MY PARKINSON’S DIARY
MY PARKINSON’S DIARY
BECAUSE HERO
Monday, March 16, 2015
February 16, 2015
So I go out to start the Missus's car this AM because Hero. I start both vehicles, first the MINI, dashboard temp -6, then the van, dashboard temp -8, so when I'm walking up the driveway after pulling out the van, I reckon I'll split the difference when I come back inside and say -7. Except what I'm really thinking about is a very specific moment last winter that appears to have just recurred in 2015.
For a good bit of last school year, I operated under the assumption that at some point I would break. I wasn't quite sure what form this breakage would take, but I just thought it was pretty obvious, at least to me, that I would not make it through the school year. In fact, this was the second winter I had slogged through life with this in mind, but unlike the Winter of 2012-2013, in which I had simply passed into the blessed comfort of spring without much sense of having crossed a finish line, during Winter 2013-2014 I finally came to a point where I realized that I would make it after all.
I think it went like this: I got out of a car in some icy parking lot, or I went out to start my car in the morning before work or maybe just pulled up a chair and took out my lunch in my classroom, and I thought: I'm going to make it. What the hell could happen to me, after all? Nothing. I am going to make it. It was a good feeling, but at the same time, I'm not gonna lie, it was a bit of a letdown. I had worked so long with the controlling idea that I would not make it through that to imagine I would required a certain adjustment.
And so it was this morning as I got out of the van in the street and started walking back up the driveway. I thought: what can happen, really? It doesn't seem as though my heart is going to give out anytime soon, and I still have all my marbles, so it would seem as though I'll make it through another Michigan Motherfucking Winter. Yay, Me. And just as I had done last year around this time, I had to imagine that I could go forward from here.
The year will unfold as years tend to do, first Lent, then Easter, the school year's end which this time will equal Walter's graduation, his party, a Summer like any other with camping at Interlochen, then packing the boy up to go wherever he decides to go, the tearful goodbyes, then Fall and back to school with the new twist of taking stock of the Diary at some point, because the next thing I know it'll be Halloween, and I will have been doing this for one year, then Thanksgiving, the holidays and with any luck at all, a Winter unlike those preceding it.
You would think I wouldn't have to learn and relearn the same things over and over, but apparently that's not the case. At the same time, I suppose I should be blissfully happy to get the chance to do so, if only so I can share the good news with one and all: Hey! I'm going to make it because Hero.
“For a good bit of last school year, I operated under the assumption that at some point I would break. I wasn't quite sure what form this breakage would take, but I just thought it was pretty obvious, at least to me, that I would not make it through the school year.”