The other day I was tidying up, putting things away and rearranging the space in our very tiny kitchen.  It seriously is the smallest excuse for a kitchen I think I’ve ever seen.  There is very little counter space, so I’m constantly repositioning the microwave, toaster, clorox wipes dispenser, dish soap, or fake Foreman grill.  In any case, I’m shuffling things around and I see three packs of crackers on top of the microwave.  They’re to-go packages, each containing two Saltine-style crackers, and they’d come with a shrimp cocktail cold soup that Meredith had brought home a few nights previous.  She’d left them on top of the microwave on the off-chance that she might eat them at some point.  I, knowing we’d never get around to eating those cheap lousy crackers, took them off the microwave and threw them in the trashcan.

Immediately, the moment between them leaving my fingers and striking the trashbag, I felt extremely sad.  I remembered eating crackers as a little boy with my family at… some restaurant we would go to frequently.  They served Club crackers with certain meals and I loved them.  Buttery and slightly sweet.  I would grab a handful of the to-go packets before we left and shove them in my pockets, eating them on the car ride home and perhaps even further off, putting them in brown paper lunch bag to enjoy at school.  I really loved those crackers.

Throwing the crackers from the other night so flippantly into the trash reminded me how much reverence I held for those other crackers in my childhood.  And I felt so sad.  It occured to me that thinking about my childhood makes me sad, and this is not new.  I had a good childhood for the most part, but it had its share of tribulations.  All of ours do.  Everyone can say they had a shitty childhood and they’re probably right, but I choose to remember the good memories of my youth.  And maybe that is where the sadness came from.

Whoever I was as a child is gone.  The family that I spent my childhood with is gone.  The home is occupied by strangers.  That restaurant, whatever it was, is most likely gone.  (Wait, I remember now; it was a cafeteria; a buffet.  I don’t remember the name, but yes, it is gone.)  I am in California, fighting my damnedest to be an adult and build a life I can die happily in, my parents are divorced, my brother is dead, and all the happy memories I can recall only remind me how sad I am that none of it exists anymore.

I am a ghost of myself.

I think often of my parents and the injustice done to them by the dissolution of their marriage and family.  I think often of my brother and the wrongdoing he endured by dying before he had a chance to prove the world wrong about him.  I think of the house we lived in, the one that my father built with his own hands, and how there is now another family living in it; one I do not know and more than likely never will.  I think about the home built upon the site where my brother’s body lay, where I found him in a cornea of his own blood sixteen years ago, and I know that the people who live there do not know of this.  I think often of the mistreatment of this family unit and it makes me very sad.  But I don’t feel any injustice for myself.  I had a good childhood, a happy childhood, in spite of all those things.  I smiled, I laughed, I was loved, and I loved in return.  My family was relatively poor for a long time but I rarely went without.  Even when we all lived in a one-room shack and heated water from an outside pump in a five-gallon casserole cooker and added it to cold water to fill a free-standing tub and take turns bathing, I was happy.  I had a family that loved me and each other enough to find a way to keep us clean and healthy.  I turn on the news and see reports of mothers murdering their children because they can’t or won’t care for them and I realize that my parents were fucking saints and I’ll defend with my blood their legacy in such terms.  We were given nothing, we were afforded nothing, and we built everything ourselves; literally.  We didn’t have much, but we found happiness where we could.  So to the point that something as trivial as Club crackers was enough to make me happy.

And as I threw Meredith’s leftover crackers away the other night, a sadness hit me that took me this long to trace back to its origin.  That after all the happiness and all the subsequent destruction, I can still find a sliver of hope in the flavor of a good cracker.  And maybe that in itself is sad, but that’s not why I felt sad that night.  I felt a reverence for my family’s triumph and all it could remind me of is how much we failed.  How we rose from nothing, loved so fiercely, then burned away completely.

My mother has a new family now.  My father has a wife and a terrifically small life that suits him perfectly.  And I have a universe that I’ve spent years building, populated with all the things I feel I need to make me happy.  We speak, but not often, and rarely about anything of substance.  Our “family” is an elephant in the room, as though we had a Deliverance-style hunting trip that went horribly awry and now we never speak of it.  I feel a profound sadness because of this but I can’t imagine what I could do.  I’m not a little boy anymore and my parents don’t love each other.  Things can never be the same and maybe they’re not supposed to.  Maybe this is what growing up is.

Maybe this is why I have such a hard time with growing up.