I don’t know what the fuck this is...

I bet there were a lot of things that I thought I would remember.

So big, at least to me in the moment, they were assured to scribe a place in my brain that I would tread and retread as life moved ever forward.

Whatever they were, grandiose and revealing, I hope someone else was there to preserve them – because unknowingly and only in hindsight, I’ve found it’s the moments I thought absolutely nothing of that have somehow endured. Stealing that space and tattooing their own small likeness in lazy circles that both bemuse and confound.

Funny how the smaller part of a much larger whole overshadows it when you begin to view your life as a quilt, rather than a tapestry. A recipe, both trial and error, on a stained and handwritten index card; instead of a neatly plated dish, served warmly but sadly whole before you.

Ambridge was where my grandfather drank.

It was a member only sportsman club. Trap and Skeet, weekly raffles. 2 acre pond stocked with garbage fish. The clubhouse was down a winding gravel drive that no one dared to traverse in the winter. Steep drop offs and unmaintained shrubs and trees – you'd miss it if there wasn’t an old hand-painted sign pointing the way. Every year a new pin. Simple tin with the same logo. Different colors and different years, my grandfather had decades of them. Warped and faded on an old canvas jacket he hung in a half-finished basement with a minibar and barely functioning box set. Cheap trophies of a humble and quiet life.

I’d watch ‘Crocodile Dundee’ (only interesting tape he had – others were just nature documentaries) on that tv, toss logs into the furnace until grandma yelled the house was a sweat lodge and pretend I didn’t know he hid the gun closet key on the rafter next to the stairs. He had an empty can of Budweiser mounted like a deer on the wall, the plaque read ‘I’ve Killed Hundreds of These.’. A jackalope too his friend Earl had made. In the corner was a rusted drill press and an elk shed – the only time he’d ventured out of state, romantically seeking to stalk and claim the big beast, but returning with nothing but the cast off remains of a trophy already passed. I don’t know why he kept it.

We apply a lot of pageantry to life. Dress it up. Mostly to protect ourselves – show must go on and all that; but fuck if we don’t all just want to be the guy on TV who makes it look effortless.

I remember catching a dollar-bill at the pond by the pistol range. Pap used marshmallows on the hook – the pastel-colored ones, which were better somehow. It was originally a prank. I didn’t magically catch a dollar; I found it all silty and gross on the shore and put it on the hook. He wasn’t looking and figured he’d get a kick out of it. He’d laugh, I’d laugh. Dumb kid shit. He taught me how to make a fire by that pond, how to clean a fish and he told me what remains the most fucked up joke in my arsenal (did not age well). But weeks later I’m back in TX and get a package. Cheap frame from the dollar store, cardboard backing and that dollar taped to a plain printed text that read, ‘Some people hunt bucks and fish for fish – my grandson fishes and catches bucks!’. He didn’t know it was a prank. Wish I still had it. But one night after the divorce really wanted that 40oz of Steel Reserve, was a little short and wasn’t feeling sentimental. People are people. Most of the apologies you owe in this world are to yourself.

Chasing the rabbit. Wanting to impress him. He was larger than life you know – not just in stature. We talk about heroes, but they never did it for me. Heroes always fell flat. Those things that made them remarkable often made them unobtainable. It was the ones we could achieve, could embody and thus mitigate their flaws that I found value in. Not heroes, no, but icons. And Pap was an icon. It was somehow genuine with him, even if it never kissed the silver screen. The next morning, bacon in the cast iron, he gave me a compass. Said ‘Check which way you’re heading before you run off. So you can find your way back.’. Thought that counts, it was cheap and holds direction for shit. But still have it in a tacklebox in the closet. Fucking rabbit that I am...

I had mailed it off to him. My ‘A’ school graduation picture. All of us, in our dress blues, feeling... probably something different between each of us. I don’t know. It hadn’t made it to the mantle, next to his retirement watch, deflated game ball and Grandma’s urn. And maybe that wasn’t an insult – maybe that was just a dusty place he returned to when the day was done. Perhaps here it still held life, ambition. A backwoods, backwards bar in Pennsylvania. Smiling each of us to those who we wanted to see. Kiner, Boudin, Winters, right there next to me. My crossed cannons. Gunners Mate. Source rating, back when that was thing and you came in under contract. Failed at the latter but ever so proud of the former as it rested comfortably amongst antlers and Canadian whiskey.

I realized time had stopped for them. A moment had extended to a perpetual, yet inevitable end. Those things now, pinned to the corkboard among old photographs, were their last grasping efforts at youth. Trophies of those who still could traverse uncharted waters and thus gave a last dying flicker to the flame they yet clung to as their embers waned. Not the theft of potential, no such thing, but rather the mourning of their own potential squandered and so lost.

But I think about it still. Hypocritically. No breath was stolen, but none was spared. My lungs still carry a hint of that musk – it is on my breath, on my tongue, it lingers as I speak. Thus, in some small way, Ambridge remains. Clawing at an undecided and foreign future that it influenced but itself could never survive.

I think and may hold apprehension, but think that the moments now where I find contentment in the futures of others and those small things I hold dear – could fucking possibly be that place. Yet stirring, yet surviving. Corkboard on a memory wall. Pinned there and whispering ‘it’s good while it lasts and somehow better when it’s passed’.

He had told me once that 99% of what we do will be judged by the 1% we don’t... or fuck up. I get the temptation. To revise or remember those things we ourselves did or are for their best possible light. To erase or avoid those things which ruin that dearly held fantasy. I get it, I really do. But whatever it is that’s a part of me; the consequence thereof is a choice. The more educated the better. After all, it’s a quilt – this stitched together thing we so value as complete. Logan Echolls once said, “They don’t write ballads about the ones that come easy...”. Fuck I hope my life is a song, not a spreadsheet – because I’ve never learned anything from perfection. Can’t buy a legacy. I mean you can, skyscraper with your name on it and lip-service to a shitty painting in the lobby. But that ain’t a song. Not something sung with a smile. You get it or you don’t...

Ambridge was where my grandfather drank.

I don’t know who I am to my daughters, don’t know who I’ll be to my son as he wobbles around my living room now. I don’t have an Ambridge – a supernatural stretch of turf that somehow connects two kingdoms and all their needs and ambitions for each other. But I don’t believe what Pap said about those 1% of our actions defining us. I think maybe the world would convict us on it, sure. But the ones who’d sing our song, those that matter, will fiercely defend the 1% on account of the 99. I know I would for him...

-

“Strength without compassion is, and will only ever be, tyranny. So Justin, have the strength to be kind.” - A. Muchow (Pap Pap), 1927-2019.