Association

As a child, what associations did I make to money? My parents' arguments were many, but the list of potential disagreements were short, and money was at the top of the list.

My father, Carroll, was in and out of the hospital suffering one heart attack after another spanning my earliest memories until the day he died. I recall sneaking a look into dad's secretary one day after he and my mother left the house. The drawers had bundles of bill receipts bound together with bubble gum colored elastic bands, rows of figures covering page after page but their meaning mystified me.

I never asked what they were because I felt my prying into the secretary was not allowed. The answer is short and sad; it was the lack of trust between my father and me. In my mind’s eye, Caroll sits at the desk not expressing his anxiety over mounting bills. In his and my mother’s mind they are trapped and he feels responsible and his poor health is the primary reason. No amount of working will help. A vicious fight erupts shortly after he makes a perfunctory attempt to pay the bills and this scenario repeats every weekend.

Although it felt terrible and I never fully accepted what I witnessed, I concluded that intimacy leads to life-threatening hardships and at the root of all this turmoil is the lack of money.

The fog of the past clears away, and I see a young boy standing in the middle of a twelve by fourteen living room. There is a window to his back, which looks out onto the road, and there is a window to his left, looking out over a small porch at the neighbors' house across an unpaved driveway. He stands in the living room looking into the kitchen toward his parents framed perfectly through the open kitchen door. They stand yelling at each other in the center of the kitchen, but that boy, me, is looking out of a dark tunnel.

What I have realized is that I can change the narrative. I do not see this change as a fictional rewrite, but rather an opportunity. The part of me left in limbo and between two worlds, is not lost. I have carried him for quite some time, and it is time to invite him to join me in this world, to help him understand that it is safe to enter and many good things await his arrival.

Jeff Bailey © 2018