October 5, 1988
My father woke me in the early hour just before sunrise on that October morning in 1988, that golden hour whose glow and glory comes only twice a day. I was still in my pajamas when we stepped out, leaving my mom and sister to sleep quietly in bed as Dad locked the door behind us.
The morning air was visibly misty, a thick sheet of fog rolling over the empty boulevard in front of our house there on Grand. There were no sounds; even the birds were silent, still sleeping on their perches or nests. You must understand the importance of this moment for me.
Mom and Dad were in the "let's try again’ phase after leaving my sister and me as distraught children for nearly two years.
Our desktop computer was, in fact, a heavyset desktop computer with that memorable monochromatic headache-inducing screen that showed a basic font in spinach green. Back then, to get to whatever program we wanted to use, each entry had to begin with "CD" for Change Directory. These were the days when the wrong input resulted in a "bad command or file name" response. If you were using a Macintosh, it would reply, "syntax error."
There were no blogs or online portals to share on social media. Social media was handled in the classroom, passing notes back and forth behind the teacher's back when they weren't looking. Dating apps were a simple piece of paper your crush handed you (or that you handed to your crush) that read:
Do you like me Y ⬜ N ⬜?
There was no swiping right or left.
Our world still slept in darkness, and our only information contained whatever was shown on the evening news. Whatever evils existed in the world—there were many—seldom made it to any viral capacity in our self-contained world and isolated lives.
There was a sense of wonder that morning: the mist, the fog, and, for me, the strange smell of a new world. I rarely had a scarce relationship with my dad for two years. At this moment, we boarded his van, which smelled like orange groves mingling with the scent of Brut (Dad's go-to aftershave).
The gray minivan was more of a hybrid cargo van with an illegally installed non-DOT seat bolted into the cargo area. The only window in the back was a rear windshield that stretched the width of the back hatch.
I didn't ask where we were going in what was a comfortably quiet ride along the grand circle. Later in life, I would learn that the road we drove along was once a drag racing track in 1914but that day, I enjoyed the newness as we cruised along West Grand, turning right on Sixth Street, right again on Rimpau, and finally at the Magnolia cross street, grinning at the surprise of McDonald's for a breakfast stop.
I'll never forget waiting in line in the drive-through (which I hated being spelled as "drive-thru") or ordering two whole sausage biscuits to myself. Dad ordered three pancake breakfasts: one for him, one for my mom, and one for my little sister.
This is my earliest memory of Corona as a younger child. It is the fondest memory of my father and probably the last truly good memory I'll have while my parents are still married.
After that, everything would be a slow burn toward a living horror story of the waking physical world, the nightmare-scape of a troubled child, and the brief terror of living in a house that hated our family.
