#the black parade is joining me on my errands today.

[ghostzzy]

my chemical romance….

#the black parade is joining me on my errands today. #izzy.txt

[p-artsypants]

Boy Toy (Act IX)

I have been reading each and every review that comes in, and I appreciate all of them! I also understand some of you are worried about the ending. And I promise, all of my stories have happy endings! (Because it makes the suffering worth it.)

FF.net | AO3

—

With the collapse of Bludvist, its seemed like the whole Kingdom as they knew it did a complete 180. Daily, Stoick received letters asking for loans and building permits to finally fix some essential buildings. The hospital was on the top of the list. It had been knocked down, looted, and burned over and over again, but Stoick had been adamant that building had to survive, no matter what. So now, with the threat of constant destruction gone, an entire new hospital was being built.

Next on the list was the orphanage. For obvious reasons. Stoick was also offering, what was essentially, free money to those who needed it the most. Families were coming in groups, each collecting a sum and then pooling them together to make enough for a really nice housing unit. Once spring broke in a few weeks, the building could begin, and life would go on.

But that was not so for everyone. Almost immediately after the attack, three men came to Stoick, groveling. They spoke of a plot of assassination on the Tsar’s head, and begged forgiveness since they turned themselves in.

Since none of them knew any helpful information on the matter, they were thrown into the dungeon, and security in the palace was doubled. There wasn’t much else to be done.

Meanwhile, Hiccup and Astrid continued their daily walks. Slowly this time, as Hiccup was still recovering from his grievous wounds, and he had a new leg to get used to. Toothless likewise was recovering, but the brave little thing was doing fine.

“Astrid, can I ask you something?”

“Hmm?”

“When…before I was taken…I had this feeling.” Though he had decided to brooch the subject, he couldn’t quite find his words. “Were there days when you didn’t wind me up?”

Astrid glanced to the snow. “Yes,” she stated, softly. That was before she knew he was human, when she thought she could do what she wanted. “It was days when the calendar was just full of meetings and brunches…I knew I wouldn’t have any time to really interact with you…so I just left you off.”

He furrowed his brows as he studied her. “I don’t think you’re being honest with me.”

God, had he already learned to read her so well? That was a painful thought.

“You got me.” She admitted. “There were days I didn’t start you up…because…” She couldn’t say it. It was just to horrible, and just confirmed everyone’s hateful words about her.

“You started to grow tired of me?”

Her eyes slammed shut. So he figured her out? Well, it was fairly obvious. In the past months, he had proven his intelligence and had already come a long way from the naïve puppet he was at the beginning.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s okay.”

“No, no it’s not.” She frowned hard, holding in painful thoughts. “You’re my husband…my best friend. And I treated you like dirt.”

“Astrid, you didn’t know…”

“I should have!” She shouted, disrupting the peaceful snowfall around them. “I spent the most time around you, so I should have seen it! I should have seen that you had a heart and feelings—“ She turned her head away from him, hiding her shame. “But I was so blinded that I missed it all.”

Warm hands encircled her shoulders. “But that was then, and you came for me. Now, you’ve opened up to me. I forgive you, Astrid.”

His words allowed her shoulders to relax and her head to roll forward. “I…I’m going to make this up to you, Hiccup. You’ve suffered your whole life, and now I want you to enjoy your time you have left.”

He smiled at her gently, and let his fingers dance across her cheek. “I don’t remember much of my old life. My purpose now is just to make you happy. So don’t worry about me, okay?”

Though she audibly agreed, on the inside, she had a much different plan.

—

The next morning, she awoke to see Hiccup still asleep next to her. His body was still, not breathing like a normal human, but pressing her head to his chest, she still heard the ticking of gears.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, kissing his forehead. “But I need you to stay asleep today.”

She dressed on her own, before Ruff or Tuff even arrived. And when they did, she surprised them by opening the door before they could knock.

“Oh, you’re up early.” Ruff acknowledged.

“I have business to attend to today.”

“Like the brunch with Heather Zerker?”

She had forgotten about that. “I need to reschedule. Today I’m doing something for Hiccup.”

The twins stared in awe, and then scrambled to take care of the necessary preparations.

“Yes!” Cried Ruff, glancing at her list. “We’ll take care of everything! Don’t worry a bit!”

“And, one more thing...” she warned them. “Hiccup is powered off for the day, because what I’m doing is a secret. Leave it that way.”

The twins saluted.

“Good,” she stated, adjusting her cloak to cover part of her face. “Now fetch Snotlout. I’m going out.”

—

The first stop on her errand run was to Gobber’s.

The toy maker was busy at work, he and Fishlegs were repairing some of the more salvageable toys she had in the basement of the castle.

“Ahem,” she cleared her throat.

“Your majesty!” Fishlegs nearly shouted, dropping a screwdriver.

“As you were,” she stated cooly.

“Well Princess,” greeted Gobber. “What can I do you for? Is Hiccup alright?” He noted the boy’s absence.

