so real & he is wondering, as any individual would & should, do I live? I pause for a second, figuring out what to say, how to say this... "But think of this, I'm here, aren't I? What do you think that means? How am I here? Think about it."

He looks at me, puzzled for a moment, then it sinks in. The obviousness comes clear.

"We get thru this, don't we? I get thru this. All of this. All of that." When I nod, his face fills with relief, then utter joy. He smiles & laughs, jumping up, waving his beer at the sky.

"Thank you, god!" He shouts at the sinking sun. "Thank you!"

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He eventually sits back down & tells me about the terror that's wracked him & my mother. About my mother's tears & how he stayed up nights picturing the war in his mind, picturing coming back in a bag or missing a leg or something somehow even worse. Not knowing what the future held, if there was a future to hold & now he does, now there is & the prognosis is good, for him, at least. He tries to thank me & then just starts laughing, filled with the euphoria of his own assured continual existence. It's a fine reason to laugh, I think.

So I don't tell him about the Brown Recluse spider bite that leads to the near amputation of his arm, nor about his kidney stones, nor Michael's early death, Jeff's cancer, Brad's alcoholism, his fights with mom, mom's health problems, my god-parents hideous demise, my own consistent rebellion & disappearances, nor the fate of his only brother.

I don't tell him about the phone conversation we had three days ago where he told me that "...I don't have much left in me. I don't have much time left at all." & I don't tell him how I reacted, how I just stuttered & tried to say something rousing & humorous & it fell so very flat & the silence stretched out between us, both of us sitting there, 2523 miles apart, thinking of the cessation of his life, the encroaching & undeniable reality of it. I don't tell him about any of these things. You're welcome, Dwaine.

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"But the future's not right, is it? It ain't no heaven. It don't sound like one at all." My father's looking at me waiting & I look out at the waves & realize that I don't even have the slightest idea what to say to that. Where is the human race right now? Where do we stand? How are we doing? "We're screwing the pooch, dad." & he blinks at the words, the word... dad.

I go on. "The shit the human race is up to right now is seriously... fucked. For all our knowledge, our fucking technology, for all the possibility of us understanding our place in this galaxy, in this goddam universe. Christ, the Holocaust... the Holocaust is just a drop in the shit-bucket. Stalin. Mao. Nixon. Pol Pot. Milosevic. Bush. Those names mean nearly nothing to you right now. Soon enough, they will. You fucking vote for George W...." I suddenly picture the Rush Limbaugh books on my parent's book shelves the last time I visited them, the American flags hanging from everything, the dense & well-worn King James Bible.

"It's all coming... Cambodia. Rwanda. Bosnia. Serbia. Sierra Leone. Cheknya. The Congo. The Phillipines. Columbia. Shit, the American South during the Civil Rights Movement.

We got over sixty wars going across the planet right now. Most of them 'civil insurrections' in the bullshit of the day. Landmines. Depleted Uranium. Smart bombs. Remote drones. Machetes. Rape & plunder. Wars over water, food, territory & oil. Unending genocide. Ethnic cleansing."

& Earth itself, Terra, Gaia. The fucking suffering, the culmination of our abuses.

"Fifty years from now, dad, we'll have a whole new set of worries. Global warming. Ozone depletion. I mean, the goddam ice caps are melting, icebergs the size of Delaware breaking off & raising the the sea level 6mm every year, creating a whole new class of refugees. Massive deforestation accompanied by the drastic loss of topsoil. A hundred species going poof every single day, down-sized into biological history. Invasive species ravaging so many different biomes. Insane levels of pollution. Mercury, I think, will soon be fucking the Sea of Japan. Hell, there will be a sea of radioactive waste, from Nevada to Chernobyl, not to mention a fine layer of fallout settling over nearly the whole of America from atmospheric nuke testing." I'm thinking of the levels of radioactivity found in the milk of the cows from the county where I grew up at. How much of that did I drink in my childhood? How much did we all?

