Breaking the 4th, Unpleading the 5th: A 45-Year Anniversary Celebration of My Family's Thawing Frozen Waterfall
In which, after a book’s worth of dispatches, I finally offer supporters something rare and true and exclusive.
Today is my parent’s 45th wedding anniversary and I’ve decided to honor the occasion by removing my gag order.
Who imposed it? Who am I defying?
I’m quite sure you’d have to travel back several, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of generations to find out.
But it ends today. Yes. It’s time, at last.
Gnawing at my nerve endings for the past several months has been this simple truth: I’m ready to write about their deaths. Which is another way of saying, I’m ready to write about their lives. Nestled a few dolls deeper: I am ready to write about my own life and death.
Are there really any other topics? Are there really any other stories? The whole joke is that the beginning and the ending have been in place all along. No wonder we are story creatures and no wonder, with the beginnings and endings predetermined, we’re all so obsessed with the middle. The dash on the gravestone between dates. The meat of my grilled Dweez sando.
For more than a year and across some 70,000 words—an entire book’s worth—you’ve been patient. You’ve demanded nothing of me. You’ve subscribed and paid for what I’ve offered up free of charge. After seeing the first few of you sign up, I turned off notifications and resisted the temptation to know who you are. Maybe friends. Maybe family. Maybe people who have found these writings some other way than our off-page connections.
This is all outrageous to me. Once a week, I write about obscure (bordering on embarrassing) tea obsessives and cultural misgivings and discuss the layout of my existential jungle gym. I rarely edit. I essentially ramble. I make a fool of myself and only occasionally string together more than a sentence anything that might be considerate of my audience.
And yet, you’ve decided to support me. Maybe you love me. Maybe you pity me. Maybe you’re curious about where all this is going…because it can’t possibly go on like this, all this tea and sky and Kamakura, forever, can it?
I don’t know but I do know what we’ve reached a clocky crossroads. A time. Time to let you behind this curtain of still water. Time for the icicles to thaw. By the end of the post, hopefully, we can make educated guesses together. I don’t know if this is the reward you were expecting—or deserve—or even if it’s a reward at all (maybe it will feel like a punishment) but it’s the one I’ve got to give.
My parents’ wedding announcement was taken in front of a frozen waterfall. They got married on April 29, 1979 atop a ski resort, then skied down—wedding dress and suit and all. There is perhaps no white quite as that sun which smacks the snow on a blue bird spring day. The photo slides from that era—that I had digitized along with a few hundred others from that era—almost do it justice. You can see why I proposed on the top of the same mountain. You can see why I also sought out a frozen waterfall for my own wedding pictures. What you can’t see is why I could imagine a future in which I never return to that peak.
Because what’s far more difficult to discuss in any way that even approaches adequate is what has transpired in the shadows of my parent’s lives in the 45 years since that day. The cosmic and karmic forces, the tectonic plates, that pushed them together, pulled them apart, and fractured the earths they walked on, their three children left to survey the broken ground behind them. Me sandwiched between my brothers who would no doubt describe all of this differently in newsletters of their own.
But let’s place some facts here in their most simple terms—because there is a good chance they may only turn into fictions from here on out—so they are believed, even if little more than clunky cars parked in a lot waiting to be refurbished in some twisted remake of Pimp My Ride but for family dysfunction memoirs:
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