Save Me Time, OR, The Life and Times of Liam Theodore Cassidy Brunstrom, Part 7
Save me Time, OR, The Life and Times of Liam Theodore Cassidy Brunstrom, Part 6
I spent seven years asking Tanya to marry me before she finally said yes, very publicly, in a restaurant at New Year’s Eve in Birr, CountyOffaly in front of a room full of happily surprised strangers. I think about that night a lot, it was the night before our friends J. and L. got married. We still haven’t gotten around to the ceremony ourselves, largely because we’re unsure what country to do it in. Wherever we decide to marry, it will irritate a bunch of people. Perhaps the best thing we can do is figure out somewhere in neither Canada, Ireland or the UK so that everyone is equally irritated. I had been looking up the details of getting married in Las Vegas for this very purpose, but now neither of us will be in a position to go to Vegas for many years. The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is meeting in Vegas in April and I’m due to give a paper there. I write to cancel (swallowing a few regrets), since there’s no way we can be somewhere like Vegas so close to Tanya’s due date. To get married in Las Vegas before a motley assemblage of gamblers, strippers, Elvis impersonators and eighteenth-century literature specialists would have had a very special kind of charm. I make a promise with myself never to accuse my child of having robbed me of my trip. I’m shocked that there’s a primitive, irresponsible, selfish and unfatherly voice still in my head saying “Vegas would have been cool.” No, our kid must be spared that voice. There are some grumpy family jokes that simply aren’t worth it.
Tanya and I still haven’t figured out, longer term, which country we’re going to live in. Will we ever be sat on a sofa, my child and I, cheering for different teams? How difficult is it going to be keeping the child in touch with extended family? How often and how easily will I be able to show the child things that I knew as a child, or that Tanya knew? Will our child know London, for example, feel comfortable there… feel at home? Will it feel odd to be parents of a child who feels more at home in a country than we do? Will our child grow up feeling interesting or just confused.
If we wind up living permanently in Canada, it’ll be a cleaner break with the past and our child would be growing up in the same country one of their parents grew up in. England is a non-starter with seemingly no chance a job there for me since I was pretty much thrown out around 94-95. If our child grows up in Ireland she’ll be one of a very new kind of Irish citizen, he’d held to redefine what Irish identity could be. There are so many alternate timelines I can project out into the future. Everything is dependent on just a few coin tosses.
I start to think about Valentine’s Day. This will be the first one of these that we’ve been apart for quite a while. Something must be done even from (especially from) this immense distance. The floral part is easy enough. I locate a florist a few streets away from her, fill in the name address and approximate time of day and a credit card does the rest. However, I clearly can’t let it go at that.
Over the past few months, I’ve managed to learn how to play Elton John’s “Your Song” on my Yamaha keyboard and (still more controversially) how to sing along with it. The fact that this is very much Tanya’s music, not mine, is very much the entire point. Now all I need to do is send her an email attachment of me performing it that she will open in her office the moment she comes in to work on February 14th, roughly 9am Eastern Time, 2pm Greenwich Mean Time. This means bringing my keyboard into my office where I have a webcam and I can record it. I choose the Sunday beforehand for this exploit as I’m less likely to be overheard by staff or (worse) students. I record a few versions before I’m happy with them but when Valentine’s Day comes, I find they’re all too long to send. I try cutting the files in half – but they’re still too big. So I have to drag the keyboard back home that evening and prop it up close to the speakerphone for a “live” performance. I’m not at my best “life” and she doesn’t get to see me doing it. When we’re finally back in Ireland together I can take her to my office and show her the files and prove that I actually did what I said I was going to do. Better tidy the office just a bit before I do that though.
conradbrunstrom 