The Origins of Sadness (essay). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Pabarue

THE ORIGINS OF SADNESS

even a.m. on a Monday morning and my mother is the only one awake. She pads downstairs. In the kitchen, she raises the shades, letting in weak, gray daylight, then turns to find the coffee pot. It’ s where it always is—on the counter, next to a bowl of clementines—but it is filled only with hot water. It sputters happily. (Mocks her, you know?) “Dammit!”

Her voice, though not a shout, rings sharply through the house. I hear it in my secluded room and wonder whether something is actually wrong.

“Dammit, Jim, did you set the coffee maker last night?”

She knows he didn ’t; if he had, there would be dark brew instead of clear water in the pot. But she calls upstairs to him anyway, just to make him admit his mistake aloud.

And now my father enters this reallife play—thickset, goateed, brownskinned, wavy-haired, kind. Unhappy. Lying on his back in bed upstairs, while his petite white wife berates him from a floor away.

“Jim?” Tone curls up at the end— shrill and accusatory.

“Oh, shit. I’ m sorry. ” He speaks without moving anything but his lips. Lies motionless on his back in bed. A turtle, a turtle. (God, but a loveable one. Can ’t he see?)

After another hour of lying still while his wife and son whirl around him, the turtle crawls out of bed. He languishes for an hour in a room adjacent to his bedroom before getting into the shower. The wife and son have left for work and school by the time the turtle emerges from the shower (fresh, but not refreshed; clean but never cleansed). He pulls on an expensive suit, plods downstairs, skips breakfast, clambers into an expensive car, and drives off to a job that is slowly killing him. His heart is a landfill.

S

My father ’ s childhood could be the source of his current problems. People are pottery, it seems to me—if there are mistakes made early on in the crafting, and the piece is put into a hot hot kiln

bean pie: take the seed outside by Tamsen Wojtanowski © 2009