3 AM Epiphany, Exercise 7

Harold could not understand how people could eat like his family did. In his few years, he just sat back and watched in amazement how they could pack it all away. Appetizers were the biggest anomaly of all. Everyone indulged in the huge bowls of dips knowing full-well that a lasgana the size of a football field was in the oven--having been placed there by his type-A aunt long before they left to the wake.

The only difference, he noticed was the expressions on everyone's faces. Instead of raising their wine glasses high and repeating phrases like, "to die for" over and over again, they drank somber coffee and kept thinking before taking another cracker of food. It made the room dour like he never could remember.

Uncle Teddy had always been rail-thin. The family looked upon him, jokinly, as if he were the child of an errant mailman. They smirked as he tried to put down food like the rest of them, but as the family got older and rounder, he maintained the waistline of his teenage years, even though he professed a love for the family's pastas and breads. Today, he seemed to lean a bit closer to the dip then ever before. Perhaps, with his father's passing, God had granted him permission to gain weight as well as a smidgen of happiness.

The silence drove Harold bonkers and he paced before the windows of his Aunt's home. He could not understand the noises he grew up with had finally been silence. There was always a child crying some where in his Aunt's house; someone was talking about something, or yelling more like it, over the radio--which blared classical tunes. The phone would ring constantly with this person or that, wishing happy-this-holiday-or-that.

Today, the house reveresed direction. Harold felt it. He had always hate the concept of his heart being pained. It was his mind, his rational being insisted. Your heart never really hurt, per se, he pleaded.

Until today. The ache became too much. He decided to make a noise for himself. He could not have staged it better. A pile of toys, long abandoned by the now-adult children of the family, lay in a pile in a box. Another round of cleaning out Grandpa's home coming to a close. He looked at the box and pulled out a cylinder.

"You remember this?"

The sudden sound caused everyone's head to rise and look at him by the fireplace. His smirk molded to a full smile.

"Tinkertoys," Harold reminded the room, "tinkertoys! I mean, when was the last time these were made? I used to play with them all the time! Windmills, cars. We used to hang tracks over them and use them as bridges for the Matchbox cars." He began to dig further into the box to see if the cars had been retrived.

He kept his smile.

"The cardboard is finally rotting," Uncle Teddy identified.

"Huh?" Harold stopped his search and tried to find the meaning of the sentence. He looked to the bottom of the box to see if the statement was true.

"No, of the cylinder. The cylinder's bottom is rotted. Look," Teddy pointed to Harold's prop. Harold was clutching it to his chest. He removed it and looked down. Sure enough, the items that brought such happiness had left white and tan flakes on his tie and shirt. He brushed them away.

"Not totally. Besides, these must be worth something on ebay, ya know? Look at this," he looked down the cylinder and smiled broader, forgetting their purpose for the gathering and enjoying the memories the toy brought forth.

"No, no, it's rotted and no good. It's probably going to pop," Uncle Teddy rose and put down his napkin from the snacks. He removed it from Harold's grasp and put it back in the box. "No Harold, look at this stuff. No need for it now. You're grown. Your cousins are grown. Best to just get rid of this stuff. Your grandfather didn't want it."

"Then why'd he keep it for so long? There were no kids to entertain," Harold identified. He watched Uncle Teddy put the toy back into the main box. He elected not to bother his Uncle. Such a useless argument just showed how well he was not handling his own father's death. "I'll take it home. It's no big deal. You don't have to worry about it."

"I'm not worried, but you could be infected. These things are probably crawling with disease. Rot from being hoarded for so long. Dad never threw away anything, not a thing. Just his family. I mean, why would he keep this crap? In case YOU had kids? Great-Grandkids? Doubtful."

"Oh, okay, um, okay," Harold's smile gave away his inner thoughts. The expression on his face turned to a furrow.

Uncle Teddy shook his head. "Sorry, your grandfather left a lot more baggage then this, taht's for sure."

"Apparently."

Uncle Teddy leaned over and pet Harold's scalp, moving the small amount gray hairs forward for an instant.

Harold sneered.

"I just figured," Uncle Teddy identified, "I just figured he'd have cleaned up a bit more before his passing."

"I think, in a way, we all thought he might."

This is, for the first time in these writings, one that hits close to my heart and I utilized real life experience to create. Again, this is writing about a fictional family where the POV keeps shifting between different people looking at the same event. I've been rereading some of these posts as of late, folks, and I do apologize for the poor English grammar. You were warned these were unedited!