Memories Are An Old Man's Toys

by Elayne Tulliani

  Memories

  Are An

  Old Man’s

  Toys

  Elayne Tulliani

  Copyright © 2018 Elayne Tulliani

  All rights reserved.

  This writing is dedicated to my brother

  SFC William P. Reynolds: One evening prior to his passing my brother shared that he felt as though he had a dozen stories lingering in his mind that he never committed to print. He made me promise that I would not allow myself to follow that same path. His exact words were, “We are one soul born into two bodies, and if you don’t pursue your writing it will be as if I have failed twice.” I know without any doubt that my brother is smiling down on me with every key I strike.

  You didn’t fail… you never failed.

  Special Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Kaitlyn Mahoney for all of your valuable input and editing. I appreciate your help more than I can express.

  Stephen Paris, thank you for all of your support and friendship and for accepting all those late night phone calls so I could bounce ideas off of you.

  I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to Carlos Ferreira. Carlos is the talented artist that created the artwork displayed on the cover of “Memories Are An Old Man’s Toys.”

  Brianna Rich, thank you so much for helping me to bring this to life. You’re the best.

  Jay Partlan, many thanks for all of your help.

  With Love

  To Mom and Dad, I feel your strength and presence every day, I love and miss you.

  Christopher Reynolds and Justin Brown, being your mother will always be what makes me the proudest. You have both been my driving force throughout life. Thank you for your unwavering faith in me.

  Mary (Cathy) Reynolds and Marguerite Biancardi, you two have guided, comforted, and encouraged me from the beginning, thank you both for being my big sisters and my personal cheering squad.

  Maureen Mahoney, we have been best friends since childhood, and your never-ending support has carried me through every stage of my life. You are irreplaceable.

  Joe Tulliani, you rescued me in so many ways, and I could never express what your love has meant to me. Thank you for standing by me.

  Chapters

  1 ELEMENTARY LESSONS

  2 INTRODUCTION TO LOSS

  3 THE CATALYST

  4 THE SMIRK

  5 DEATH GRIP OF OBSESSION

  6 REFLECTING

  7 NEXT STOP, BEAN TOWN

  8 THE WEIGHT OF SHAME

  9 JOEY AND THE HORSEMAN

  10 THE JOURNAL

  11 A SERIES OF CONFESSIONS

  12 SURRENDERING SOULS

  13 THE LEGACY

  14 ILLUSION OF FOREVER

  15 BEAUTIFUL HEARTBREAK

  16 SYSTEM DOWN

  17 TOMORROW IS NOT PROMISED

  18 A BETTER PLACE

  19 A SEASON OF CHANGE

  1

  ELEMENTARY LESSONS

  “Is life better with or without social media? Do you feel a deep connection with the people in your life or do you often feel isolated?”

  “My name is Professor Simpson, and I would like to welcome you all to Sociology 1020. Before we dive into our assigned reading, I would like to ask each of you to ponder those questions for a moment. I believe we all, at one time or another, feel lonelier now than we did before we had all of these tools at our fingertips. We’ve all experienced moments when, it’s late at night, and darkness and silence surround us, both broken only by the occasional passing car whose lights peer through our window and invade our serenity.

  “During these private moments how often has the thought crossed your mind, ‘I wish things could go back to how they used to be?’ Most of us never allow that thought to occupy too much of our time. We probably push that idea from our mind because of the emotions of sadness and loss it provokes as opposed to the fact that turning back time is just not an option.

  “We yearn for the days when our families got together, and the adults visited while siblings and cousins ran through the yard, laughing and carefree. Unlike today’s gatherings where people spend the majority of their time focusing on their phones oblivious to the people around them. Many parents recall with heavy hearts the days when they were involved in every aspect of their children’s lives. As opposed to nowadays where their involvement often amounts to no more than clicking “like” on a social media page. Those memories make us wish we had taken more time to enjoy those days when given the opportunity. With each passing year, the expression ‘The days were long but the years flew by’ takes on a more profound and sadder meaning.

  “This yearning for yesteryears is magnified twofold as technology begins to take hold of our lives. Each time our calls are answered by machines we scream, ‘Why can’t I talk to a human being?’ When automated calls invade the serenity of our home, we mumble under our breath and slam down the receiver. As the targeted junk mail mountain climbs ever higher, we sigh that soon we will commit an afternoon to shredding everything. We have allowed technology to surpass all of our needs, and the servant has become the master.

  “These last two generations have been weaned onto video games and electronic devices. There are little television screens mounted on the back of the driver’s seats to entertain the kids during a mere thirty-minute ride. Our precious moments of ‘nothingness’ are now replaced with pressure, expectations, and deadlines. Life is just too fast these days, and the primary human need to decompress is now an elusive luxury.

  “Each of these thoughts creates a bitter taste that lingers and leaves us sitting up at night with our faces cradled in our hands thinking how great it would be if someone could just turn the clocks back to a time when life was simpler.