“My husband is doing well since the incident.” She provided. “But I’m here on a private matter, one that must remain secret from him.”

Fishlegs stopped his working and listened in interest.

“Oh?” Asked Gobber.

“I would like his name, his real name.”

Gobber sighed, “Are you sure about this? He doesn’t have any memories and he—“

“His name, Gobber.”

“…it’s Henry.”

The memory of the woman during the parade came to mind. She had also called him Henry.

“And his last name?”

“I don’t know.” Gobber shrugged. “When the lad was still a little thing, maybe around 8 or 9, he came and asked me to teach him how to make toys, because he couldn’t afford to buy them himself. So I took him in as an apprentice. He said he didn’t have a last name, and that he lived with his mother in the narrows.”

The narrows were a part of the town down by the docks. Where most of the buildings were abandoned warehouses, there were a handful of shacks, some being only a room with a whole family in it. Being so far from the market meant they were far from the Berk Guard. There was no protection from criminals, but there were rarely raids from Bludvist all the way down there.

“So he was your apprentice?” She asked, “for how long?”

“Up until he died, actually. Fishlegs joined us about two years ago, when we made that working catapult.”

Ah yes, she remembered that one. A great deal of fun.

“You met him a few times too, on birthdays and Christmas.”

Her eyes widened. “What? I did? I don’t remember…”

“He never introduced himself, but he was there when we delivered presents. He said he enjoyed seeing your reaction.”

A guilty knife stabbed her in the gut and made her weak in the knees.

“I met his mother on occasion, but she seemed like a very private person. Didn’t say much, and never stayed for very long. But she loved him immensely. He never knew his father.”

“When did he…you know…?”

Gobber sighed, sitting on his bench. He glanced to a room in the back corner, that was covered by a sheet. “I should have noticed sooner. He never ate the food I gave him, instead wrapping it up to take home to share with his mother. He was always skinny, skinny as a twig. But then one day, he fell in the snow and broke a few ribs. It wasn’t a bad fall, so I knew something was wrong. Turned out, he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His mother was ill, and he gave her every morsel he could scrape up. All the while, he was lying to her that he was eating his own portions. So we sat him down, and forced him to actually eat. But by then…it was too late. His mother came to me crying, and said that he went to bed feeling sick, and never woke up.”

Tears came to Astrid’s eyes, hating everything that was being said.

“We buried him, and then we came to your birthday ball.”

Her eyes widened. “Right after?”

“It was a good distraction.” Provided Fishlegs.

“When you said ’I want you to make me a husband’ my immediate thought was ‘we should bring Henry back.’”

“How?” She asked, “How on earth did you do it? In three days, no less?”

Gobber beckoned her and Snotlout into the back room. It was a workstation, and it looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in a long time. “Is this…?”

“His work room, yes. Henry was extremely smart and creative, despite having no education. He taught himself how to read, and did research on physics, aerodynamics, human and animal anatomy…everything that caught his interest.” Gobber picked up a journal that sat on the workbench. “It started innocent. He found a little black cat that was missing a leg, and nursed it back to health, creating a fake leg for him.”

“Toothless!” She exclaimed.

Gobber stared at her in surprise. “Yes, that was what he called him. How did you know that?”

She smiled, fondly. “He…Toothless was following him. Hiccup found him in the courtyard and took care of him. He dubbed him Toothless out of the blue, and the name stuck.”

Gobber smoothed his mustache. “It seems…some of his memories are coming back to him.”

Astrid nodded, but said nothing, urging him to continue.

“Not long after people noticed Toothless walking everywhere with him, a little old woman came to us. She had lost her cat to old age, but she wanted her companion with her for the time she had left. So Hiccup designed a…system of sorts. Something that worked like an artificial heart to keep the body running like it normally would. Only, it had to be powered by a hand crank. Therefore, the wind up key. When it worked, we kind of thought he was crazy, but he promised never to touch it again.”

“You mean he designed…that whole thing?”

“Yes, every detail and note is contained in this.” Gobber handed her the journal. “He didn’t create it with the intention to revive a human, and if I hadn’t been drinking, I probably wouldn’t have tried to do it either. It is rather…morbid and wrong.”

Astrid didn’t say anything, just held the journal in her hand.

“But, of anyone in Berk that deserved a second chance…I think he definitely earned it.”

Astrid wiped her eyes.

“Does that give you closure?”

She looked to him. “Does he have any other journals? Can I take them to him?”

Gobber frowned. “Are you sure? If he reads these…it could bring back old memories.”

“That’s what I want. I know he suffered, but he deserves to know the truth about who he was.”

Gobber sighed, knowing there was no arguing with the Princess. So he simply nodded and got to work packaging up all his notes and sketchbooks. “Just be careful.”

She nodded.

—

The next stop was the graveyard. she wasn’t quite sure why she decided to come here, but she just wanted to see his grave. Maybe to cement the fact that her husband was dead at one point.

Problem was, the graveyard was fairly large, since Bludvist tended to keep things busy.

