Taxman

Some people go through life keenly aware of how fucking trivial it all is.
Others give a shit about graduations and goodbyes.

I spent an hour or so today reading letters that my mother wrote to my father in the year or so leading up to their marriage. My mother has always lived life.

I was surprised by many things in those letters.
My mother was a romantic. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the pleasure of reading the letters that he wrote to her.

My mother and I are more similar than I thought.

Life is not that hard. I need more love in my life. Those letters made me feel like all of the things I care about and all of the things that I am angry about don’t matter. Just find someone to love.

In eighth grade my mother said she wanted to be a dental hygienist and that is what she still does today.

I saw pictures of my dad with another girl feeding him hardboiled eggs at some college frat event. My mother went on dates with many boys.

I feel like I could be plucked from the earth and it would make no difference.

Life is a journey, I know, but when will the sucky part be over.

My mother said she would die if she lost my father’s respect. She said it made her unhappy that he didn’t go to communion, but she didn’t want him to go for her. What were they up to?

My mother was a terrible student.

My dad’s friends called him Beans.

My mother and father were confused sometimes. They had conversations that made her feel “icky.” This is such a relief to me.

My mother looked forward to being a good lover and she said she was thinking about their new home and thinking about what to cook for dinner and then she marveled, “I don’t even get angry thinking about it.”

She said “I trust you, but not with directions.”

Fucking tragic that his heart stopped beating twenty-seven years later.

And in the background for me is this nagging feeling that what I should really be doing is studying the Internal Revenue Code for my tax class.