And now for some entertainment

Have a short story with your coffee and a side of poetry


Generation Gap
"What I wanted to know was: why is it necessary to redefine values anyway?" The gray haired energetic women looked at each other, as they crossed first st. and 2nd Ave. oblivious to the tattoo parlors and mohawked teenagers that flanked their path.
"So did you find out?" The second one asked the first in earnest anticipation.
"Well that’s what we were getting to when we were interrupted" They were the same height, the same size exactly, small frames, somewhat diminutive, healthy, fit, middle aged. They bent towards each other confidentially like scholars conferring on a deeply puzzling matter, both were totally engrossed in the conversation, bobbing and nodding like two curly tufted hens. When the second heard the answer of the first, she jerked away from her friend with a sudden violence. She was visibly annoyed at the disappointing end to the conversation. She felt as if her Barbara had held the answer to the meaning of life, the holy philosophical grail and simply let it slip away. She turned back to her with exasperation, lecturing as if the woman one year her senior were actually her child,
"You know what I do when someone cuts in on a conversation I’m having? I say: ‘excuse me, we’re in the middle of a conversation here,’ I don’t just let them steamroll me out of what I’m saying, or hearing, especially if it’s important, and yours was certainly important."
"Yes, well you know how Doug is, he always finds a way to steam roll things if you want to stretch the metaphor..." The second rolled her eyes in tacit agreement. Barbara could always find a way to place blame in someone else’s lap, and yet, it was true, her 6’3, overweight, uncouth husband did have a way of knocking everything and everyone in his path both literally and figuratively down. He could flatten a conversation in no time at all simply by his presence. (There’s a point in every story when the words run themselves out of their own volition and it is necessary to devise some sort of plot to provide an artificial edifice for their existence, or in simpler terms to pick up the slack and keep the words a rollin’ on) I have come to that point in the juncture of this story which was begun with a line I overheard while walking through the east Village, feeling melancholy and angsted and too old to be hip and too young to be sure of myself, and decided the best thing to do would be to subvert my own rambling swarm of self doubt in the infinitely fascinating lives of those strangers around me, highlighted best by particularly illustrative fragments of their conversations, phrases that stood out from the rest, hanging in the air before the lips of their utterers, taking on a life of their own due to the sheer out of context power of them and their poetic ability as lines to, as many a freshman poetry workshop teacher has stated "stand on their own." (Were I to be a semi-published MFA teaching a bunch of sweaty antsy, highly self conscious freshman about sestinas and free verse, my one motto would be to learn to love the parenthesis that creep up in your writing, for in embracing those awkward hangers on you are forced to love the worst of yourself, the most humiliating, humbling aspects of your character, and it is within those aspects that you will find your writing voice.))
Cut to a sunny, cramped kitchen in a rent controlled upper east side apartment, with a plastic yellow stool, a diner style counter, a rusty refrigerator covered in family photos and drawings (which the 20 somethings who now occupied it, sitting one on the stool, the other on an old garage sale wooden chair, had drawn when they were in early elementary school and which their mother had decided were such emblems of each of their burgeoning talents that she would never remove them, at least not until they morphed into the artists she had expected them to become), a small curtained window, a vase of sunflowers freshly bought, a tiny Matisse print of the reclining nude, a dislocated page of the New York times and some unopened mail. Of all the spacious rooms in the three bedroom walk up, whenever Brian and .David, better known as "the boys", came to visit they preferred to squeeze themselves into that tiny kitchenette, as if there they would feel the most contained, the most unmistakably home. Brian, the older one, with a bobbed dirty blond haircut, mod-60’s style because he had for a very short period been in a band sat on the chair. David, with dark brown hair that grew to uneven jagged points around his ears sat on the high-stool, facing the tiny window, his long legs sprawled out across the tiles, his concave back leaned up against the bright peeling- in- places wall paper. They sat perpendicular to each-other, angled knees just missing collision, big sneakered feet dangling lazily. This way they could talk through sidelong glances, occasionally turning directly to face one another for dramatic impact, or lazily gaze off into the distance when the other became boring or when one was secretly offended in the way only siblings can unknowingly hurt each other and be hurt. Now they were talking about mom, a subject which usually united them across the banal rivalries of siblinghood.