“Do we even know if his graved was marked?” Asked Snotlout.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I should have asked Gobber.”

“Pardon me,” a voice spoke.

Turning, they were greeted by a man not much older than the Princess, looking rather large and imposing. He wore red robes, those associated with the church, but had three blue lines inked on his broad chin.

“You’re a—“ Astrid began, taking a few steps towards her guard.

“A milk drinker?” He asked, pleasantly. “Yes, I was. Don’t worry, it frightens everyone. I may have been born up in the mountains, but I don’t consider it my home. My name is Eret, I’m the undertaker here. Now that you know that I’m not going to hurt you, can I help you?”

Astrid smiled in relief, but Snotlout did not relax his guard. “I’m looking for a grave. The name Henry, buried around November 13th.”

“Hmm…last name?”

“No last name.”

“No last name? Oh! I think I actually know who you’re talking about. This way.”

The Princess and her guard followed Eret past all sorts of statues of angels and headstones, until he stopped at a little plot. It was only marked with a puny wooden cross. “Well, this is it. Young Henry, died of starvation.”

“Yes, this would be the grave we’re looking for.” There was no body in it, but just the sight of the cross sent a real, true coldness to her bones. She crossed her arms a little.

“Did you know him?” The undertaker asked.

He obviously had no idea who she was, since her hood hid her identity. And it was safer that way. “No, not really. Did you?”

“A bit.” Said Eret. “I began to keep an eye on his mother after his passing. She’s quite ill, and it’s only a matter of time before…”

“What is she ill with?” Astrid asked, not hiding the concern in her voice.

“Not sure. She can’t afford a doctor. We here call it poverty disease. It’s when someone gets sick, and then can’t afford any care. Eventually it’s just exacerbated by them trying to continue working…”

“Where is she? I’d love to help.”

“She lives down in the narrows, by the old fishery. Her name is Valerie.”

—

Astrid, for being the Princess of a country, had never been to the narrows before. Surely, Stoick would throttle her if he found out she went there with only one guard.

“Hey Astrid?” Snotlout asked softly.

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re good at fighting too. This place makes me nervous. Not that I can’t protect you, but…”

“I wonder how many times Hiccup was jumped coming home from work?”

Snotlout sneered, “once would be too many.”

They spotted a woman doing laundry, and asked her if she knew of a woman named Valerie. Then they were pointed in the right direction. Despite the grittiness of the area, the folks were helpful enough. Though Astrid did receive a few too many lewd looks while Snotlout received the finger.

“I dressed down,” Astrid noted, looking at her plain clothes. “But I still look a lot nicer than all these people.”

“Lets just find Hiccup’s mom and get out of here.”

Finally, they came to a little shack. Smoke rose out of the little tin chimney, indicating that someone was home. Astrid knocked, “Hello? Miss Valerie?”

A weak voice answered from within. “Who is it? What do you want?”

“I…am a friend of your son’s. I would just like a word, please.”

There was a pause and then, “come in.”

The shack was in order. A small room with two beds opposite of each other, and a fire pit in the middle of the dirt floor. Nothing else was there to mention.

In one bed laid a woman, looking incredibly thin and frail. She fought to sit up, coughing a few times. “Hello?”

Astrid didn’t know what to say. A few months ago, she had mocked this woman, and called her crazy. But now, she was meeting her mother in law, and didn’t have a clue how to proceed. “Uh…”

“You knew my Henry?” The woman’s eyes were filled with sorrow, and the dirt on her hollow cheeks made her look like a skeleton.

Oh, Astrid should have put more thought into this. Yes, reuniting Hiccup was his mother sounded like a wonderfully kind thing to do. But the woman had already lost her son once, and now he was going again. This wasn’t fair to her.

“Please,” said Valerie. “Tell me how you knew him...I miss him so much.”

With a sad sigh, Astrid stepped forward, and took a seat on the bed, pulling her hood from her face. “I know your son…”

“You’re…the Princess Astrid? But…how? Why? Here?” She shook her head. “Your husband, during the parade…”

“He is Henry,” She confirmed, holding the woman’s hand. “He’s alive.”

“He’s a—…” The woman dissolved into tears and curled in on herself.

Snotlout watched in awe as his princess embraced this filthy beggar woman in a comforting hug. He had fairly recent memories of Astrid spitting on such people.

But that was before Hiccup came along.

“Snotlout,” Astrid called.

“Highness,” he snapped to attention.

“Can you fetch a carriage? She needs to come with us to the palace.”

“No, no please...” the woman begged, her tears making streaks in the dirt on her face.

“Listen,” Astrid said, taking a firm grasp of her arms. “Henry is...he’s not the same boy that you knew. He did die, that is true. But the toy maker brought him back. He doesn’t remember who he used to be, and his body is entirely dependent on machinery now.”

“...what?” The woman breathed.

“Unfortunately...there’s been a malfunction.” She looked into the mother’s eyes, and felt her voice die in her throat. This wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t be doing this! “He...he won’t last much longer. But you deserve to be with him, too.”

