Littlejohn by Howard Owen

Author:Howard Owen [Owen, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79090-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

August 1

Growing up around Daddy and Uncle Lex and Aunt Connie and Grandma, without any brothers or sisters, made me feel like the Chosen Child at times, with four people so much older lavishing so much praise and attention on me all the time. Mom was a lot younger and didn’t put up with as much as Daddy and the rest did.

But it also made me a little uneasy. Who’s going to take care of all these people? I’d think to my eight-year-old self. I was already intelligent enough to know that Daddy and Lex and Connie were going to take care of Grandma until she died, and that they’d done the same for Granddaddy, who died long before I was born, and that it had always been that way. I’d envy Uncle Gruff and Aunt Century for somehow escaping. Which is how I came to view our farm and East Geddie—as a place from which to escape.

It made Daddy and Mom feel bad, I know, when I’d tell them, during high school and college years, that there was nothing on earth that could make me stay in East Geddie.

“It’s not you,” I’d say once in a while when they seemed especially cut to the quick. “It’s just this place.”

Which was only partly true, in retrospect. It would not have been a wonderful life, coming back to East Geddie to run a farm and live among people who knew everything about me and my parents and probably my grandparents. I went back to my twenty-year high school reunion, which they held at a Holiday Inn twenty miles from the old school, for some reason. It was “dry,” which didn’t seem to bother anyone else. I wished that I’d brought a fifth. The worst thing was that these people, who all grew up together, seem to visit each other about as often as if they lived in separate states. There were people there who live five miles apart who seemed to be catching up on five years of news. One of the few pleasant things I could imagine about a return to East Geddie was the fantasy of getting back together with my oldest friends, after we’d raised our families and had our careers—sort of like one of those sitcom reprises where all the characters from a fifties or sixties show come back as adults under some trumped-up premise and pick up where they left off. But I don’t believe it happens that way in real life. Not in East Geddie, anyhow.

The bottom line, though, truth be known, is probably that I never could face the prospect of sacrifice. This is not a solitary failing; my friends in the English department and I talk about it often. What do you do for aging parents who took care of their aging parents until the bitter end, come bedpans, Alzheimer’s, nervous breakdowns (yours) or whatever? And the amazing thing is, with Daddy and Mom, they didn’t even seem to mind. Even Mom,

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