We were so tired. Always so tired. Like some permanent symptom of parenthood. After nearly two years of sleeplessness, exhaustion felt like home. Sophie was almost 2, and still hadn’t slept through the night. And hardly napped at all. I was very occasionally able to bob and dance and romance her into one. Maybe. And of course C had to get up early every day for her gig at the legal salt mines, when it was still dark, and she wouldn’t be back until it was dark again. So we were sad and exhausted and strained every Saturday. If we even got one together at all.
But not Sophie. No, she was ready to go. And this Saturday was the Summer Solstice Fairy parade down State Street, quite the event through the middle of town in Santa Barbara. We’d been planning on going with her for months, putting on one of her countless fairy outfits and wands and letting her “magic” things down there like she was always trying to magic crap around the house. Now it just sounded like work and another hellish, stupid parade. Except for the adorable tiny fairy part. And we had stupidly told the grandparents about it, so they were expecting pictures. Off we were.
Sophie put on a fairy tutu, fluffy and glittery and blue, picked out a silver magic wand from her collection, and we went to watch the legions of entrants (we had been too busy and disorganized and tired to accomplish officially entering her into the event.) She twirled and magicked the crowd on our end of the street anyway, dancing with her silver wand that she shook everywhere. “Magic. Magic.” She smiled her little smile, bestowing her magic and grace on all the spectators who must have actually come to see her, because there were no other fairies in the street yet. And they all smiled back because she was the cutest fairy they were going to see that day, for sure, and the only one with real magic. They took pictures of her like she was a star. A reporter clipped shots from his huge camera as she toddled her magic up and down the block, the crowd watching. Flashing smiles, pointing fingers, snapping photos.
We finally started to leave hours later, it seemed to me, after the parade was over enough for me to beg off having to see any more of one of humankind’s stupidest tradition, a parade! A spectacle meant for children and mental defectives, of which I still maintain I am neither. Sure it was cute for a while, but sooner or later they ran out of fairies and then it was old guys in shiny cars and young girls in crappy bands and fire-trucks and horses and wave at the people because we like to wave! Say hi! Look there’s another one! Somebody run me over. Please.
Sophie kept trying to run in the now-busy street and C looked like she was going to just pass out with that limp half-smile on the curb and I barely saved Sophie from getting run over by a teenage girl trying to jerk a wheelchair up on the curb. The corpse sitting in the chair was surrounded by his family, all three generations, and they took up residence right next to us on the corner. Three kids, two older parents and grandma and…grandpa, I assumed.
“Can you see, Dad?” the Mom said, a plump white woman in her 50’s.
Grandpa in the wheelchair said nothing. His mouth was open and slack, and he was slumped back in the chair. No response of any kind. Not even any eye movement.
“Here move him this way. Better now?”
The teenage daughter swiveled him to the right. He fell over a little. The mother pushed him back upright. Still no response. Except for a moaning that sounded more like a dying man’s plea to die sooner, than directions to better see the parade. It was so angry, muffled. Like what the hell are you people doing propping me up and bringing me here. I wanna die, not sit through another goddamned parade you horrible ignorant ungrateful…
“Uhhhhhhh!” was all that actually came out. Still no movement of any kind, no muscle tension. Nothing. Just the angry death moan of their old man’s corpse. “Uhhhhhhhhh!!!”
“OK let’s go! Enough parade. Let’s parade our Sophie back home,” I snapped to C. She relented easily and stood up. Between the parade and the moaning corpse we had overstayed our tiny welcome.
Sophie sat up tall in the stroller, beaming her perfect, gigantic smile and magic wand. And now C and I were really tired. Worse still, tired of being tired. As Sophie waved and said ‘hi’ to everyone we met on the long way home, I wondered deep, dark. How the fuck did I get here, mostly. Seriously how did I get here? Was this it? Nothing accomplished, nothing gained, all those plans and dreams along the way, all fallen to the wayside, silly attempts to be productive and successful. Working on some crappy book that no one will ever read, just a stay-at-home Dad and that was all really. Suddenly a househusband with no real future in sight and a present that was exhausting and miserable and unfulfilling? For sure I would end up like that moaning corpse of a patriarch, propped up for some parade by the rest of the family. Just like that fortune had told me from our Chinese restaurant the night before, He who does not know where he is going will soon end up somewhere else. Obviously true! He ends up slumped in a wheel chair begging his family to kill him, but they just think he’s moaning because he can’t see the clown jugglers in the infernal procession. Uuuhhhhhhhh!!!!
Just then I had to jerk the stroller to a stop to avoid running smack into a homeless man. Not just a homeless man, but one of Santa Barbara’s aristocratic homeless, maybe the king, even, by the majestic, cognac-drunk way he held himself, and the way he gestured and spoke, with truly regal stature. As if we were all on his property, his domain, and he was merely allowing it while we still pleased him.
“Excuse me,” I said, turning the carriage to move around him. He stopped giving loud, unctuous orders to the invisible minions to his left, and took us all in as only a bum royale could. A step back, a huge smile, and both of his enormous arms opened to address us, or attack us. I wasn’t sure.
“Hi!” added Sophie sweetly. I whisked around him. He whirled back towards us before I escaped the street corner.
“THERE GOES THE LUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD!!!” He proclaimed impossibly loudly to the crowded street, his voice booming with soaked importance.
I looked back at him and he stood, immobile, in his flowing beard and immense jacket, arms still embracing the world and blazing eyes locked with mine. Dammit. He was right. I was.