every time is like the last
Home at last, safe in my litte coffeeshop on Alberta (which is as close to home as I have right now as I'm currently homeless, looking on Craigslist in a few minutes for an affordable studio that allows dogs...) I've missed this place.
Georgia is, thankfully, receding into the background like a disturbing dream. Here are the highlights/lowlights:
1.) My brother, who accompanied my dad to Atlanta to pick me up, insisted on stopping at the Barnes and Noble at the ginormous Mall of Georgia to buy me a book for x-mas, which was very sweet. I immediately grabbed "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion, which I've been desperate to read ever since I discovered it in the New York Times Book Review a couple months ago. I read the whole, relatively short book in two evenings, and it was great and not nearly as depressing as I expected. The book chronicles the details of Didion's experience during and after the sudden, unexpected death of her husband of 40 years. I wanted to read it because, after my experience of my brother's death four years ago, I find myself extremely interested in how other people respond to the death of loved ones. Also, having just left my partner, I was curious to explore loss from a different perspective. The irony: I read the whole book in two nights sitting in a recliner in my dad's living room which is parked in the exact location where my brother died four years ago. During the last week of his life, when he was very sick and could no longer climb the stairs to the room he had shared from birth with his twin, my dad put a hospital style bed in the living room, and that is where he died. December 2nd, 2001, 6 am.
2.) My favorite aunt and uncle plus cousins came up to my grandmother's to visit while I was there. My uncle has a new, fancy camera w/ tripod and we all walked over to my dead grandfather's ancient, gigantic barn across the street so he could set his camera up for long exposures down the dark, musty hallways for shots he hoped would impress his little photography club. While he fiddled with the camera, my aunt and I explored. This barn has been a source of exploration for as long as I can remember, and I never expect to find anything new, but this time I did: Between the silos, underneath the hidden spot where owls live, we found heaps of owl refuse, full of tiny little mouse skeletons. Given my obsession with skulls, I tried to salvage at least one little mouse-skull (complete w/ one long pair of yellow front teeth) but they were too fragile and papery, they cracked and crumbled in my hands. So, no tiny mouse skulls for me...
3.) My dad is building a room onto his house. He and my stepmother have salvaged a load of hundred-year-old brick from her grandfather's old house. They've only moved a third of it, a huge stack of filthy bricks that must be cleaned before they can be laid in the room. (The bricks will go under and behind a giant, wood-burning cookstove which is sitting in another old, dilapidated family house, waiting itself to be salvaged.) I hate my stepmother. I have hated her since I was a kid and I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual. I have never hated anyone as much as I hate my stepmother, I don't think it would even be possible at this point for me to hate someone so much. I found myself, after some alpha-female jockeying for position, sitting across from her with a pile of filthy bricks between us, scraping off old concrete and dirt with the claw-end of a hammer, holding the bricks, holding the hammer, thinking "I could swing this brick at your temple and crack your skull open, I could swing this hammer just the same." It disturbs me to know I could kill my stepmother with my bare hands, brutally. It would be a crime of passion and if the jury knew her they'd never convict me. They'd give me a medal and stage a parade in my honor and name a town holiday after me. They'd call me the dragon slayer.
4.) My grandmother is awesome and aggravating. The last night I was in town, I sat down in her living room with my laptop and headphones so that I could make a c.d. for my dad and brother while she watched t.v. next to me. She was deeply curious about the computer. She was like a little monkey who had stumbled across something foreign and shiny in the jungle. She asked a million questions. She especially wanted to know about the internet. "What is e-mail? You can do email on that thing? How do you talk to people on there? How do you find them?" She knows my cousin Alisha met the man she ended up marrying online. She's mystified by it. So, I endeavored to explain the internet to her. I felt like a time traveler or a space alien trying to explain some baffling mystery of the universe. I kept having to back further and further up to accommodate her absolute lack of knowledge. It was, in many ways, a dramatic role reversal. She had become the child and I was the wisdom-holder. After my terrible explanation of the internet, I gave her a little tour of some of my computer's programs. I couldn't get online from her house, so I couldn't show her the internet itself, but I opened a few programs and she was amazed (it plays music! movies! it has a calendar! it writes letters! it's a miracle!)
The best of all, the highlight of all highlights: I decided after a long internal debate to play something very personal for her that I knew she would really appreciate. But this requires some backstory: sometime during my x-mas era housesitting gig, alone in the house, after exams, I had a lot of time to myself, a lot of time to kill. One of the little projects I took up was learning how to use the Garageband program on my mac. Garageband lets you record and mix music tracks and make c.d.s -- it is, basically, a music studio. So, I sat down with my guitar and what passes for my voice and I fumbled my way through the program, managing to record and mix a rudimentary version of the song "You Belong to Me." (Think Patsy Cline: "See the pyraminds along the Nile/watch the sunset from a tropic isle/just remember when you're gone awhile/you belong to me.") It was all much more tedious and time-consuming than I would've guessed and by the time I was done I was totally annoyed with the whole thing. But, sitting at my grandmother's, I knew it would make her really happy to hear it. So, first I explained what it was, how the program worked, how I made it, etc. Then I sat the computer in her lap so she could hear it better, and I pressed play. I watched with apprehension as the program sprang to life and soon my jangly guitar and shaky voice were warbling out of the little speakers. My grandmother was thrilled beyond belief. She made me play it two more times for her and wanted to know if I could somehow make her a copy that she could have and listen to whenever she wanted. She spent the next half an hour beside herself, I have no idea why. She said over and over "We never see the real you, you always hide yourself. I know it. But on there (she pointed at the computer) you just open up and let yourself go." It meant a lot to her. That's the point. Sharing it with her felt weird, but I'm glad I did it. And now, if it turns out this was my last visit with her (she's 87, after all, and can't live forever) at least we had this last bonding moment, hovering over my computer, listening to a great, if poorly rendered, song.
