Like many other boys, I was carefree and careless with a thoughtlessness that bordered on stupidity. The world revolved around my desire to laugh and run in a bubble of fun and I rarely noticed the wake of catastrophe that cast out behind me. But I was always aware of my father watching me, and I was aware of the storm.
He was a giant of a man, with a voice like thunder in the distance. I was a butterfly, small and frightened, observing the horizon of his brow, watching to see if the storm clouds were coming near, waiting for the winds to blow in my direction.
Surprisingly, despite my raucous behaviour, they very rarely did.
There was a deep anger in my father, but that storm ravaged other lands. Most often, my delicate wings felt only his whisper. But the whisper of my father was still a very powerful thing.
Each of my siblings have their stories about these whispers, about the times my father sat them down to have A Talk - a proper noun that is capitalised in our childhood memories the way A Beating is for some children. A Talk was a gruelling ordeal of mental torture where your mind felt like a balloon filled with too much water.
I, the only son of his six children (and his least intelligent child by far), was often caught off guard by A Talk.
"Let's take a walk," my father would say, and we would go outside and sit down on the stoop, walking nowhere. He would ask me innocent questions about my day, enquire about my opinion on random matters, and generally just chat with me until I suddenly became aware that I had irrevocably incriminated myself, and that he knew every detail of the childhood crime I thought I had gotten away with two days earlier, and had all but forgotten.
At which point, he would begin to fill my mental balloon with water, taking me to task for my misdeed with a complexity of words that my eight-year-old mind couldn't possibly comprehend. I would spend the rest of the day reeling with confusion, my mind unable to focus on anything I was doing, trying desperately to absorb what he had told me.
A Talk was torture. My siblings all got different versions of A Talk, but we each joke to this day that we would have rather had the beating and be done with it. The beating, we say, would have been easier on us.