"& the ongoing decline, or should I say decimation? Of the plankton in our oceans, the very base of the frigging food chain & because of what? UV? Over-fishing? Pollution? Hey, take your pick. HIV/AIDS spreading like fire. Ebola was a hoot. SARS is pretty fun. McDonald's & Burger King telling fat-ass America to super-size it but watch out for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or Mad Cow, as it's known & hey, heart disease is the number one killer. Number two is cancer, cancer, cancer like you wouldn't believe. One in five, they say. The Multi-Corps are sodomizing the fucking planet in the hope of a better stock index. The happy happy bullshit of capitalism. NAFTA. The WTO. Neo-liberalism is the new buzzword for the rich getting richer while the poor get shit. Globalization, the consumerist meme gone global. Disposable packaging, disposable diapers, disposable cameras, disposable cell-phones & all the while, landfills spreading like the very landscape of Hell. The fucking oily weapons industry. The war in Iraq, Afghanistan & Iraq were just info-mercials for our new weapons systems. Just part of the fucking quest for oil... & we got bio-tech weapons baying somewhere in the background like some stupid vicious bitch-dog just waiting to be let loose.

We got militant factions warring over everything you could imagine... But mostly it's just Allah versus Krishna versus Jesus, just like fucking forever. Just starving superstitious soul-fucked peasants but with AK-47s, car bombs & Stinger missiles. Oh wait till the 9/11 attack in 2001. Christ, the World Trade Centers won't even be built for another twenty-something years.... & what our government does in the name of it all. PATRIOT Act, my ass. Screw them. Screw all of it. I'm telling you, man, fuck all of it."

I suddenly feel like crying... or laughing. I can't tell. The words just keep coming. I'm a fucking Cassandra & my father's just looking at me with perplexed but compassionate eyes. The way a empathic dog might look at the screaming victim of a some accident: I'm so sorry, so sorry, so very sorry for what it is that's happened... I wish I could make it better.

But I can't, I can't even understand it.

"Six point five billion people. That's how many people are alive in 2003. Supposed to be nine billion within a couple decades... Some fucking legacy you guys leave us."

I suddenly remember what he once told me, when I was eighteen years old, his age now, that that's how he thought the human race would go. Just like the deer in Ohio... Breed & breed & breed, eat everything & then starve slowly, horribly, over the course of some lean winter. Forty-one years from now, this man, the father of seven children, will tell me this without any sense of irony. Hate flashes in me, brilliantly, loudly, but just for a moment, like a supernova or a gunshot... Temporary but fierce, fierce but temporary.

I dig deep now, I dig for the dim bright spot & I say "But we're smart monkeys, no matter how fucking stupid we are. Some of us are trying. We're fighting like hell. We're trying to be kind, trying, trying to be sentient. It's difficult to look at history, at the patterns, the idiot repetitions of war & revolution & apply that knowledge to your everyday life. The walls that stand between us & what? What? Utopia? Sanity? Health-care? A goddam meal? You wouldn't even believe. The corps, the governments are like gods & most of us dissenters don't even know what we're struggling for. We can't see it, it's never existed before, it's never been seen. Some say science is the devil. Others say religion.

I say tradition mixed with technology... But who fucking knows? We're like children burning our hands on the great big fire of evolutionary development. Either we burn or learn & I think... I hope we're learning. Shit, I hope we're fucking learning." & I am crying now.

How did I get so upset? Over what? I'm fucking drunk. I'm a cynical fuck & fuck this shit. It's nothing. I don't care. But maybe I do, maybe I do. I'm crying & now my dad's arms are around me. He's holding me awkwardly & telling me "It's OK. It's OK. Don't cry. It's gonna be OK." This just makes me cry harder & I'm furious at this, so fucking humiliated & he holds me tighter & maybe I do care about it all, maybe I don't. I think maybe I do, I know, suddenly, that I do. I shout, I scream something, punching at the sand, punching at my father, hating him, hating him always for being so stupid, so fucking simple, punching him, blaming him for everything ever & then he hits me back, just once, but very accurately...

& the entire world seems to blur away, somehow beautifully, thru the lense of my tears, the pain of my miraculously broken nose & god-shit, goddam, the motherfuck, this hurts.

It hurts.

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I'm OK now. I'm bleeding but fine.

The first of the stars have come out, blazing in the east. I'm sitting in the sand, with a rag held to my nose & my heart aches with something I don't think I've ever felt, not in the course of my adult life. I don't know what it is. The feeling, maybe, of a certain kind of joy but it's like an atrophied muscle, this love of my father & it burns me & I'm happy, I'm happy.

Tho the world be fucked, my father is alive, really alive, at least for now.

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& now Dwaine shouts... "Charlotte! Hey! Over here!" & a hundred feet away, picking her way up the beach, is a beautiful girl with pale & freckled skin, bright red hair & as she sits down next to us, I can see that she is three or four months gone with my oldest brother & now she's looking at me, looking at my busted face with her bright green eyes...

& my dad says, "Charlotte, this here is someone I want you to meet."