"So she was like, "Why is it necessary to redefine values anyway?"
"Oh man," David groaned agonizingly into his hand, hiding his face with shame for his own parentage. "I can’t believe she said that"
"Yeah and you know what the worst part was?"
They were now facing each other directly, fully ensconsed in the unfolding drama. "What?"
"it was, like, the way she said it, you know, like she really really wanted to know, like I was going to give her the answer to our whole fucking generation, no more than that, like I was going to suddenly explain all of (modernity)the modern world to her, you know, like I could just clear it all up for her, right then and there."
"So, so what did you say?" Both boys covertly acknowledged the inherent painfulness of disappointing their mother’s expectations and it was this element which turned the story from absurdly embarrassing to potentially tragic.
"Luckily I didn’t have to say anything, dad came in, blustering around, you know how he is, he lost some fuckin’ special pen or something stupid, I was so damn happy to see him."
"That’s a rare occurrence"
"Yeah, I know, but I was totally saved."
They both chuckled a sigh of relief at the averted tragedy.
"Doug?" Barbara takes off her reading glasses and faces her husband in bed. He’s looking through a sports magazine, making notes in the margins with his special pen that never runs out.
He shifts slightly to show that he’s heard her but doesn’t take his eyes off the magazine.
"Doug this is important."
He plops it down with force; a gesture that in a different man would be seen to convey annoyance, frustration, but Barbara knows her husband well enough to know that all his actions are grandiose, he’s simply incapable of making a subtle, graceful movement. It was one of the things she loved about him first, his animalistic mauling of her in bed, so passionate, until she discovered that was the way he handled everything.
"What?" He says monotone as if it’s a statement.
"What do you think about this whole redefining values, this thing they were talking about at the boys college, I mean what does it all mean anyway? I felt like those kids were speaking in a secret code, when did we become so outdated like our parents? What are the new values? What’s wrong with the (progressive ideals) ones we all raised our kids with?" She didn’t expect any legitimate answer from her husband, maybe some unrelated nonsensical comment or a grunt and shrug, something to show that all she considered deeply important and meaningful, was to him, a waste of thought.
At first he didn’t move at all, she wondered if he had even heard her and was about to repeat herself, which she sometimes had to do, when he, carefully, quietly and with more control than she had ever seen him wield over any object placed his magazine on the night table(stand) beside the bed. He then turned to her, fixing his gaze on her eyes, something she had forgotten he used to do when he was making a big decision about their life together.
He began in the measured voice of a seasoned pedant, "you see, it’s not so much that the boys want to replace old values with new ones, it’s that they want to question the ultimate validity of absolutes in general, they want to break down the assumptions that underlie the use of the term "Values," they want to question what those assumptions are based on, possibly undertows of inequity or unexamined social biases, but mainly they want to remove the concept of static "truth" from their vocabulary. It’s not That new of a concept, it’s just slightly newer in the culture and not a part of what we learned in college."
Barbara stared at her husband, the upper management salesman who threw big raucus parties for each of his co-worker’s birthdays, who changed his major 5 times while they were in college, who fell asleep during a sit-in, and once asked where they were going during a protest march, in shock. She had always known deep down he was intelligent, but just not in the way she and her sons were. Not inquisitive or intrinsically thoughtful.
"How did you know all that?" For a second an absurd movie clip where an alien impersonating a woman’s husband gives himself away by knowing things the man would never know flashed into her mind.
He answered matter of factly, "That’s always been My philosophy, that’s why I never got too worked up about all your protests and sit-ins, I just thought, who’s to say our idea of social justice is the right way, why be so fervent about one way, when it may not even be any better than any other way, and what’s more, what’s right will change when everything around it changes. I was just ahead of my time, that’s all, but don’t worry, you’re way’s still good, it’s just not what’s in right now." He patted her comfortingly on her puff of soft gray curls.
She looked up at his wide comfortable face and had a sudden overpowering desire(urge) to make love to him.