INCONSTANT MOON

If they say the moon is blue,

We must believe that it is true.

 Old English Proverb    

                                                                                           

    “It was different in my day.  Kids respected their parents," Mom said. "My mother and father were wonderful.” 

   Her father was a drunk and a pedophile.

   By the time Mom turned five her mother was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. It happened on the night of a blue moon. No medical opinion rendered, the family suspected witchcraft.

   “My father worked hard and he took care of mother. He only drank for birthdays and religious holidays,” Mom said in his defense. 

    Then I must have a photographic memory for those holy Hallmark days of Grandpa lit up, his eyes and lips shiny, unzipping his pants and grabbing little hands to rest on the hard surprise there. We never told. The aunts and uncles paid no attention to the kids hanging around jolly old Granddad.

    “It only happened once,” Mom says when I remind her that he molested her, too.  “And my mother chased him with a frying pan.”  

    That’s her story and she’s sticking with it. That was the night of the blue moon and her mother never walked again. No more chases with the frying pan: truth waned with the moon.     
      

    “We were happy then,” Mom says.  “Life was simple.” 

    She smiles at her happy-ever-after ending to the story of her life. She’s 83. I still have a life to live, a ways to go, the irresistible pull of the blue moon to fight.

Published in 2007 in Storycircle                              

Family Traditions up now at In Posse

Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son speaks to me.  My mother kept secrets and tried, but failed, to teach me to keep them, too.  "Never tell a man anything," she said, "he'll just throw it in your face later."

She left my father and returned to her father taking me and my brother with her.  Her life was hard, made more bitter by my insistence, finally, on setting the record straight.

Given a choice, she might have preferred Delacroix's Medea, below, especially if she thought it might prevent me from publishing the following:


‎"Family Traditions: Writing Fiction From Real Life

Poetry and Prose from In Posse Review

Start with a personal tragedy, something that haunts your relationships. It helps if you have a colorful family chock-full of sociopaths, if not outright felons. It’s better if you don’t quite understand the impact the event(s) had on you. You’re solving the mystery of yourself.  more