Life in Rewind. Terry Murphy Weible

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СКАЧАТЬ mother had gone to a place where Ed couldn’t see or touch her was terrifying. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to his dad. He wanted to stay by his side, be near to him, watch him to make sure nothing bad happened to him. Ed nevertheless yielded to his father’s wishes, and the traumatized boy went to live with his aunt and uncle. ‘I didn’t have the words to express myself, and what I was feeling,’ remembers Ed. ‘I could only do what I was told to do.’

      Ed may not have had the ability to express his thoughts and feelings aloud, but his deepest emotions rose up in silent expression as he related to the scenes of the movies and television shows he watched. He connected with storylines dealing with the issues of love, honour and family, as they played out before him on the television set.

      Ed recalls a specific moment during this time when he was visiting his Auntie Queenie’s house. Auntie Queenie was upstairs making his favourite chocolate-and-marshmallow sweets, while downstairs he watched Uncommon Valor with his Uncle ‘Crunch’ Mac in their new entertainment room. ‘When you see moments like this on television, or in the movies-the love of a son, played by Patrick Swayze, for his father-those are real moments of emotion that live inside of us, and stir us at the very core,’ Ed remembers. ‘I was raised on moments like that…television brought it out in me.’

      According to Ed’s father, ‘not much changed’ while Eddie lived with his Aunt Betty and Uncle Junior. And while Ed was drawn to Junior’s strength and integrity, and cites him as a role model for living a life of honour-being a man’s man who meant what he said, firmly believed in being truthful, and never talked bad about anyone-it wasn’t enough to erase the feelings of being so desperately unsettled. At the urging of Ed’s sister Tami, Bob took Ed to see a psychiatrist, hoping to find answers for his son’s silence. Ed refused to talk to the doctor.

      In an attempt to bring his family back together and give Ed and his sister, Deena, a fresh start, Bob thought it would be a good idea to sell the house in Stoughton and make a permanent move to their summer home on Cape Cod. It was not a decision he discussed with his children-he just did it. Suddenly, inexplicably, Ed was taken to live in a world far away from the smell of spring lilacs outside his window, the tyre swing hanging from the tall tree in the back garden, and his best friend Rudy. It was the only home he’d ever known-the refuge he associated with his mother’s love and protection. As he watched his dad load boxes into a removal lorry to take down to their summer home, he had no idea he was leaving his childhood home for ever-and he was never given a chance to say goodbye to it.

      Time just kept moving forward, and the changes it inflicted upon Ed were too many and too fast. He wanted it all to stop. He wanted to turn back time and make everything the way it was before. He wanted to stay in the one place where his mother lived in his heart and mind, but it had all vanished in the rearview window of his father’s car as they left Stoughton for the last time.

      The house on the Cape was a brand new ranch with all the modern conveniences. It didn’t have a long history, or rumours of ghosts. It didn’t smell like an antique shop. There wasn’t even a hint of his mother’s shampoo freshness, or the lingering scent of cigarettes she’d smoked at the kitchen table while playing her games. Other than Ed’s sister, Deena, his grandmother Sitto-who temporarily acted as their caretaker-and of course the television, the house was a vast, unfamiliar, five-bedroomed emptiness. The joy that Ed had once got from playing outside was gone. The scenery was foreign and he had no friends in the neighbourhood to play with. He missed Rudy, he missed the tree swing, he missed the swimming pool. So he retreated inside to live among the things he could touch, that had once been touched by his mother. He began to seek comfort in the physical objects, the toy Transformers, GI Joes, the Star Wars figures and the Darth Vader costume his mother had bought him, all of which had a calming effect on his mind. He would curl up on the sofa, watch his usual cartoons and television programmes, and relish the familiarity of it all, reliving the warm and cosy feelings from the childhood that felt a million miles away. The toys and television had become Ed’s mental catharsis.

      When Tommy came home from the service he would come by to help Bob get the kids off to school. He recalls it was hard to get Ed moving in the morning. ‘The harder I pushed, the longer it took for Ed to get his things together and make his way to the car,’ says Tommy. Ed, he reports, was always going back to check and recheck things he needed to bring to school, and touch certain things before he could move out the door. ‘Looking back,’ recalls Tom, ‘it was Ed’s OCD starting to reveal itself. It wasn’t because Ed was lazy, but we didn’t know that at the time.’

      A self-described ‘geek’, Ed was the skinny new kid in a new environment, and he quickly became the target of neighbourhood bullies. He wasn’t comfortable at school, he wasn’t completely comfortable at home and, by the time he hit 13, he wasn’t comfortable in his own body. ‘I was trying to become an adult and deal with the fact that my mom wasn’t there, and there was no one in the family for me to talk to about adolescence.’ Emotionally, Ed says he continued to identify closely with the young kid inside himself and still enjoyed his cartoons and toys in spite of the growing pressures of being a teenager. And while Ed wasn’t as close to his father as he had been as a child, there was a constant undercurrent of worry in his life that he, too, might die. His dad wasn’t home much, but Ed always made it a point to know where his father was, checking in on him to make sure he was OK. Life was confusing and, he admits, ‘I lived a lonely motherfucking life, always asking myself, “What the hell about me?”’

      Ed says that he quickly realized that his survival, and gathering friends and family around him, depended on his personality. ‘Being a sweet, geeky, book-smart kid helped me make friends.’ Ed’s attachment to his friends was intense and loyal. The more preoccupied he became with his friendships, the more he was distracted from the constant thought of dealing with the loss of his mother. ‘I didn’t get closure to the problem, and never developed the coping skills I needed, but I felt I was honouring her by trying to be happy,’ says Ed.

      By the time high school rolled around, Ed had grown into a tall, good-looking teenager. Tommy, who had always been a terrific athlete, encouraged Ed to get involved in sports. Ed never considered himself a jock at 10 stone, but managed to make the football team in years 11 and 12. By this time Ed had naturally developed a quick wit that made him popular with his friends, and became part of a small group of guys. Kevin Frye, captain of the Falmouth High School football team and one of Ed’s closest friends, remembers: ‘Eddie would always go above and beyond to help his friends out, and he wanted everybody around him to be happy. We all knew he didn’t have much of a home life, he and his dad were not the closest, so his friends pretty much became his family.’

      No one ever really talked about the fact that Ed’s mother died, but his friends all knew, and there were times when Ed would become suddenly pensive. When someone would ask, ‘What’s up, Eddie?’ he would simply tell them he had a lot of things on his mind. It was clear these sporadic interruptions in his otherwise upbeat mood reflected much deeper issues. Kevin remembers times when it would be hard for Ed to go home after they’d been hanging out together because he really had nothing to go home to but an empty house.

      Ed’s high school football career was unremarkable. He was tall but skinny, and not by any stretch the most physically gifted athlete on the field. His playing time was usually limited to the few minutes at the end of the fourth quarter. Ed may not have seen a lot of game time, but he remembers overhearing one of his coaches say, ‘The kid’s got a lot of heart,’ and that made him feel good. Even when he did play, there was rarely anyone around to watch who could later pat him on the back and offer words of encouragement. The only reason he played football, he now admits, is that he wanted to make his brother Tom proud of him.

      Tom would show up at practice whenever he was in town, but Ed’s dad was always too busy working to come to his games. Ed says he never pressured him about it because he figured work was something his dad did to bury the feelings he had for his mother. In the back of СКАЧАТЬ