Valerie shut her eyes tight as she continued to cry, overwhelmed in grief and relief.

“But you’re very ill, and I can’t let you stay here.”

“I can’t!” Valerie protested. “I can’t go with you!”

Astrid pleaded with her, earnestly. “I’m not leaving my mother in law to starve like a wretch in this squalor! You’re coming with us!”

“No!” She cried. “It’s not safe for me! It’s not safe for Stoick! I can’t go back!”

Wait.

“What?” Asked Astrid, leaning closer. “What did you say?” No one ever called the Tsar by his first name alone, well, except for her.

Valerie shook her head. “I’ve already said too much, I can’t…it’s not safe…”

Gently, Astrid grasped the woman’s arm again. “Please. If this a threat to our safety, you need to tell me.”

The woman wiped her eyes, trembling. “I’m sorry…I…Valerie isn’t my real name.”

Astrid just stared at her, eyes narrowing.

“My name is Valka, Valka Haddock.”

Silence reigned as Astrid stood suddenly, shell shocked. Haddock was Stoick’s last name, a rare fact because of the royal status. And Valka…Valka had been the name of his late wife. The one taken by Bludvist.

“I don’t—“ Astrid stuttered, “I don’t understand. You’re the queen?”

Valka hushed her, “you mustn’t speak so loud!”

“I’m sorry,” Astrid took a calming breath and returned to sitting on the bed. “Please, continue. I’m all ears.”

Valka gnawed at her lip, nervously. “Stoick and I…we were married. At first, it was…a rough marriage. Arranged.”

She had heard a little about the marriage from Stoick. He wasn’t keen on talking about it, but when prodded, he admitted that he had been fond of her before she was lost.

“When I found out I was pregnant,” began the woman, “I was…overjoyed. Stoick was a nice, gentle man, but he didn’t love me the way I loved him. With our baby, it was like…I’d finally have a part of him to love me back. However…the Chancellor, Osvald Zerker, was not happy about this news.”

“The Chancellor? Why?”

“Because if anything happened to Stoick, he would win the crown.”

She had heard nothing of this before. “What? Since when?”

“Since Stoick was an only child with no heirs. Technically, Spitelout, the Captain of the Guard, was the closest relative, but he was not deemed competent enough to rule. So Osvald was deemed viceroy. That is…until the crown prince was to be born.”

A cold fear crept into the back of Astrid’s mind when she remembered Dagur. During a the fight that ensued over Mala’s pregnancy, he had carelessly mentioned that he was only interested in her for her power. Now it seemed like Dagur hadn’t gotten that idea on his own.

“Osvald came to me one night, two guards with him,” Valka continued. “He gave me a choice. I could purposefully lose my baby, or I could save him and kill Stoick in his sleep. If I refused to both, they would take me to Bludvist, and that would be the cue to start the raids on the royals.”  

“So…Osvald wanted to take the throne?” Astrid asked. This would confirm the plot of assassination those men had warned them about.

“Yes, and he was willing to do whatever it took to get it.”

This was turning out to be a very interesting and insightful day. As soon as they returned to the palace, she would make sure that Osvald was jailed.  

“I chose to run. After a while, the guard stopped looking for me, and assumed I was taken by Bludvist. In this way, I was able to protect Henry and Stoick.”

“Oh my god!” Astrid said suddenly, the last bit of information clicking into place. “Hi—Henry is Stoick’s son!”

“Yes,” she confirmed.

“He’s the Crown Prince!”

“Yes.”

Astrid put her hands on her head, dealing with this information. What a strange twist of fate. She shook herself out of her trance. If all this was true, she had a lot of work left to do. “Well, it’s safe now.” Astrid assured. “Osvald can threaten you all he likes, but I personally saw that Bludvist was eradicated. And we are aware of the assassination plot, so the guard in the palace in on alert.”

“But some of the guards are plotting with Osvald!”

“Never the less,” Astrid pressed. “I am next in line for the throne. If he wants to hurt Stoick, he’ll have to get to me first, and I will personally make him suffer as Fragonard suffered.”  

Uncertainty was still violently within Valka. After all, she had spent her whole life hiding, and just a few words were supposed to put her at ease?

“You’re coming with us. I’m not giving you a choice.”

Resigned, Valka closed her eyes. “Alright then, I’ll come back.”

#boy toy #httyd #how to train your dragon #hiccup horrendous haddock iii #hiccup #astrid #Astrid Hofferson #Snotlout #fanfiction #hiccstrid #pinocchio!AU

[how2to18]

LAST AUGUST, upon getting a new job at a small university in Wisconsin, I started a daily hour-long commute. Every morning I jet out of Madison’s east side, meandering down I-90, and halfway to Chicago, I exit onto a network of county roads that wend through cornfields and prairie, a landscape whose only saliences are the oxidized rectitude of grain silos or the pylons for the town’s electricity. Most of the other vehicles out here are semi-trucks or SUVs towing fishing boats with names like SEADUCTION and GROUPER THERAPY.

