A Year without Umbrellas

A Year without Umbrellas

When time was young and we were residents of the Aberdeen housing projects, we had a perculiar year without umbrellas. The middle school was half a mile away and it mostly rained and sometimes without letup in winter, and today I walked an hour in the rain with a Lands End jacket and thermo underwear and nostalgic of those years which we were battered like economic particles in cyberspace. Then it was the early 60s where in more cosmopolitan places people already took drugs and prepared the British Invasion. That year, right before Kennedy was assassinated, my brother Hank and I went to Hopkin's Junior High by dashing in the rain. Hank my younger brother by two years was always two steps faster than I and since then, no one could ever catch up with Hank. Being soaking wet when I arrived to school, I stood by the heater until the final bell rang for class.

I remember the school intercom telling us to go home. Earlier that year or was it the previous year that we were told to go home as Cuba became a Missile Crisis. Now it is 2017 and North Korea is supposedly “the problem.” I have several jackets now and two umbrellas and two hats, one humorously labeled Police while the other Woodland Park Zoo. Hank is dead and so are quite a few people I knew and even shared tea or beers with. I have now over 400 books in my apartment and I even publish book for others.

Mama, I am so sorry I did not understand you have eight children to please and I always complained that my shirt was not in style.Hank and I had no umbrellas while the younger oness did. Hank never complained because he loved you. I thought I deserved a more affluent mother.

In my 35^th year I won a literary prize in Bumbershoot. That is a Dutch word for umbrella. Still I did not appreciate you, mother, and even the day that you died, I still did not know life is too brief to say what we need to say. Today I walked in the rain over an hour without an umbrella, mother, but I did not feel melancholic, I feel nostalgia. When we had nothing, we had everything. Now I have so much, I value it less. You had me as a son.

I was slow to grow. What is literature when one doesn't even know that one has a mother.