Steady Flossin

It was not long after my old man was dead and properly planted beneath the withering white birch in the cemetery of St. Laurent's that the money began to run out. What was left after the hospital and burial expenses, the secondhand suit we laid him to rest in, and the unpaid tab at the North Italian Club amounted to little more than a single mortgage payment. I had known of lean times, having grown up the only son of a man lost in a valiant attempt at transcending limitations of class and education. He was uncomfortable with his role as wage-earner and like many of us he spent his time in avoidance of responsibilities. His was an orderly world where every thing had its place, and wherein there were several uncontestable truths. He plied his trade in a rundown chemistry lab and took long, unhealthy drags on cigarillos while calculating the saturation of amines in certain isocyanates. That the man succumbed at forty-nine, after three days of paroxysms, hallucinations, and crying out to his Lord in our twice mortgaged bungalow was of little consequence to me. It is not a question as to whether I loved or even admired the man, it is more a question of whether I ever really knew the man at all.