In some sense, a commute is an ontological problem. Confined to one’s car or the seat of a train, there is only so much you can do. It is a prickly non-hour during which you are unaccountable to your family or friends and are thus unburdened from the onuses of home or the tug of productivity. Of course, some of us push back against this inertia. So conditioned are we to “maximize our time,” we view the bus or train as a makeshift office and convert our business calls into public soliloquies. From my college days in Chicago I can still recall voyages during which neatly barbered executives held onto the train car railing and shouted into their cell phones things like, “Jesus Christ, Marty: not today, Monday!” or, “Just send me the goddamned spreadsheets!” One wonders why anyone buys theater tickets when, on public transport, you can see Death of a Salesman for free as a daily matinee.

Even those of us who drive still attempt to escape our limitations. We outfit our bodies with a couture of electronic gadgets with the hope of transcending time and space. With our bluetooths (blueteeth?) and smartwatches, we return phone calls and eschew idleness, striving to stay one step ahead of the competition. My cousin, a financial advisor, tells me that during his commute he often video-chats with customers through a small dashboard camera. Occasionally they’ll remark upon the whine of a proximate car horn or the image of cattle ranch framed in his rearview window.

From this vantage, the commute seems to reify a basic American covenant: the promise of social mobility. With nothing more than your pluck and intuition, you’re free to hoist up those bootstraps and bloodhound around for your share of the pie. I have the sensation almost every morning that to join the puttering multitude is to bolster the ranks of Americans who still believe in the Horatio Alger myth, who think we can transcend our disappointments through hustle and toil, who believe the trajectory of our fate is commensurate to our willingness to stay on the move. Very often on the highway I hear in my inner ear two pop songs from the 1980s, “Working for the Weekend” by Loverboy and “Workin’ for a Livin’” by Huey Lewis & The News: songs whose carbonated optimism makes it easy for me to imagine myself as Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success, a fair-haired golden boy who can climb the professional ladder with nothing more than winks and roguish charm.

Which is to say that a commute is an occasion for self-delusion. It is an hour of preening and exhortation during which we psych ourselves up for the day’s demands. When I was in my early 20s, during the first decade of the century, I lived in a dingy apartment on the north side of Chicago and interned for a certain big-eared senator who harbored presidential ambitions. Three days a week, I spent an hour on the El, jouncing toward the Loop, wearing a suit that didn’t fit me and an ill-advised goatee. I had grown up in small-town Wisconsin and pegged myself as a wide-eyed Huckleberry unfit for national politics. During my commute, I tried to compensate by watching, on my laptop, episodes from Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, modeling my persona on the role of Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff who blustered and quipped his way across the Capitol, deactivating political foes with unction and blandishment. Within the span of an hour, Lyman’s serrated wit gave me a stencil for my workday sensibility, even though my own tasks in the senator’s office never went beyond typing correspondence or fielding constituents’ complaints.

Of course, a commute is a circular journey, a coming and going, so whatever varnish we apply to our psyches in the morning invariably wears off by the hour of return. At no time is this more apparent than on evening buses and trains, when the despair of fellow passengers can so thoroughly darken your mood that you find yourself getting off several stops before your exit. The apparition of these faces in a crowd, Ezra Pound wrote of a subway station in 1913, petals on a wet, black bough.

Back in Chicago, my boss was forecasting a season of hope and change, but it was not uncommon for my commute to wear the symptoms of the prevailing anomie: barefoot transients muttering preachments to no one or teens in billowing parkas toking joints with impunity. I remember once, on the Red Line toward Evanston, a cohort of drunken students from Northwestern bellowing Disney songs from their youth: “A Whole New World” and “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” That these tunes were so roaringly incongruous to the train’s interior — that they operated as a callow taunt to our less fortunate fellow travelers — seemed never to have occurred to them. Instead, the students held fast to the talismanic powers of a commute, a vessel hurtling toward their own enchanted destinies.

Such optimism seems more prevalent among the young. For those of us who are now on the cusp of middle age, a commute isn’t so much a journey of progress as a footpath around regrets and deferred ambitions. By the time they were my age, Emily Brontë had penned Wuthering Heights and the Buddha had renounced all worldly possessions, but all I have to my name are a handful of publications and one year toward tenure at a small Midwestern university. Whereas a commute was once a screen upon which I could project a montage of future achievements — a widely feted novel, the label of wunderkind, a house in the country — it now functions as a yawning chasm of time in which, if I’m not careful, I can lose myself to ruefulness and dispassion.

I suppose this is why, wherever I grumble about my commute, my friends are quick to offer a menu of dubious advice. Adamantly they suggest the downloading of audiobooks or podcasts, anything to lure the mind away from the jaws of self-critique. In order to lessen the burdens of the journey, they seem to suggest, you must forget where you are and why you’re there. You must take up the avenues of self-erasure.

