Rambles of a Boring Day

1

“I did too, long ago,” my Dad mumbled to himself wistfully. He was watching the Waltons, which he played continuously, even if he was not in the room or in the house, the Waltons were still rolling away in the DVD player.2

“I did too, I did too,” Dad stared at the television intently, like he was gazing into another world. The actors on screen spoke to one another, but to Dad they seemed to be speaking to him. He remembered things that hadn't actually happened, and dramatized those things that actually had. Fleeting moments in his life had become the topic of the shows which played on in his mind.3

“Our family has always lived on this mountain,” said the old actress. She was playing an old hick who was fighting for her land against the government men.4

“Always lived on this mountain,” Dad repeated, as if he was the fictional old woman, who did not actually exist. In truth, his family had only recently belonged to the mountain, at least as far as history was concerned. His family hadn't founded a town, and his family was certainly not the name sakes of a mountain. In his mind, however, his family was the most honest and hardworking in the world, the most ancient family to have ever set foot upon the Pennsylvania mountains.5

I remember my Grandmother, the words she spoke to me the last time I had visited her. “It's as if he lives in two worlds,” she said. “The real one...and an imaginary one, where he goes to escape.”6

Sometimes, these worlds overlap. The imaginary becomes reality, and the selfish fear of aging and of facing up to reality forces one to embrace this fictitious existence.7

“This mornin', when I woke up I asked myself what I was gonna' do today,” said the actor, who was playing an aged moonshiner whose family had never left the foothills of Virginia.8

“What I was gonna do today...” Dad repeated, as if he was proving his faked existence to someone or something. Perhaps proving it to himself. He never understood the significance of the words, of course, he never understood the actual morals that the television show was trying to portray.9

“What I am gonna do for myself today, maybe I'll go huntin', maybe I'll fish,” the old actor said from the confines of the television screen. The lines he spoke, and the life he supposedly lived were all fictitious, written by folks who had never seen a Virginia mountain range up close. But that wasn't the point behind the script, it wasn't the idea that the writers wanted to get across.10

“What am I going to do for myself today?”11

In life, simply by living, you are given the freedom of choice. Even prisoners of a steel cage, kept away from the outside world have choices. They've more ambition and energy than those people who roam outside, the understand the concept of life and the possibilities that it presents.12

You could go fishing, you could go hunting, you could do anything you want. All you need to have is the ambition and energy to do it, all you need is the motivation. All you need is the will to accept this life, this real world, and to take it for all its worth.13

“I do too,” Dad mumbled, as if he was standing next to the old clans of Virginia. An actress begins singing a song on the television, and dad sings along as if he knows the words, as if he had has heard the song all his life. He hasn't, and the song actually means nothing to his soul or his memory, he only pretends it does.14

Dad will never ask himself the question posed by the Walton man on television. He'll never ask, “What am I going to do for myself today?” He'll only sit in his chair, in his aged house, and fill himself with imaginary memories of dramatized events which never truly occurred. He'll sit there, thinking of places and people they never truly existed, and he'll pretend he remembers them.15

He will sit, repeating lines uttered by actors, and he will pretend they are his own. He will sit, pretending that the entire world is just beyond his grasp but that he is just too frail and old to hold it in his hands.16

He will die, having proved to himself that his entire life was a grand adventure of family and good times in the mountains, and he will forever long for reality without ever truly realizing it.17

Dad was sitting in front of the television, as he sighed. His eyes were fixated upon the far off mountains of Virginia.18