Well, it was supposed to be two. Then, at the last minute, Vicky changed it to three. Three sammiches for our Super Bowl party.
Not surprisingly, we had enough food for our guests – these were three two-foot long sammiches – but what we didn’t realize was that we’d have enough food for our guests… the neighborhood… and the teams playing! I mean, shit! We had a ton of food!
… As a result, we’ll be having sammiches for dinner.
… I’ll have sammiches at lunch.
… I had sammiches for breakfast.
Mother fuck.
After the game, we cranked up the Wii and rocked out with Guitar Hero III. Even Julie joined in – a new addict to fill our army of nerds. I finished the game on Easy, which is to say it’s played with only three of the five frets. When I moved to Medium, I had to play with four frets and twice as fast.
But I’m sure that wasn’t what woke me up in the middle of the night.
I woke up at about midnight… downstairs… in my jeans and hoodie and with my slippers on – sleepwalking is a bitch. And then, I was wide awake cause, you know, sleepwalking is a bitch. I had no desire to watch a movie or play a video game – not even Guitar Hero III – so I surfed the old Internet(s) for a while. I ended up on My Space, where my primary goal is to NOT look at Rosa’s page, which I didn’t. But I think I looked at every other page. And then, I ended up on Classmates. Vicky gave me her login info a while back and I thought it might be fun to see the folks I went to school with, to see how much they’ve changed. My old pal, Eugene Davis, from elementary school looks about as exactly the same as possible, which is saying something considering the passage of 60-70 years. I found out my name is displayed incorrectly, par for the course in my life.
Then, I found Teresa Alaniz. My first love. Yep, there she was in a picture with (I assumed) her son. Wow. The years had certainly changed her but there was something there that made her unmistakably her.
And I thought, maybe I would sleep better if I expunged the lifetime of sins I carry around, all the wrongs I’ve done from Rosa all the way back to… well, Teresa. It isn’t likely anything could ever be resolved with Rosa; she did some horrible things in our divorce as well. But Teresa… I imagined myself starting on a road of forgiveness, starting with her, sitting in a diner, having lunch, explaining to her how bad I felt about everything I’d done… and then…
“Ken, it’s been about a quarter of a century. Everyone else forgot about what you did a long time ago. You might not be able to let it go but she obviously let it go. Give it up.”
I thought that and realized I had a point. After all, there’s a reason I long ago established a very firm rule about not doing anything during those early mornings when I’d been sleepwalking. I shut down the computer, walked back upstairs and struggled to get Suki off my side of the bed. Beside me, Vicky snored… on and on… Payback, I figured.
It took me a long time to finally get to sleep. It was the sammiches, I figured.
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