Your mom was happy about that! She told your dad she was pregnant … she thought he’d be so happy … but … he was so mad. He said he knew it wasn’t his baby, it was the other guy’s baby … he kept insisting, and your mom said no, no, it was your dad’s baby, she knew it … she’d prove it … But he wouldn’t listen … he just would not listen! Maybe he didn’t want to know the truth … maybe it was an excuse for him to leave … Had he wanted to leave? I don’t know … he couldn’t take it anymore. Enna-way, it’s our baby, Swiv. Your dad left! He’s not really fighting fascists. He’s just somewhere else … and we don’t know where he is. Well, maybe he is fighting fascists. That would be like him. As you know … Swivchen, honey, I’m so sorry … I’m so sorry about all of this, but this is what happened, and it is right that you should know the truth. Come here, honey … sweetheart … my precious Swiv … here, let’s put your little tray up … let’s breathe … hooooooooooooooo …
And then … well, and then … little by little your mom really did rebuild. She came back to life. She found herself in the photo. She recognized her self. The fire inside. The ember. And here we are. She’s not crazy, Swiv. Whatever that is. She might have called herself crazy back then, but she’s not now. And she wasn’t crazy, ever. She was terrified. Her body knew it. It took her mind a while to catch up. She was grieving … she was grieving. We’re all so clumsy in our grief. She had lost Momo. She was used to Momo fighting alongside her. She had lost her dad. Your Grandpa. And she was so scared that she’d do what they did, too. She didn’t want to lose you. In Albania … she realized she didn’t want to die. She wanted to go home to be with you and your dad. She’d had an affair with that other guy for protection, for kindness—if it was kindness. It was protection. What she was doing was forming a team with that guy. We need teams. That was a good instinct. Survival. She was fighting, fighting, fighting … to stay alive. To get back to you. And here we are … where’s that nitro, honey? Well, that’s the truth … you know, fighting can be making peace … fighting can be going small … That’s the truth, Ruth!
There was something else that I wanted to say … ahhhhh … yes! Do you know the story of Romeo and Juliet? Well, I mean in a nutshell. It was a tragedy. Do you know Shakespeare’s tragedies? People like to separate his plays into tragedies and comedies. Well, jeepers creepers! Aren’t they all one and the same? So, King Lear fails to connect with what’s important in life and loses his mind … who hasn’t? There is comedy in that, don’t kid yourself. That’s life! And life doesn’t necessarily make sense. We’re human! Enna-way, everyone knows this. I’d like to see someone … maybe it could be you! I’d like to see someone take all of Shakespeare’s plays and mix them up into one play … bits and pieces to make them one … a bit of King Lear mixed up with As You Like It … what? I know, honey. I know. It could be an interesting assignment, that’s all I’m saying. Oh, someone did that at the Fringe Festival? If you say so! But I’m saying it should be mainstream, not fringe. To be alive means full body contact with the absurd. Still, we can be happy. Even poor old Sisyphus could figure that much out. And that’s saying something. You might say that God is an absurd concept but faith in God’s goodness … I find joy in that. I find it inspiring.
Oba! I’m rambling. But I brought up Romeo and Juliet for a reason. What was it … yes! My town … my hometown, and your Mom’s too. Hooooooooo. And Momo’s, of course … it had a similar tragedy, in my opinion. The church … all those men, all those Willit Brauns … prevented us from … well no, it was more than that … they took something from us. They took it from us. They stole it from us. It was … our tragedy! Which is our humanity. We need those things. We need tragedy, which is the need to love and the need … not just the need, the imperative, the human imperative … to experience joy. To find joy and to create joy. All through the night. The fight night.
That church in our town … those Willit Brauns. So smug. So certain. And they caused mass-scale tragedy. They were bandits. They crept in … crept in and tiptoed around in the dark … we couldn’t see what they were doing at the time but we felt it … we felt it … all those Willit Brauns, they robbed us blind. They stole our souls … they hung out their shingles as soul-savers even as they were destroying them … they replaced our love, our joy, our emotions, our tragedies … rage! Sorrow! Violence! Lust! Desire! Sorry … am I embarrassing you, Swiv? Well, they burnt it all down! But listen … Our love … our resilience! Our madness … we go crazy, of course! We lose ourselves. We’re human. They took all those things and replaced them with evil and with guilt. Oh. My. God. Guilt! Jeepers creepers! Ah, but we’ll slay their hypocrisy with our jokes. High five! They took all the things we need to navigate the world. They took the beautiful things … right under our noses … crept in like thieves … replaced our tolerance with condemnation, our desire with shame, our feelings with sin, our wild joy with discipline, our agency with obedience, our imaginations with rules, every act of joyous rebellion with crushing hatred, our impulses with self-loathing, our empathy with sanctimoniousness, threats, cruelty, our curiosity with isolation, willful ignorance, infantilism, punishment! Our fires with ashes, our love, our love with fear and trembling … our … hoooooooo. Hooooooooooooooo … did you find that nitro, honey?