Author's note: This story was inspired by a post by Meteor Blades. The names of the parties, as well as certain other details, have been changed for privacy, but the story is based on real events.
Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes you think you recall the details of an event, only to hear someone else tell a completely different story. The older the memory, the more fluid it seems to be, one moment a still reflecting pool, the next a series of rippling waves radiating out from the event. This story retells what I thought was such a memory.
I can't tell you exactly how old I was. I know what house we lived in, and I know who lived (or more precisely who did not live) with us at the time. I remember the kitchen as it was, with the green asbestos file floor, and the black tile squares - on in the kitchen, showing a rocket, the other in the breakfast area, with the planet saturn cut into the tile. That would put it in the era of the Saturn Rocket - late Kennedy or early Johnson administration, perhaps. That would make me twelve or thirteen perhaps, just old enough to become aware of what was going on in the world around me.
I can still see the table, and where we all sat, Mom in the "jump seat" closest the kitchen, where she could jump up to the stove or refrigerator for extra servings, etc. , Dad at the other end, the de facto head of the table, and the three of us on the two sides, myself next to Dad, and my sister next to Mom, my brother on the opposite side: as it was every night for the twenty plus years I lived in that house, we all sat in our assigned places. Dad went into work early - arrived between 6:30 and 7 every morning, so dinner, too, was early. A night like any other night, we began with grace "In nomine Patri, Filia, Spiritu Sanctum" (I wonder if Dad thought there was spiritual "extra credit" for crossing himself in latin.)
It was like that for all the #9 men on the north side. Up early, a long day outside, driving from intersection to intersection keeping the lights on time, and home with stacks of reports to fill out before the start of the next day. But they were living the dream, all of them, having made it from the parishes whose members lived in walkup apartments in courtyard buildings to those slightly nicer parishes further to the west, where houses sat on luxurious thirty-five foot lots, and women drove to the supermarket instead of pulling two-wheeled carts. Life was good.