By Brent Dorian Carpenter
I have probably heard the term a thousand times, but never before do I recall ever making any special effort to fathom its deep, true meaning or ramifications. Since the death of my father on July 6, though, it has reverberated over and over again in my mind and assumed the mantle of withering reality. "The onslaught of time." Wow. Ow!
Earlier this summer, my father became a victim of this jarring conceptÑthat time marches relentlessly forward and, quite frankly, there isn't a goddamn thing I, we, you or they can do to stop it, much less slow it down. I remember whenever conversations surrounding mortality came up around the family, Dad would joke about how he was going to outlive all of us. "Aw, shut up, nigger," he would say to one of my favorite uncles, "I'm gonna bury you!" Turns out, he survived virtually none of us. Time finally caught up with him and whupped his black ass into oblivion, if our precious memories of him.
Overall, he had a good life, thank God, rising up as he did from a hardscrabble "Alabama-Black-Man-born-during-the-Great-Depression" childhood. He educated himself and rose to astounding heights for a man of his circumstances. He lived large and lived well and when he passed, he even left his three sons, of which I am the youngest, and his fiancee, a little something to dramatically improve our fortunes in life. Thank you, Daddy.
One unexpected benefit of his death is that it has brought me and my middle brother Kevin much closer to each other. Kev had kinda dropped out of the family for a while, but this event has brought him fully back in. Can I say "thank God" again? The other day, he and I were sitting in our dad's condo downtown, doing exactly what we've been doing every few days when our schedules permitÑreminiscing over days past, fading childhood adventures known to few outside ourselves.
One of the most inestimable memories came roaring back the other day, surrounding, interestingly enough, not our father, but rather our long-deceased grandfather, Montgomery Tarrant, our mom's dad. As the legend goes, one day way back in the inconceivably antediluvian period of 1923, when Warren G. Harding dropped dead while occupying the White House, our grandfather and a good friend built a log cabin deep in the woods in a place called Woodland Park, Michigan. If you're not familiar, perhaps a reference to the nearby towns of Bitely and White Cloud can help you pinpoint the place more accurately? No? Exactly. It was in the middle of nowhere. Rustic. Peaceful. Breathtakingly beautiful in its abstract simplicity. The family used to go there every summer for a week.
Kevin was recounting his favorite recollection of the placeÑthat moment when we all first pulled into the driveway and he and our oldest brother Spencer would grab that dilapidated old bike from the garage and race to the corner store on roads paved of sand to buy slingshots. It was a top priority, he explained. He described how that bike tire just spun round-and-round in the sand. "Damn, I remember that!" I said excitedly. I was maybe six or eight years old at the time. It's amazing how even the smallest fragment of a reclaimed memory can trigger so much unexpected joy, as though it lay embedded in the crevasses of your heart and mind on an almost genetic level all along.
Whatever the fuck happened to those days? Those simpler times, back when I was just a kid, before I was aware I was black. And gay. And bipolar. And a victim of the prison/industrial complex. And that I would wind up enduring so many ridiculous and unfortunate circumstances throughout my (what now seems for the first time like a long) life. I'll tell you exactly what happened to those days. The motherfucking onslaught of time. We ended up having to sell the cabin when grandfather died.
The last twelve months of my life have been one massive consciousness-altering event after another. You know what I meanÑthose life-altering intrusions of some inconvertible reality that force you against your will to reboot your entire mind to accommodate your new paradigm. On Star Trek, they call it a "major course correction."
I have had eight of them in the span of a year. Like Captain Picard and his gallant crew when attempting to thwart a Borg incursion, I have had to learn how to adapt, and plenty fast. Some of these experiences have been positive. Too many of them have been negative.
This latest one has been quite devastating. My baby knows what I'm talking about. I noticed that, during my father's illness, death and aftermath, the number of very unwelcome grey hairs on my head had exploded into alarming plurality. This most recent episode is probably going to triple them. I wish, like the characters in my second novel, I could go back in time and fix things, make them not only right, but perfect. Alas, time does not accommodate us mere mortals like that, and thus, new realities are set, to my undying regret.
Mother and I are planning an epic return trip to Woodland Park this fall, and maybe even a little further up the road to a world-renowned little enclave called Idlewild (does that ring any bells?). It will be the first time any of us have set foot up there since Grandpa Neal's passing in 1985. I'll call it, if I may, a trip back in time. Even Kevin has expressed an interest in tagging along. I think he understands, like me, on some visceral level, that we'd best grab one last look at the treasured remnants of our past now, just in case, thanks to that object lesson called the onslaught of time.