Such recommendations seem of a piece with the most popular injunctions of our time. Constantly we are told to stay busy, to dodge overthinking, lest we court long jags of depression and the arrival of bad moods. Under the banner of self-care, we are exhorted to go ahead and binge-watch that TV show, to scarf that chocolate cake, to delight in the unbridled consumption of the widely practiced “cheat day.” Steeped in the nonthought of yoga, we fold our bodies into the postures of infants and corpses, aiming for a kind of self-obliteration, paying drop-in rates for mental fatality. This points out another etymological declension of commuting: before the word came to connote soul-crippling drives to the workplace, to “commute” was to lessen the severity of a punishment, as when a judge offers a guilty party the balm of a lesser sentence.

And yet part of the sadness I feel during my commute stems from the realization that I have spent too much time absenting myself from my life, that I haven’t appreciated each moment as it came. Throughout my 20s, I believed my days were following the logic of a sitcom, with new characters wandering across the set and interacting with the central players, but the plot was strung loosely together, never building toward some overarching narrative, never orchestrating some final theme. When I was in grad school, I would spend barren hours drinking on the union patio, smoking cigarettes with friends in the seventh year of writing their dissertations, and it never dawned on me that this tipsy chatter would be on the record, that this was time I’d never get back.

That I suffered from this delusion becomes most obvious to me when I finally arrive at school and teach my classes. These college students are nearly 15 years my junior, and yet lately they’ve entered the lecture hall in the apparel of my childhood. In particular, the Massimo hats and Tommy Hilfiger hoodies, which were so popular in the 1990s, now have the power to summon Proustian levels of nostalgia in me. It is a strange mirror. Last week, during office hours, one boy told me how desperately he wanted to tell his story, how badly he wants to be a writer, how badly he wanted this, he said, throwing an arm into the air, as though the cramped precinct of my office were some sort of holy relic, the site of all creation. I would have found his earnestness charming if it weren’t such faithful reflection of my own college-aged hungers. Which is why I found myself fighting back tears. To grow old is to encounter on a daily basis an interminable parade of previous selves, miniature incarnations of your delusions, your wild hopes, your mistakes.

In these habits of mind, I seem to share a bloodline with Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway, those sullen nostalgists for whom a routine errand — a trip to the florist, a jaunt to the post — became a juncture to reflect upon the errancies of one’s life: a squandered dalliance, a neglected son, the aftereffects of a ravaging addiction. No wonder we bristle at the idle hours of our commute. For it is then that we see how choosing Chicago over Berkeley kept us from a life of sunshine, how a graduate degree in fiction ruled out a job in the West Wing, how our moneyless lifestyle as aspiring novelists prevented us from having children.

These days, during the hour of my commute, I am trying to sit more easily with my disappointments, trying to remember more fondly the places I have been. For that is what we risk losing amid all those dissected evenings in thrall to self-abstention, all those slack-jawed hours with TV shows and podcasts. We are distancing ourselves from the fact of our inevitable transformation: that we are always getting older, that things are no longer as they once had been. In this sense, we are always in commute, always traveling inexorably between those “two eternities of darkness,” as Nabokov called them, the one toward which we are heading and the one from which we came.

“I thought it would last, my time,” writes Philip Larkin, that bard of resignation. “The sense that, beyond the town, there would always be fields and farms.” On my journey home, the road is long, and out across the gathering dusk, a hem of leafless trees stands frayed against the mauvish horizon. For half an hour, I drive through swaths of undulant prairie, unaccompanied by fellow travelers, and every so often the fecal reek of soil pervades the window, a vestige of the forgotten summer. Atop a faraway hill, two cows graze in lazy contention, and even in the twilight, I can see that they’re breathing steam. For a while, I lose myself to the hum of the interstate, but when I come out of the fog, it seems, impossibly, that I’m already near my exit. Always, it comes quicker than we expect.

¤

Barrett Swanson was the 2016–2017 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

¤

Banner image by Alan Light.

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Saturday Study

It’s not that I wasn’t busy sophomore year – every high school student in the district is busy.  Students carry a full academic load and participate in at least two extracurricular activities; sports, National Honor Society, foreign language clubs, music training, visual arts, performance arts.  Choir, Corral and spring track season rounded out my academic responsibilities. Junior year was no different.

 I got my driver’s permit in September and took “behind the wheel” with Mr. Rockel. He was a petite man with straight greasy black hair and a foot deformity, which required him to wear special shoes. Some twenty-five years earlier he managed to get on staff with the local school system. By the time we had him as an instructor he had the dubious honor of teaching Driver’s Education and Health Education to belligerent and obnoxious adolescents. He also had the honor of being assistant coach of the football and wrestling teams. “Behind the wheel” involved four students and one instructor riding in the student driver vehicle on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons. We drove all around town, practicing starting, stopping, signaling, and turning. We ran Mr. Rockel’s errands, and the big event was highway driving.

