Parrhesia (par-rez’-i-a): Either to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking. Sometimes considered a vice.
“Sometimes the truth hurts Earl. You’re a fu*king idiot and I’m ashamed to be your father.” These two sentences changed the course of my life—like a shoal tearing out the bottom of my boat. I was only nine years old and my father had pulled me out of school to work as stern man on his lobster boat. I baited the traps and sent them overboard, I also hauled traps and checked them for keeper lobsters. Dad’s nickname was “Shorty” for all the short lobsters he’d been cited for keeping. He drank Peils beer and smoked cigars while he skippered “Bang Bang Betty,” our lobster boat.
Mom was mysteriously “lost at sea” when she fell overboard from Bang Bang Betty by the bell buoy off Ram’s Head. Mom and Dad never got along. I predicted he would kill mom when I was in the fifth grade in my diorama “Person Overboard.” It won a blue ribbon in the Town Fair in the “local color” category. People kept asking me how I made the tiny cigar and can of beer. I told them I made the cigar out of a lollipop stick and the beer can from a piece of tubing stuffed with plastic wood. I had painted the cigar with brown paint and the beer can with blue paint. I used my felt tip pen to write “Peils Beer” on it. The “person overboard” had black hair like my mother, heavy chains around her neck, and her arms raised. She had a speech bubble pasted to her hair that said “You dirty dog!”
I brought my diorama home with the blue ribbon dangling from it. That’s when my dad began calling me “Idiot.” About a year later the police came to visit. They wanted to have a look at my “famous” diorama. I told them my dad had burned it in the fireplace because I was an idiot. Just then, dad came home. The police handcuffed him and charged him with the murder of mom. He yelled “You fu*king idiot!” as they led him out the front door.
Now, I’m the youngest lobsterman on the east coast. When I’m hauling traps, I play Pink Floyd on my lobster boat’s Bluetooth speakers. My boat is named MAMA as a tribute to my mother.
I live with my aunt Fidget who takes real good care of me. Dad writes to me from state prison every once-in-awhile. The letters are all the same: “Dear Earl, you’re a fu*king idiot.”
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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