Fargo’s Mid-day Sun

(North Dakota-1983)



The mid-day sun beat down upon Shawn and me, looking over the empty fields of Fargo, in the summer of 1983. He was eleven-years old; you’d think he was fourteen, he was tall and thin, and had a bubbly personality. Whoever met him loved him, if indeed he was willing to share his personality.
The empty field, seemed to have given-up the struggle of growing things, it was all weedy (sometimes likened to my life). We were riding bikes down this long blank road; the dizzying heat seemed to be bouncing off our bikes onto us. Shawn was thinly clothed. I was out of the Army now going on two and half years, and going with a girl named Sharon, she had lived in West Fargo, and had relatives, whom we were visiting, she was ten-years younger than me.
We stopped our bikes, and headed back to Sharon’s relative’s home, and there Shawn played some basketball in the driveway, a basketball hoop was fastened onto the garage, he played with me, fainter and smaller my energy went, in comparisons to his, as he squirmed and twisted around with that basketball, as if he was a pro. Then we ate our lunch.
Shawn seemed to have been wrapped in a mist and whirling cloud, a storm of delight, he was always excited to be with me—back then. Somehow, somewhere he seemed always to be clinging, if not climbing, striving, and looking for immortality, where there was no hope.
My long line of thoughts—for it seemed I was always thinking—twisted towards the sky, it was a thrill to be with Shawn, but it always seemed I was trying to put my life back together in those days (if only we could start off in the middle of our lives, and forget the long and enduring path to the summit), it is funny, when I say that ‘…back together,’ because this was my earth, my time, but I needed a shock in the head to get me out of a long gaze.
Plainly, I was working at a bank, not making much money, and needed to go back to school, needed to stop drinking. And I was looking you might say, for that trail, the boys were better off with their mother, for I was divorced at the time, and drinking did not favor a winsome life style had I taken them, and they wanted me to (it would be in 1984, when I’d stop drinking completely, the boys, my twins would be twelve).
That year, 1984, I bought a duplex, and was going to move my two boys in it, and I think they shouted with joy, it would although be embarrassing, the house burnt down, the folks in the lower apartment, the place I was going to live in with the boys, were the culprits, in that they were the issue at hand. Funny I thought at the time, here I stop drinking, and the husband of the lower apartment, was drunk, and fell to sleep, and up with the house, eleven people living in the house and no one got hurt.
It was miserable for both me and the kids, — a home without a roof, dreams shattered. I kind of knew how they were thinking—being brought up for four years on a foster farm—I knew how it felt: deserted, abandoned, and surely they felt similar emotions.
At this point of my life, there was no way to relaunch the boat that is to say, I could not rebuild or replace the house; it was 90% destroyed. Oh, I don’t know, maybe I could have, but it didn’t seem so at the time. Thus, grimly I told the kids what happened, and the glittering candle that once was in their eyes, was put out, now a sputtering candle indeed.

In conclusion to this chapter, Fargo was a hot place back in the summer of 1983, and Shawn was in a most joyful mood, high spirits on that short trip from Minnesota to North Dakota. And that long bicycle ride, down that long empty road, with its blank like fields, was but one moment in life, a time before he could protest life. And by the time he would have seasoned heavily with life, rising to full manhood, balancing his life or trying to, as I had to do mine, he would learn as I did, some of life was salt, other parts black paper, a spicy stream indeed is life, and I’ve enjoyed most every minute, and grabbed most opportunities, as I did with that long bike ride in the countryside, and am most grateful for do so.


11-3-2008