Grandma died last night.
I baked a grape pie.
http://www.taunton.com/finecooking/pages/c00119.asp
I am a jerk.
Isn’t it just awful, isn’t it just the worst feeling imaginable, isn’t it just the sort of poetic irony the substance of which has been woven into so many movies and songs and odes and epic novels over the years — the realization that you’ve taken someone for granted so heinously, the awesome effects of which may be quite unrecoverable (but we hope that they are not. We hope and we pray.)
I’ll say it. I’m a jerk. An awful, awful jerk.
It’s so crappy the devices of time which make it impossible for one to travel back and rearrange, delete words, turn the appreciation quotient up. It’s too bad that you can’t shout warnings to your past self into the wind, to be swept back like an errant hat. It’s too bad life isn’t like Quantum Leap. I could use a little Scott Bakula right now to save me. Not that I deserve it, being that I am a jerk.
An awful, awful jerk.
last hurrah
Afternoon and I am tired, I didn’t sleep last night in this big old creaky place in the woods, when I came home at 11pm all the doors were open and Boogeymen galore hiding in the upstairs, so I barricaded myself in the den, Anthony Bourdain on the TV protecting me while de-boning a leg of lamb in an RV on a desert highway — now there’s a man. All you would-be suitors, pay attention.
As a result of my sleeplessness, I spent all day leaning on the counter at work, well-hidden behind the greeting cards and veneer of Snow White smile with voice to match. You have a wonderful day, I tell them, not insincerely. I don’t mind customers, not even the mean ones. They’re rather insignificant to me, as a whole, insofar as their ability to affect me. I have bigger fish to fry, bigger fish than the spoiled ones they return every so often, wrapped carelessly in crumpled paper. People are careless and selfish — this I know — and every time I get mad at people for being that way I realize — oh, wait. I am one.
But now I am home in the end of this afternoon enveloped in Louis Jordan and crinkly beer-colored light. I think this may be my last hurrah with Grandma and it feels but like a slurry of nostalgia related to more than just her — nostalgia for places, other people, feelings, times. If that’s how I feel at a perfectly healthy twenty-seven, then I can’t imagine how she must feel at (nearly) ninety-seven. After dinner she sits at the tile dining room table and caresse the spot on her chin where the cancer grows, with a look of near-fondness in her serenely clear eyes. I think she knows what it is and she is happy that it is there.
Take me away, she might say. She eats cookies from the package I brought home. “Hm,” she says thoughtfully.
I can’t eat dinner because the smell of mashed potatoes reminds me of retirement homes in Santa Fe and Jackson and turns my stomach, reminding me that this is a retirement home, albeit of one. I feel like I should sit there and keep her company.
“I’m tired,” I tell her.
“Hm.” she replies. “Hm hm hm.”
