Room-in-Nation

I listen to the rain and the ‘ping, ping, ping’ of water dripping on something metallic outside as I sit in my quiet room – the former bedroom of my younger child, a room I have commandeered since he moved out – in the first chair we bought for our house thirty years ago, which we call the Picasso chair because of its pattern but really, it is a Bauhaus design, something I hadn’t realized until some ten years into owning the chair, and the cat slumbers on the Ikea couch that my other child found free on the street with its new covers in light gray, complementing the color of the thirteen-year-old cat, whose golden fur is long and fluffy and makes him look like a lion in the winter months, but now we head into spring, and his undercoat is wanting to shed but instead mats, and I work daily to comb out the knots, but he is getting less patient with the pulling of fur and skin, especially in the area of his arthritic hips – a pain I understand as I age along, too, and feel anguish whenever I rap my fingers on a door frame or desk as I walk by and misjudge distances, cursing loudly in pain in a manner not dissimilar to the cat, whose full name is Lt. Crocker, named by that younger child when he was nine and appropriated the name of a soldier in one of the many WWII history books he was reading, which, if I had been paying closer attention, I would have realized the subject matter of was much too graphic and mature for him, but I only realized it when I snuggled with him on our living room couch watching Saving Private Ryan, and I asked my baby how he felt as the scene of the invasion at Normandy Beach unfolded, when all of the soldiers jump from the landing crafts into the water, one by one, row by row, and are mowed down by enemy fire before they reach the beaches, because I feel sick to my stomach not just from this horrific scene, but also the fact that my beautiful innocent boy is watching this, and he answers, and he answers, “It makes me feel seasick and not want to get on a boat,” which is just another instance of his giving me an answer to a question which seems ironic, sardonic, or worse, inoculated, and I wonder if it is my wit he has acquired or is it that by allowing him to take in these gruesome images in slow motion that he is becoming insensitive to the horrors humans inflict on each other, perhaps preparing him for a time when he will have no choice but to inflict such atrocities on other humans, and I wonder if all of the violent first-person shooter video games are an authoritarian plot to prepare a generation of soldiers, as they will be needed by these modern-day feudal lords in their quest for world domination while they remain secure in their ostentatious gilded manors in gated communities, keeping out we serfs, preparing us for the return to yet another time when those with wealth and power openly proclaim that only they are deserving of their privilege, for the masses have not the wisdom nor capacity to appreciate it.

But I digress, my attention diverted from the steady ‘ping, ping, ping’ of the water drip outside my window, which, because the rain has now stopped, is more insistent, but still unidentifiable, and that sound is what I hoped I might focus my thoughts on, a vexation for which I could find a simple answer.