Eleven, Eleven

Eleven, Eleven



         Growing up in my family we had a lot of stories, quirks and traditions. But what family doesn’t? It’s what made us unique, in a very conformist way. I suppose it’s the type of stuff you spoon feed every kid. Santa’s elves are watching, the Easter bunny is hiding eggs. Normal stuff.

         And we held on to these traditions, held on tight.

They were our link to the culture that we grew up in, which was always a generation or two behind our own. Hatchlings of the nineties, with a walkman in every backpack, but we were still on Grandpa’s knee in the rocker listening to vinyl.

It was like magic, even beyond the fairy shit that was sprinkled on Christmas dinner. Each one of these stories held some insight into my world. One day, my mother asks her mother. This is a story she told me. She asks her, why do you cut the ends off of the loaves of bread? It’s what she’s always done, so my Grandma just shrugs.

‘Because my Mom use to do it, I suppose.’ That makes sense, right?

So that’s how my mother bakes her bread. Like mother like son, one day I ask her. Mom, why do you cut the ends off the loaves of bread? She gives me the same answer. So, being the logical little bastard I was, I move up the line.

‘Grandma?’ Same question.

Same answer.

You trace this back a few generations, and my great grandmother tells me she cuts the ends off, because her bread pans were too shot. There’s the insight. People do whatever it is they do, because that’s what the people before them did.

         Nobody in our world is governed by logic. We are magnificent creatures of habit. Then I think of all the wasted bread.

         How many things can this theory be applied to? My great grandmother sits in her recliner every day, with weak hands rolling the beads of a Rosary in through her fingers. Her mouth is fast at work chanting prayers to the Lord. I just guess that she use to watch her mother do the same thing.

         Now I hold onto these traditions even tighter. They become my link to faith, my shield against cynicism. Every bit of family lore I can sponge up, I do.

         One of my favorite bits, this one comes from my Grandfather, is that whenever you see the clock read 11:11 It means the angels are all flying in a line. Kind of like a theological eclipse. And he points this out every time, you could set your watch to it.

         Me and my brother, we just smile back at him. Each time I think of the paper designs you make in school as a kid. The ones that folded out to be a whole line of the same shape. I laugh because the angels on the ends have their arms and wings cut off, so they would fit in the bread pan.

         Kids say the darnedest things. Imagine the things they only think.

         After he dies, the whole family looks at their clocks at 11:11. We didn’t watch for it, but we always noticed. Losing someone you love hurts, but it always made us feel better to think that when he hit the pearly gates and got his wings, he jumped in line. That was him, my grandfather working hard in the afterlife to make sure we were never late.

         These things stick with you, so thirty years later I’m hiding Easter eggs with my own kids. Laying on the rabbit story real thick. I’ve carved out a decent life for myself. Got a beautiful wife, the same big family, and a whole treasure chest full of memories.

         My house at that point is a wonderland. With gnomes in the garden, and Santa’s elves peeking through all the windows. Even though I’ve got my cocoon wrapped tight, I still get bad news. 

         That’s the year my wife was diagnosed with cancer.

         I did a lot of stupid things in my college days, and now I figure sobriety can’t last forever. So I start drinking again. Forget that I had two kids still in diapers who needed their daddy. I had lost the love of my life, and there was nothing left but heartache.

         Doing what all decent men would do, what my grandfather would have done. I bit my lip and pushed on. It was rough and I never let that pain go. It only took two years before I was chasing my morning booze with harder booze. I quit my job and started watching TV full time.

         God, what a piece of shit I had become…

         I drifted away from the big family that I use to love. I there was no way I could have given my kids the attention they deserved. Hell, I couldn’t provide what they needed. If Santa’s elves were still looking in, they would have seen a Crown in one hand and the bird in the other.

         But despite what I was, I still tried. I loved my kids. They each got a handmade lunch, a hug, a kiss, and an I love you. Even if it did drift on rancid alcohol breath.

         Just the captain wrestling with the wheel of a sinking ship, I was being crushed by the guilt of letting  it happen in the first place. My heart ached for my wife, for my kids. Shamefully, it ached for myself. Self pity can cause a lot of pain. All the while I tried to preserve the last of my crumbling, aching heart in a bottle of tequila.

         One afternoon, I was nursing a headache, when I started to remember life before she died. In the unrelenting grip of nostalgia I started to sift through my treasure chest.

I started to cry, and decided to make bread.

         In a big bowl, I started pouring all the ingredients. Just like I had seen my mother do, only I couldn’t help but let a few tears slip into the mix. I should have just stuck to what I’d seen.  It may not always have been for good reason, but the way things were done before me seemed to work. It was when I veered off that things started to go bad.

         When it came to kneading the dough, I hit it like it was the cause of all my heartache. I wasn’t just kneading, I was punching, beating it into the bottom of the bowl. I must have been a hell of a sight. Tears flowing down my face, my eyes clouded, and furiously sparring with bread dough.

         I had just started to roll it out into loaves when my daughter walked in. I looked up and I’ll be damned if the clock didn’t read…

         11:11

         She asked me something, I couldn’t tell you what it was. It didn’t matter. In that moment she looked exactly like her mother. And I saw red. I was drunk, and I was hurt. I didn’t know what I was doing.

         I hit her, backhanded her hard. She fell back into the living room and started crying. Guilt, over what I had done only made the pain worse. I cried even harder, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. I was too far gone, running deep into my own mind to get away from it. And I hit her again, and again.

         I beat my precious little girl like I beat the bread. Eventually she quit moving, there were no little hands trying to shield from full grown fists. I hated myself. I was a fucking monster. So I did all I could think to do. I drank.

         Eventually you just go numb. I quit thinking, I wasn’t me any more than the husk of a little girl on the floor was my daughter. I drank, and cursed.

         The body was blocking the TV.

         After a while I quit sobbing, but the tears never completely died down. So this was it, huh? Rock bottom. In the end my treasures didn’t do me much good. Then I remembered the bread in the kitchen. And as I lumbered in and started to cut the ends off, I thought.

         Pain can do a lot of strange things to a man. The pain of losing a wife can cause a man to pick up the bottle he put down a long time ago. Then there’s the pain of knowing that you’ve got two kids that are too young to remember their mothers smile. Well, I guess just one.

         Knowing that your son will wake up in the morning to find that you’ve killed his big sister, that kind of pain will cause an honest man to think of taking his own life. So I set about it. I start sawing though my neck with the bread knife. As I slump to the floor in a pathetic heap, I see the clock out of the corner of my eye.

         It reads 1:11.  And at that moment I realize that the line is incomplete. One of the angles couldn’t make it. She couldn’t stand in line where she ought to be, because she wasn’t dead. My baby girl was still alive, I was wrong. But that didn’t matter, because at this point I was choking on blood and gasping for breath.

         Somehow I didn’t think they would let me stand next to the angels.

         And in my last moments I see my son walk in, I see my mother bake bread, I see my grandmother pray, and cling hard to the hope that not everyone does what they see their parents do.