  “The gentleman I’m going to introduce you to is abo-

  ut to take you on a journey that involves no time travel yet

  thrust you back to yesteryears in the most interesting of ways. By the time we finish reading this book, you will realize that you have the ability to revisit the days when life was a little less hurried and when friends were people you had real-life experiences with and weren’t just names on a list of your social media accounts.

  “Some of you had never known a time when social media didn’t exist. You may be the group that experiences the most significant revelation of all. You hold the power, literally, in the palm of your hands to emerge yourself in the moments of your life in a manner that our younger generations have never had the joy of experiencing.

  “Now allow me to introduce you to the man who will leave you with this gift by simply taking away your ability to ignore that you already possess the power to turn back time.

  Since we are blessed to have such beautiful weather that we can conduct class here on The Commons let’s get comfortable and please turn off your phones so we may begin.”

  I would like to introduce you to Billy; his name is as unpretentious as the man himself. He’s a unique man that inadvertently blends into his surroundings. There are mirror-like images of him everywhere in your life. You interact with him daily at the library, accountant’s office, and the computer repair shop. He is everywhere yet we never notice him.

  Billy will most likely conjure up memories of someone from your childhood. He was the little boy that ate lunch alone and tried his hardest to avoid making eye contact with other children. On the occasions when eye contact was unavoidable, Billy cautiously offered a nervous little smile despite knowing that it would be met with dirty looks and degrading comments. He knew the answers to all the math questions and won all the spelling bees. His circle of friends consisted primarily of adults and the few children who found themselves tangled in his web were obligated to be the
re due to blood relation rather than choice.

  As a child, he was of average size with a head full of dark brown curls which dipped down and danced in front of his big brown puppy dog eyes. He hated his hair because the other boys used to tease him that it looked like girls’ hair. His mother, on the other hand, adored his curls and would spend hours at night while they sat watching television just combing her fingers through his ringlets.

  Because Billy was picked on and bullied daily, his confidence took a beating too. He had become a prisoner of his insecurities. Therefore his secret crush on a little girl named Sherry would stay just that…secret. Sherry in many ways was much like Billy. She was brilliant but painfully shy. Sherry came from a home that reeked of dysfunction and substance abuse. Although she never dared to approach Billy she had a very innocent crush on him as well. Billy was teased, bullied, and dismissed as though his existence was purely for the amusement of other children. Sherry always felt terrible for him, but she knew if she befriended him she would become the next target. She always admired his spirit but maintained what she felt was a safe distance.

  Billy grew up in a modest home for the times with a rotary phone and black and white television. There was an old Philco radio standing in the corner of the parlor that gently filled the air with classical tunes. Despite the typical home, Billy was far from your typical little boy. He was a brilliant child with a heart of gold.

  Although he always felt different, he had no idea how very different he was. Never could he have imagined what an instrumental role he would play in the world. He was tired of being bullied and pushed around, but he had learned to accept it. What he wasn’t able to take was being ignored and dismissed, to him, being ignored hurt more than any punch he had ever suffered and the pain lasted much longer too.

  His younger years unfolded under a shadow of sadness that no child should experience. Although most of the children considered him a wimp or a sissy, they had no idea how much courage it took to face each day.

  It was 1972 and Billy had recently entered the fourth grade. It was mid-October, and the Science teacher had assigned a project to the class and Billy was rather excited. Even though he did great in all his classes, Science and Math were his favorites.

  Recess, lunch, and gym were the times he hated most and the brief moments between classes and the walks to and from school were the times that terrified him, those were the moments when he felt most vulnerable. Despite the taunting and intimidation that went on within the classroom, at least under the watchful eye of the teacher he felt a small sense of safety. There were only so many shenanigans that a teacher would tolerate and Billy found comfort in that.

  The Science teachers’ name was Mr. Collins, and he was rather fond of Billy. It wasn’t often that a teacher got a child who enjoyed learning and when such a child was assigned to your class it was next to impossible not to feel a renewed passion for why you decided to enter teaching in the first place.

  The assignment was for each child to spend a week studying their home life and then come up with an idea for something that would help to make some aspect of their home run smoother. Mr. Collins had explained that it could be a gadget for the kitchen that would make cooking easier. The invention could also be something that would help the family to get better organized. It could even be something as outrageous as a robot that would perform tasks for you.

  Mr. Collins real goal here was to get the kids thinking outside the box and to help them develop their problem-solving skills. He didn’t care what they created it was more important in his opinion that they used their heads for something other than hat racks.

  Billy was silently excited while the rest of the class moaned and groaned. However, Billy sat there waiting for the dreaded shoe to drop. He silently chanted, “Please don’t assign partners, please don’t assign partners.” He hated when he had to team up with other kids because he always got bullied into doing all the work himself and then they got the credit. Mr. Collins announced, “This will be an independent project,” and Billy let out a sigh that some of his classmates heard. One of Billy’s classmates, a boy named Tony, leaned over to him and whispered, “Lucky for you wimp.”

