1. We start
A man sits in front of me. He dresses to match the weather. The sun is high and the wind is clearing out whatever remnants of the Spring and readying the world for Summer. All around us the World is filling our ears with sounds. Cars are passing by and people are walking by us. Chatters surround us and it feels like we are the only ones not making any sound and therefore isolated.
We are at a cafe that I have arranged for. We are at the outside seats and infront of us are two cups of coffee, with a pot filled up in case one of us needs a re-fill. Cups and pot are white porcelain that glint in the sunlight. One has said to me before that everything around us is alive, even the ones we do not perceive to be so. And the moment we leave them, they stop living and die where they stand. After looking at all the things left in the streets all these years, I can finally understand what that means.
We keep quiet as we slowly finish our first cup of coffee, as is the custom. After the first cup, he corrects the position of his cup and opens his mouth.
“I understand that you would like to hear about my mother.” He says to me.
“Yes. But not because of any obscene reasons, I assure you. I am interested in hearing about all that lived. I mean lived through the war.” I say to him.
“The war was a long time ago. All that lived through it are now too old to remember the exact details. And many books and movies were made. Why do you need anymore testimonies?”
“It’s a personal interest. I do not mean to research anything in particular. I just want to collect whatever I can find about the whole thing. If you are afraid that someone might find you, I am not going to publish anything I find.”
“I don’t care about that. I’m just afraid that my mother’s story is not going to be that interesting.”
“That is nothing you should worry about. I’m just interested in knowing what happened. And however miniscule the detail is, it is still a part of the big picture.”
“I’m afraid that I might waste your time.”
“I have the whole day to myself. Please talk”
I pour coffee into his cup, then into mine. He pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and takes a slow drag. I pull out a recorder from my jacket. He looks a bit suspicious for a second, but as he has said, story of his mother is not anything special, so he says nothing of it and finally opens his mouth to talk. I press the record button as words escape out of his mouth.
2 Story of my mother
Author’s note: the entirety of his story was not an uninterrupted details. While he talked he smoked numerous cigarettes, drank many cups of coffee to keep his throat wet. And of course the sun has moved during his monologue, so at one point we had to move from outside to inside.
My mother’s story is like everybody else’s. She grew up in a town, upkeeping her father’s cornershop business. She ran errands for him, her father. She grew up smiling, like every girl did back in that time. Everyone in town liked that smile of her’s, saying it was a piece of the Sun fell from the sky to warm their hearts. She liked that, so she smiled more to prove them right. She was loved by her parents. They did not commit anything wrong, they went to the church when they felt that they might have done something out of line to ask for forgiveness, and walked out free of guilt. Every so often her father threw a bargain sale that invited everyone to buy his grocery for an affordable price. That was her youth.
When she grew up into womanhood, she took over keeping up the store to spare her
aging father from falling while at job. She took care of store’s money account, kept count of everything that went in and out. She made sure that milk was fresh, breads were freshly baked, and sugar was not mixed in with impurity. Her mother applauded her good sense, and her father sat in quiet satisfaction that his daughter grew up to take good care of that business that stood there for generations.
This part is really boring. You could just say that she lived a happy childhood and all would have been explained. I don’t know why I even started here.
The rest of her life, up until when the war broke out, was a happy one. I’ll just call it that and you need not worry about the details. You just fill in the details and that would suffice.
And just as mediocre and normal as my mother’s growth was, so was my father’s childhood.
He grew up a mailman’s son. He assisted in delivering packages as a child, and as he grew up he took over the delivery. His father, my grandfather, liked to drink at dinner, and enjoyed smoking cigarettes. His mother was a good woman that kept the house in good order, kept everyone well fed, and kept a smile on grandfather. They enjoyed going to church every sunday and considered themselves good people. They did nothing bad. They lived a very content and mediocre life.
They, father and mother, grew up content, they grew up happy, they firmly believed that they will just keep living like this until one day they will find someone to marry and live their old days telling stories to their children about what they used to do. They truly felt that their lives, well up to the final moment when they shall draw their last breath, were set in stones.
Anyways, father and mother met at a social gathering. I don’t know where they met, it could have been at a state fair, a circus that visited their town, or at a bargain that mother threw at the corner store.
Whatever the occasion, father met mother, or mother met father, and their thought was, there is a young man or woman, and that was that. They said hello, and they went on their separate ways. And were it not for the sense of humor of our god, they would have never met again and I wouldn’t be here talking to you.
They met again, this time in the corner store, as father was buying a bottle of milk for his lunch. Their eyes met, and as they recognized who they were looking at, they again said hello, exchanged money and goods, and father went out the store and had his sandwich lunch. As he ate his lunch, he thought about the girl he met, he thought that was a normal yet nice looking girl. And as he went to sleep that night, he thought he should visit that store again in hopes that he might meet her.
So he frequented the store until one day mother started to distinguish his face from the numerous faces that visit the store. And after countless visits, father finally asked mother out for a meal, and thus they started going out. As they went out, they started feeling like they could see themselves grow old with each other by their sides. Of course, there were some turmoil times between them, but lived it out, and they kept going out. And at last they got married on a Sunday with everybody celebrating their wedding. Everyone, grandparents on both sides included, thought this was a good marriage and they will be blessed with happy children. They thought father and mother will raise a happy family and die with smiles on their faces. And they did. They lived a happy marriage, and they were blessed with a child, my older brother.
They raised Y, my older brother with love and care like all first time parents did. They kept him warm, they rushed to his side whenever he cried, their hearts melted when Y smiled.
And so Y grew up happy.
While mother and father were busy raising Y, the world was starting to see strange creatures lurking about in the woods. Radio was talking about some unknown thing walking on two legs, some noticed that thing was shaped like a human, and radio made a regular news about this strange creature, which we now know as the children.
They were there from the beginning. They weren’t hiding from anything, they were lurking around and people had time to be aware of them and take actions.
But tell me, who could care about such unknown creature that you have never seen before when you have a child to raise?
So three years went by raising Y. In retrospect, those were my mother and father’s mediocre yet happiest years of their lives.