 AFS (American Field Service) filled my time – my family hosted a student from Spain – and I served as an officer of the club. Choir and the more elite Triple Trio both required frequent rehearsals before and after school. Corral Board required monthly meetings, and I became involved with a program called Teen Counseling.  All this on top of an Honors English class, a senior math class (trigonometry and functions) an experimental biology class, and chemistry. In my mid-30s with a house and family to care for, I cannot imagine how I ever managed to keep such a schedule. Throw in babysitting for pocket money, and I wonder how I ever had a social life, much less got any homework done!

 But what a social life I had!

 I spent all my free time with David. And when not surrounded by our friends, we adventured on our own. When he finally decided to get his driver’s license, he drove an old metallic brown Datsun B-310 hatchback. Over the months we spent as a couple, David drove us all over the county and downtown from the suburbs to explore. One afternoon after school David and I drove out to the sprawling suburban county park, Winton Woods, found a secluded picnic spot, and didn’t do our homework. Another night he drove us downtown to one of the fancy hotels, parked in the underground garage and we spent our evening racing up and down the stairwells of the Westin.

 Ours is the first generation of teenagers to grow up with personal computers in our homes. Very little useful software was available for the general public, mostly word processing (Apple’s Mac Write, or IBM’s WordStar or WordPerfect) or Lotus spreadsheets. E-mail was an elite luxury, used mostly on academic campuses and in private industry. Certainly personal computers in the home were not ubiquitous. David and his friends joined the cutting edge of a new technology. He was the proud owner of a newly introduced, and mass-marketed Apple IIe. He called it Rutherford, typed some of his homework on it using an early word processing program, and participated in a local dial-in Apple bulletin board service. He taught himself binary, and wrote letters to me in code. I didn’t understand 99% of it, but thought it cool that he liked it.

 Apple went head to head with IBM marketing their products. School systems struggled with how to integrate the personal computer into the curriculum. Our school district chose to require all students to take a computer course in order to graduate high school. The high school basketball coach was recruited to teach a loose history of the computer and the BASIC programming language. All I remember of the course is infinite loop logic (Go to, if, then, go to) and what the acronym stood for “Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.” This was supposed to make us all computer literate, much less good programmers? We struggled with tagging lines, editing our rudimentary programs to make them do something. All in all, we’d have been better served to take typing (now keyboarding) classes and learn how to prevent Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. But a few were actually inspired by what they were taught. They found the process fascinating, and armed with new PCs in their homes, they became masters of a new technology.

 David and I spent hours in his bedroom at his mother’s house while she was at work or out for the evening with her companion, Jake. Instead of talking with each other like other teens did, David turned the lights out, put music on and in the glow of the green monochrome monitor, we typed our conversation. Quiet, except for the click of the keyboard, one of us might accidentally hold down the space bar for a length of time, need to use the backspace key, but misspelled words were forgiven. I sat on his lap, and we took turns at the keyboard. We considered our words well. Committing a thought to fingertips requires a more careful consideration of word choice. Inflection and tone don’t come across well on a monitor and we didn’t have today’s emoticons or myriad font collection. We laughed when one of us typed something funny or kissed when the conversation took a tender turn. An insufferable tease, I did my best to distract him from his thoughts when it was his turn to type. What might have taken another couple three minutes of intimacy to reveal to each other, took us three hours because of the time it took to type our thoughts.

 David loved his Apple, and was one of a select few souls who played around with programming, a newly popular technology. He was eager to learn on his own, and yet wanted to share his new hobby. He found friendship with Christopher and Moj. The three worked together on the technical crew of the Corral show. Lighting and sound, they wired up the performance center, paying attention to fire codes, working with the directors and getting the timing just right for the several performances. Thus forged, their friendship solidified. David, Moj, and Christopher talked computers and programming among other things like girls, music, bikes, cars, and other testosterone topics. They shared interests, stimulated each other intellectually, and challenged each other to excel in their computing pursuits. Thus netted, Christopher and Moj were pulled into the clique.

 Moj was a quiet one. He was 5’10” or 11”, not quite six feet tall although he reached that height in adulthood. Dark curls and dark eyes, he has a stockier build than David, more substantial. A gentle giant, he is thoughtful, introspective, and observant, and has a tough shell that wears like armor. I never knew Moj very well. We were wary around each other, always polite, but distrustful. We never shared those intimacies that I shared with David and Christopher. Instead our world-views and personalities are quite different. Though our friends were links in a chain, we were on opposite sides of the circle – linked together not directly, but through the friends with whom we surrounded ourselves. He avoided any discussions about the opposite gender, devoting his energy to the discussions about computers and wiring and programming and pyrotechnics.

 Christopher’s family was from New York City, the Big Apple, The CITY, Brooklyn? They moved to town so his mom could attend medical school at the University of Cincinnati. They lived at the end of a cul-de-sac off the same residential street that led to Anna’s house. His dad ran a small business from home, manufacturing specialty canoe paddles. Mr. Leideigh went to Florida on occasion, but basically was home during the day. He was a great “House Dad” keeping his eye on Christopher and his younger brother Jason. He kept the rest of the group of us out of major trouble. His office was in the space between the kitchen and the stairway to Christopher’s bedroom above the garage. He worked the phones and on the PC, and we (David, Anna, Erin, Julie, myself and others) said hello as we paraded by on our way up to Christopher’s room.

 With strawberry blonde hair and freckles, Christopher was the all-American poster-boy for mid-80s “preppy.” Puberty hadn’t hit quite yet; his voice still in the treble register and facial hair more than a wet dream away from reality. We spent a lot of time in his room above the garage, secluded from the rest of the house. Once there, we did any one of a number of things – sat around and talked. I listened to Christopher go on about his relationships with Julie, and later Erin. He whined about them not willing to call him their boyfriend. I counseled, and played go-between. Then again, perhaps we actually worked on homework – I vaguely recall opening an algebra textbook.

 Mostly we listened to music – while I listened to the tales of Lake Wobegon on Saturday evenings with my parents before a baby-sitting job, Christopher and David were part of the crowd that sat around listening to Pink Floyd for all hours. I became well versed in the history of the band…from Piper at the Gates of Dawn right on up through Dark side of the Moon, Wish you were here, Animals, and The Wall. I was quizzed on album names and track titles, and they forced me to play “Name That Tune.” The only thing I didn’t know was the names of the band members. But the rest of that knowledge served me well once I got to college – I fell in with a crowd of ‘Floyd fans, impressing them that a girl was familiar with the tracks.

 I had signed a deportment contract to participate in the Teen Counseling program – no drinking or drugs. Besides, Councilman and Squadwoman Savage’s daughter could NOT be caught under the influence! David and Christopher and the rest of the guys shooed the girls out of the house when they were going to drink or light up. I was trusting. David reminded me of my curfew, or told me he needed to talk to Christopher privately or gave me some other plausible tale. Gullible and slow as I was, I just left. It was at least a full year until I recognized the signs of impending high-dom. Either they got sloppy, or I got wise, or a little bit of both. In retrospect I appreciate their respect for us. After all, had they been mean-spirited, or otherwise unsavory characters, they could have gotten us drunk, high, and then had their ways with us. But they didn’t. I was “sweet’n’innocent” (my words) “high on life” (their words) and they kept me that way. Thanks guys.

 *          *          *

 Somebody told me (Anna? Heather?) Ross was lonely and gave me his address suggesting I send him something to cheer him up. For whatever reason, despite all the research and preparations, College of Wooster was not a good fit. I was told he was lonely, bored, and terribly homesick. So, in the fall of 1983, I started sending mail. I tell myself now that my goal was to write a note and send one envelope per week. I probably wrote less often, every other week, or once every two or three. Regardless, writing to Ross was my teenage therapy, my sanity. I kept my notes to him private – he was the lucky recipient of an adolescent girl’s diary. I could and did write anything and it didn’t matter. Ross was so far removed from my daily life I felt safe sending him my thoughts. Since we grew up in the same community and knew the same people, he would understand (or so I believed) my frustrations, my passions. Ross was a teenybopper’s fantasy, and that year as busy as I was, he learned more about me than anyone else.

 Like so many school districts across the nation, our high school instituted a “Saturday Study” program as a deterrent for behavior problems. For so many infractions of various school rules, you were issued demerits. Collect ten demerits, and you were required to attend school on Saturday morning from 8 a.m. – noon. In our school, Saturday Study was formal detention held in the large lecture hall. Only no lecture was delivered that morning. Instead, every other seat was filled with a warm body who had committed some adolescent transgression. Most were regulars – those who smoked in the bathrooms, who regularly started fights, some minor criminal mischief (graffiti or some such) those who skipped class and were caught off campus, and then there was me. I lived 800 yards from the school building, and was rarely on time. And so, after earning so many demerits every time I was marked tardy, I had to serve a Saturday Study. The kicker though, was that if you were late for Saturday Study, you were locked out, and had to serve twice instead of once. I did my time in Saturday Study more than twice. I’m still not punctual. If I ever have a job that requires me to be on time every day, I’ll be fired within a month!

 Most of us slept. Which was okay if you got the right teacher supervising that particular Saturday morning. But some teachers refused to allow sleeping. If you didn’t bring schoolwork or something else to do, you were required to write an essay, or escorted to your locker to retrieve your textbooks. Personal stereos (Sony Walkmen – in the pre-MP3 era) and small TV’s were confiscated. For me, it was an unfortunate opportunity to actually do my homework, at least then it was done and over with for the weekend. And write letters. I wrote thank-you letters to my grandmother, I wrote letters to my brothers, and I wrote to Ross. I scribbled random thoughts, offered up gossip, told him what was going on at Corral – I’d taken a position that he had previously held - lamented difficulties with David, and doodled. While sitting in that lecture hall, watching the clock, waiting for noon to finally arrive, I addressed and stamped the envelopes and then on my way back up the hill to home, put the whole mess in the mailbox.

  y/��3