Unsteady steps on a Saturday, counting the days down. Sunday’s trash night. Monday’s swimming, Tuesday’s soccer. I’ve grown to hate the pedestrians out here. Everything about the west coast I love but it’s the pedestrians, the way they gloat, the look they give you in the cross-walk. There’s no give and take. They expect you to stop for them, but it never goes both ways.

We go to the new movie theatre. It’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. We get there earlier than expected and I hold Charlotte back outside, insist we sit on the bench because I want to teach her a new word. I make a big deal about it and pull her hair back to whisper, “SUNBREAK,” and point to the sky. She’s enchanted (what is it?),…and I say, it’s when it’s all cloudy and the sun comes out, but just for a little…like now.

We enter the theatre, the sounds and the smells, the drama, explosions in nearby rooms. Pimply kids with ties pushing bissells, carrying walkie-talkies…disposable cardboard carriers for transporting cups and straws and boxes.

Charlotte holds my arm for part of it and I kiss her head, so she knows I’m there. Earlier, we drove to the Pacific Science Center, got our pictures taken in one of those booths. It had a handwritten sign saying it takes a full four minutes for the pictures to develop but it mis-spelled develope in a way that made it sound like a fruit, made me wonder which was right, and as we sat there after the credit card swipe, the flash went off unannounced, four in a row, like fireworks.

We went up the Space Needle and stood in line with the foreigners, the tourists, some just like us with kids getting a birthday gift ride to the top with their grandparents. The others had their phones out and recorded it all through poses and trained angles, hair in the breeze, jaws set back cool, We were here.

Last time we came this way, I got in a funk and wrote some post that fetched me a lot of Likes but made Dawn cry. I felt like a real shit when she confronted me about it, mis-read what I meant, which was all my fault really, but still got me a lot of Likes and now it’s in the “top posts” section on my web-page.

The Daily Post Challenge theme was about a dystopic future: how would it end, from your point of view?

I thought about it on a walk but it got me down, and all I could see were grave faces in the trees with eyes where the limbs got lopped off.

We drove to the Pacific Science Center, and I saw the bums in their blankets beneath the bridge and thought they looked like corpses, they didn’t move, and I felt detached from the others at the theatre, and entranced by the starkness of the film, how this young couple followed some batch of butterflies around thought to be extinct, drove all across America trying to find and film them, spent most of their youth and nearly lost their marriage before it finally worked out somehow, somewhere in Mexico, they found them high up in an old tree.

It’s a lesson you can take stock in if you choose to see the world that way, for the breaks in the clouds. There really shouldn’t be any difference between the days.

Categories: humor

Tags: clouds, cloudy with a chance of meatballs, DPchallenge, dystopic future, Memoir, monarch butterfly, pacific northwest, parenting, postaday, seasonal affected disorder