Summer Time Blues

[Zenn (DELETED 4491)]

Sometimes, Zenn really hated summer. When he was a kid, it meant leaving Canada to go to California with his sister to stay with their father. It meant baklava and struggling to learn Greek from their grandmother and days on the beach with ice cream and soda pop and the ocean. Sometimes their father would take them to Sea World or drive them to Disneyland.

He and his sister would stay up all night playing games and eating junk food and pass out in their blanket fort, only to wake up in time for breakfast to play outside. This persisted on into their teens until his sister graduated and went to university in Toronto and he had to spend the summer doing those things by himself and missing his school friends.

When he turned seventeen, the visits to San Diego stopped. Not because of a family rift (though, the summer after he turned sixteen, his grandmother passed away and they held a traditional Orthodox funeral in her honor; his mother even made the trip from Montreal with them and held his father’s hand while he cried) or a conscious decision on his part to stay in Canada from then on. His mother, at the not so ripe age of thirty-eight, developed early-onset Alzheimer’s and was sent to live in an assisted living center.

Every day after school, Zenn would go visit his mother. He would do his homework in her room and tell her what he was studying and what his friends were doing. His sister called when she could and he would whisper about their mother’s rapidly deteriorating condition.

The next time he saw his father and his sister was at his graduation. He didn’t go to university like his sister had, preferring to stay with his mother until she began to hallucinate that he was his father and speak to him in Greek. For once, he was glad he’d never picked up on the language beyond the basics.

He moved to Ontario, staying with his sister for a time, and then bouncing around from place to place, odd job to odd job until he had blown into Harper Rock. He acquired a terrible apartment a few blocks’ walk from the little independent music store he worked at. He saw his sister and his mother twice a year, once on their mother’s birthday and once for Christmas. Their father never came back to visit.

And so, Zenn hated summer because his mother’s birthday was during the summer and so it meant seeing her again, unable to remember her two children. It meant watching his sister try to choke back tears as she explained how her career was going and this and that and their mother just asking where their father was because they had a date in a few hours. They were in love, you see. It meant feeling his heart shatter because his mother was gone but she was still there, trapped in this limbo and every time the urge to shout that they were her children and their father had abandoned her and them a long time ago.

Summer was the worst season of the year.