  Tony hated Billy, and the feeling was mutual. Tony was a young Italian boy who according to all the girls was “drop dead gorgeous.” Billy didn’t see it that way; he thought Tony was full of himself and as dumb as the day was long. He was always picked first in recess games, and most of the other boys followed him around like he was some sort of prophet and did whatever he told them to do as if they got to be cool by association.

  Tony spent more time in the bathroom mirrors then the girls did, and he walked around the school as if his classmates should feel honored that he even showed up. Most of the teachers appeared to be under his spell as well. It was like you could pick out which teachers were the followers when they were kids, which ones were the punks and which ones were the nerds. The rest of the kids were too shallow to pick up on this, but Billy had it all figured out. The truth was, the teachers probably just felt that if they were on Tony’s good side, then the rest of the class would stay in order.

  That day Billy was so eager to get started on his project that he darted out of school as soon as the bell rang and had made it all the way home before he realized that this was probably one of the first days he didn’t get tormented on his way home. He had run so fast that the rest of the kids were still milling around at their lockers. He thought, “Maybe this is what I should do every day. If I had my stuff ready, I could skip going to my locker, and maybe the trip home wouldn’t always end with me getting my ass kicked.”

  He didn’t waste too much time trying to figure out future escape plans; he was biting at the bit to get started on this project. He loved when he got to work on things like this as he had what the adults in his life referred to as “an overactive imagination.” Billy scoffed thinking, “They wouldn’t know an original idea if it jumped up and punched them in the nose.” The only person that supported him, even though she didn’t always understand him, was his mom. She knew he was special, but at least when she called him special, it didn’t translate into ‘a freak’ like it did when other people said it.

  He spent that night sitting on the old folding stool in the kitchen with his face cradled in his hands studying his mother as she worked in the kitchen preparing dinner. Each time she looked at him she giggled. He was studying every move she made and asking a million questions. She was getting quite a kick out of his interest. His mother always wished they could spend more time together, but it seemed there just weren’t enough hours in the day. His moms’ name was Marguerite, and she was a very kind woman, she treated everyone equally regardless of their status in life.

  Billy’s dad often called Marguerite a handsome woman. Billy could never figure out why he said that; handsome was for men. One night Marguerite caught the look in Billy’s eyes when his dad called her handsome, and she realized he was confused by that term. She leaned over and whispered to him, “That means daddy thinks I’m pretty,” Billy giggled because it was the first time he realized that his dad must like his mom the same way he liked Sherry. He felt like he had been let in on a secret.

  Pretty, was putting it mildly though, Marguerite was a

  gorgeous woman. She was of average height with long brunette hair that she kept rolled up into a bun. However it wasn’t the kind of bun that Billy had seen on old women, it was rolled down the back of her head and clipped with a pretty butterfly hairpin. She had high cheekbones and stunning hazel eyes.

  On some nights she would sit in front of the tall dressing table and brush out her hair and Billy would sit on the edge of her bed and they would talk about life. He loved these talks with his mother because she spoke to him like he was an adult. She never talked down to him or assumed that due to his age he wouldn’t understand her thoughts. She talked to him like he was a real person and Billy didn’t get that treatment in too many areas of his life.

  Marguerit
e wasn’t extremely educated, but she was smart about the things that mattered most in life. Some evenings after Billy had finished his homework he would curl up with his mom on the couch, and she would read him stories about dragons and kings. Billy didn’t care too much for these kinds of stories, but it didn’t matter to him what they read, he just loved his time with her. This evening in the kitchen was no exception; he was having fun studying her routine.

  He asked her about the gadgets she was using, “Why are you using those mixers? Why do you have to use special scissors for the bones? Why are there so many different measuring cups and spoons?” The questions were as endless as his imagination, and she was very patient and answered them all.

  He wasn’t quite as excited about his plan to sit and watch his dad the following day though. His father’s name was also Billy, but everyone just called him Bill. Little Billy couldn’t wait to be older so people would call him Bill too. He always felt like “Billy” sounded too much like a kids name and he never really felt like a kid.

  His dad was a practical and straightforward man. He was an Air Force bombardier in WWII, and his military thought process had never really left him. He was a no-frills, cut to the chase sort of man. He had a kind heart, but sometimes it was a little difficult to reach under his tough exterior. Billy would just have to do the best he could to study his dad tomorrow.

  He lay in bed that night thinking, “How could I come up with the best invention ever?” He drifted off to sleep with a kaleidoscope of thoughts racing through his mind.

  The next morning he got the stern reminder of why he hated walking to school. Tony and a group of boys were all standing outside of a little corner grocery store waiting for the girls from their little click to come out of the store. As the boys saw Billy approaching, they began to taunt and tease him. “Hey Billy, whatcha got for lunch today?” One of the boys grabbed his lunch box and began to rifle through it. “Yummy, Billy brought me cookies today.” The boy bit into the cookies that Billy’s mom had baked and then spit them on the ground. “Damn, they taste like old socks,” he taunted, and all the boys laughed.