BRAIN

BRAIN

WHISPERS THE FALLING SNOW

It snowed all through the night but it never really stuck, just a crusty-thin layer of white on the lawn. Spears of brown-green grass poked through the snow and ice there and a white powder variously collected on the semi-decrepit cars haphazardly parked by teenagers in the driveway.
Seannie, the second-youngest in the family of three boys and two girls, typically got out of bed early just to see his father, even for a brief half-hour, while his Dad got ready for work in the pre-dawn winter darkness. Since it was Christmas-time, waking up with Dad also gave Seannie the chance to plug in the outdoor holiday lights which had been hastily strung over whatever tree branches remained in the yard after a summer of five kids inventing new sports on their thin quarter acre.
Dad disliked the chore of hanging the Christmas lights each year mostly because of the cold but also because it required him to a) get up on a ladder and b) to do something essentially frivolous and even maybe a little artistic, God forbid. Usually he just wanted it over with as quickly as possible but Seannie and his brothers and sisters would encourage him and tease and cajole him into making the most of it. Eventually the display would bear a passing resemblance to something at least festive, extension cords crisscrossing the yard feeding power to even the most remote outpost of withering maple tree.
Dad often grumbled complaints about lack of daylight this time of year. Waking up early and coming home late made him cherish whatever encouragement he could get from nature, the black, frigid mornings making it hard to go to work – especially when he had no choice either way. Seannie imagined himself a Man Friday to his Dad’s Crusoe, swearing he would be there for him at a moment’s notice. He was ready for whatever his Dad needed and Seannie always thought some adventure, some mission, some secret journey lay just around the corner of any old cold December morning which is why he was the only full witness to the events of that particular morning.
Since it was Saturday, Dad was going out at the crack of dawn to get his NY Times at the deli. Mommy was still socked into bed, snowed under the covers by a week’s worth of mothering five kids and hunkered down under the layers against Dad’s punishing home-heating restrictions. Seannie eyed her in the soft glow of her own Christmas decoration – the electric faux candles that adorned each of the windows of her bedroom. His Dad was ex-Navy (although like the mafia, you never really leave the Navy) and he liked to remind his wife and children, only half-jokingly, that they must “maintain a constant state of readiness at all times” and it was this mind-set that drove him out into the morning, despite his more leisurely weekend schedule, to get the news.
This was a drill. Who knew when the real emergency would happen and these forays prepared him, he thought deep down under layers of catholic guilt and depression-era conservatism, for the catastrophe that could and surely would happen soon enough.
He steeped out into the morning and realized to his immediate and intense frustration that his car was locked in behind two others. His teenage kids had arrived home late the previous night and despite his standing order that the last detail of their evening was to realign the cars to leave his triple-used and rust-encrusted Volkswagen Rabbit closest to the road, here it was, his car--as plowed under and effectively out of service as his wife was herself inside in eyelid-mowing REM mode likely dreaming of a far-off, kid-free Irish countryside.
“Goddamnit,” he grumbled--his favorite curse word and one he used constantly despite being, by all accounts, quite the upright catholic man.
But he would not be deterred and since he was a problem solver and, truth-be-told, a bit of a short-cutter, he surveyed the frozen lawn and determined, with a self-congratulatory decisiveness that the shortest route to the road for him and the Rabbit was a right-turn off the driveway across the lawn, a left around the Norway maple and a quick right between the two pines while taking care to avoid the goddamned overly-sensitive Dogwood. He’d be out on the road in no time.
“Plan your work and work your plan,” his own German mother intoned in his ears as he fired up the engine and a festive blue smoke plumed from the tailpipe and added its own color to the front-lawn Christmas display. He put the engine in gear and gingerly rolled across the path leading to the front door and on the way to the road. As he passed the maple that Seannie hung out of all summer long the bald tires of the rabbit flipped the frozen extension cord that streamed out from the house to the trees onto the axle of the car. And without knowing it, he began to drag the baroquely cabled network of power for the entire Christmas light display. Since the cords were all inter-connected the immediate result was a smoky pop from the electrical outlet in the living room where Seannie stood gazing out the window. Soon after the wires leading to bedroom where Mommy slept began yanking the electric candles one-by-one from the window sills where they had been Scotch-taped. Mommy shot out of bed startled awake. She ran to her Seannie knowing he was the only one of her children that could be in any kind of immediate danger and they both watched the smaller of the two pine trees on the lawn begin to bend grotesquely toward Dad’s Rabbit as he drove by it, its string of lights snapping off the branches to follow his car like some weird jagged kite tail. Noticing the tree bending Dad stopped the car and got out. Seannie imagined he could see the word he could not actually hear form itself in the condensed breath that spat out his father’s mouth.
“Goddammit!”
Mommy clucked a little chuckle and turned off to make some tea.
Seannie looked out at his Dad, totally in love.

THIS ISN'T FUNNY BUT...

One can just imagine the Python bit that could be inspired by this story:

Researchers at the University of New South Wales found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic.