I might have posted this years ago. Or I might not have posted this years ago. It sounds familiar. I know where this recording took place: In the room that was once my father’s Den, which later became mother’s Office. For a period of time this room was my mother’s bedroom before reverting back to its status as The Office. This first floor room, its one window facing the street, had a view to that street obstructed by a single tree. That tree’s branches and growth darkened the space around it, encroaching on the driveway and areas leading to the front door of the house. That tree became a centerpiece of what amounted to the ultimate breakdown between my father and mother. The tree had grown almost out of control, its branches reaching out enough that they might envelope the house. The tree already threatened the structural integrity of the shingled roof. It had deposited enough twigs and leaves to fill the gutters along the front of the house, rendering them useless for their simple purpose of uniformly corralling rainwater from the wide roof into a narrow column onto a designated spot. A narrow but house-wide ditch had formed across the front of the house where rainwater poured down, leapfrogging the overstuffed gutter.
The Office, née The Den, was (on occasion) my hideout in times of confusion and anger. I would curl up with the white rotary dial phone and make myself look like I was engaged in rapt conversation with whom I did not even know. All anyone had to do was pick up another phone in the house and hear for themselves that I was talking to myself. But that never happened. When I was on the phone I was one the phone and no one bothered me.
The Office, née The Den, was the scene of a lie I told my mother. Well into adulthood, past the age and maturity whence one would expect such cheapness, I told a lie that I can’t repeat today. It’s too tiny and meaningless. Thinking of it later I asked myself if that was the last lie I would ever tell. It might have been. But I doubt it. Life is a patchwork of fantasy and lies, from intimate memories we have of others who know not who we are to the stories people remember of us as comrades and partners — we mine our memories in despair for having no idea what those people are talking about.
The tree, ultimately, put my mother and father as far apart as they ever became. It involved the encroaching branches and the problems it could bring onto the house itself. Dad wanted to hire his buddy from the neighborhood to trim the thing. Mother wanted to get someone licensed and bonded, The issue was not so much who but how much. Dad’s friend could do it for, I don’t know, a couple hundred bucks. The brand name company couldn’t do it for less than five times that. Either way dad had to pay for it, and mother’s decision on who did the job prevailed.
Mother called me from The Office the night this argument took finally ended with her decision to hire a commercial tree-trimming company at considerably greater expense than dad’s neighbor from the other side of Florida. It was the first I knew of the disagreement. All I knew to say was of course, you are right, why would you deal with this tree any other way than with licensed and insured workers? That was all I knew of the matter for years. It was when mother landed in the hospital that father unloaded on me regarding the tree debacle. The foundation of the matter had me siding with mother on the argument. In retrospect, taking the matter in isolation, I think it still does. Dad’s friend was a neighborhood handyman, certainly a skilled workman in his own right. But he had no money (which partly accounted for his interest in doing the job). If he fell off the roof or sawed off a branch that smashed a window there would be no way to recover the cost of the damages from him. Dad could probably take on that expense but, when it came to anything to do with money, my parents were separated by a tangled thicket of a communications dead zone.
After his death I would mention The Tree to my dad’s estate lawyer. The lawyer chuckled and, though the phone, I felt him nod his head in chagrinned acknowledgement of the incident’s significance. The day the tree was trimmed was the day dad decided to cut mother out of his will to the fullest extent possible. In Florida you cannot fully cut a spouse out of your will without going through with a full divorce. That never happened, but as the designated Executor of his affairs I got to see firsthand how much paperwork and legalese one can work with to accomplish their goal of screwing their wife out of everything they can.
And yet, on balance, as means as it might have seemed, I think he did the right thing. If he had just left her half of everything she would have taken that money and spent it on trivial things. Instead he set the funds up in a trust from which funds could only be withdrawn to pay for emergency medical expenses or home repairs. 800+ pages of legalese (which in the end winnowed down to about 8 lines of highlighted bullet points) made sure that she herself never had access to the funds without decisions being made by myself as to what use they would be put to. Right or wrong it was uncomfortable for me, and it still is just thinking about it.
At the end of this music box sound, for just a second, you can hear a train off in the distance. That is the train I used to wait for as a child, lying restless in bed in my room upstairs.