Georgia is, thankfully, receding into the background like a disturbing dream. Here are the highlights/lowlights:
1.) My brother, who accompanied my dad to Atlanta to pick me up, insisted on stopping at the Barnes and Noble at the ginormous Mall of Georgia to buy me a book for x-mas, which was very sweet. I immediately grabbed "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion, which I've been desperate to read ever since I discovered it in the New York Times Book Review a couple months ago. I read the whole, relatively short book in two evenings, and it was great and not nearly as depressing as I expected. The book chronicles the details of Didion's experience during and after the sudden, unexpected death of her husband of 40 years. I wanted to read it because, after my experience of my brother's death four years ago, I find myself extremely interested in how other people respond to the death of loved ones. Also, having just left my partner, I was curious to explore loss from a different perspective. The irony: I read the whole book in two nights sitting in a recliner in my dad's living room which is parked in the exact location where my brother died four years ago. During the last week of his life, when he was very sick and could no longer climb the stairs to the room he had shared from birth with his twin, my dad put a hospital style bed in the living room, and that is where he died. December 2nd, 2001, 6 am.
2.) My favorite aunt and uncle plus cousins came up to my grandmother's to visit while I was there. My uncle has a new, fancy camera w/ tripod and we all walked over to my dead grandfather's ancient, gigantic barn across the street so he could set his camera up for long exposures down the dark, musty hallways for shots he hoped would impress his little photography club. While he fiddled with the camera, my aunt and I explored. This barn has been a source of exploration for as long as I can remember, and I never expect to find anything new, but this time I did: Between the silos, underneath the hidden spot where owls live, we found heaps of owl refuse, full of tiny little mouse skeletons. Given my obsession with skulls, I tried to salvage at least one little mouse-skull (complete w/ one long pair of yellow front teeth) but they were too fragile and papery, they cracked and crumbled in my hands. So, no tiny mouse skulls for me...
3.) My dad is building a room onto his house. He and my stepmother have salvaged a load of hundred-year-old brick from her grandfather's old house. They've only moved a third of it, a huge stack of filthy bricks that must be cleaned before they can be laid in the room. (The bricks will go under and behind a giant, wood-burning cookstove which is sitting in another old, dilapidated family house, waiting itself to be salvaged.) I hate my stepmother. I have hated her since I was a kid and I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual. I have never hated anyone as much as I hate my stepmother, I don't think it would even be possible at this point for me to hate someone so much. I found myself, after some alpha-female jockeying for position, sitting across from her with a pile of filthy bricks between us, scraping off old concrete and dirt with the claw-end of a hammer, holding the bricks, holding the hammer, thinking "I could swing this brick at your temple and crack your skull open, I could swing this hammer just the same." It disturbs me to know I could kill my stepmother with my bare hands, brutally. It would be a crime of passion and if the jury knew her they'd never convict me. They'd give me a medal and stage a parade in my honor and name a town holiday after me. They'd call me the dragon slayer.
4.) My grandmother is awesome and aggravating. The last night I was in town, I sat down in her living room with my laptop and headphones so that I could make a c.d. for my dad and brother while she watched t.v. next to me. She was deeply curious about the computer. She was like a little monkey who had stumbled across something foreign and shiny in the jungle. She asked a million questions. She especially wanted to know about the internet. "What is e-mail? You can do email on that thing? How do you talk to people on there? How do you find them?" She knows my cousin Alisha met the man she ended up marrying online. She's mystified by it. So, I endeavored to explain the internet to her. I felt like a time traveler or a space alien trying to explain some baffling mystery of the universe. I kept having to back further and further up to accommodate her absolute lack of knowledge. It was, in many ways, a dramatic role reversal. She had become the child and I was the wisdom-holder. After my terrible explanation of the internet, I gave her a little tour of some of my computer's programs. I couldn't get online from her house, so I couldn't show her the internet itself, but I opened a few programs and she was amazed (it plays music! movies! it has a calendar! it writes letters! it's a miracle!)
The best of all, the highlight of all highlights: I decided after a long internal debate to play something very personal for her that I knew she would really appreciate. But this requires some backstory: sometime during my x-mas era housesitting gig, alone in the house, after exams, I had a lot of time to myself, a lot of time to kill. One of the little projects I took up was learning how to use the Garageband program on my mac. Garageband lets you record and mix music tracks and make c.d.s -- it is, basically, a music studio. So, I sat down with my guitar and what passes for my voice and I fumbled my way through the program, managing to record and mix a rudimentary version of the song "You Belong to Me." (Think Patsy Cline: "See the pyraminds along the Nile/watch the sunset from a tropic isle/just remember when you're gone awhile/you belong to me.") It was all much more tedious and time-consuming than I would've guessed and by the time I was done I was totally annoyed with the whole thing. But, sitting at my grandmother's, I knew it would make her really happy to hear it. So, first I explained what it was, how the program worked, how I made it, etc. Then I sat the computer in her lap so she could hear it better, and I pressed play. I watched with apprehension as the program sprang to life and soon my jangly guitar and shaky voice were warbling out of the little speakers. My grandmother was thrilled beyond belief. She made me play it two more times for her and wanted to know if I could somehow make her a copy that she could have and listen to whenever she wanted. She spent the next half an hour beside herself, I have no idea why. She said over and over "We never see the real you, you always hide yourself. I know it. But on there (she pointed at the computer) you just open up and let yourself go." It meant a lot to her. That's the point. Sharing it with her felt weird, but I'm glad I did it. And now, if it turns out this was my last visit with her (she's 87, after all, and can't live forever) at least we had this last bonding moment, hovering over my computer, listening to a great, if poorly rendered, song.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 10:48 AM
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