It all begins with two people. And it ends with one person in one place and the other person in another place. This is just the way that things work. Most people tell me otherwise but I say to them, check again.
Go to a park in the morning, count how many people are there, how many families, children, adults, teenagers, lonesome or with company, number them carefully. If you have courage, ask them why they are there. I am here to watch over my kids, a man in his early forties may say while occasionally glancing down at his phone, not really watching the kids.
His wife works on Sundays so she doesn’t know. The last time she visited a church was when her sister passed away from a traffic accident. And she wore black, her kids wore navy blue, he walked out to take a call from work and now he’s at the park, looking down at his phone, checking the score of a baseball game. His kids are on the playground, swinging from the monkey bars, yelling: Daddy, look! They wave their arms but he’s not paying attention, yeah, yeah, good job, he says while still looking at his phone. The kids give up and go the swings, well beyond his sight.
The man’s legs begin to ache and so he sits down on a bench. He doesn’t know where his kids are but he thinks to himself, they’ll show up soon enough, there’s no need to worry. And the day passes like every other Sunday. You wonder how the kids will grow up. You give up because it’s none of your business.
Eventually your imagination wins over and you can’t help but to think about the man and his kids at the park on a Sunday morning. They will grow up, grow old.
The children will be big enough to go to the park alone, to meet new people, to be offered by a stranger something to smoke, to say yes to that stranger who offered something to smoke. This will all happen without the father knowing. And he will his trust his children in a way that he could never trust himself.
They go their separate ways, branching off from each other’s lives until a wedding or a funeral brings them together again in some distant future. If not only for a day they will be in each other’s presence again. The son looks at his father and thinks but doesn’t ask, are you looking at me now? And his father will say yes, I am looking at you now.
Later on in the night, he pulls his son aside. He tells him to take care of his children, and to take them to the park often, no matter the day. The son nods, understanding his responsibility and embraces his father underneath the dim lights of an empty hall.
They forgive each other.
The son drives them home, his father’s eyes pasted on the stretching road ahead, no longer distracted, no longer wondering where he went wrong. Together they travel with their penance, headed in different directions, dreaming of their destination.
