Her Moats and Subways

Pawed over a shoebox-load worth of kid and baby photos of hers while she finished up some work from the office in the other room. "If you get bored you can stop." Invading this little cubbyhole or keyhole doesn't run much of a risk of being dull, it swings a little too hard the other way. Ballerina outfits, hoisted on shoulders, backseats, Long Island fun parks, sidewalk under her little shoes looks like reels of film. So is this exhuming or really conducting an autopsy of her childhood or her parent's marriage or places and times she knew or looking in some crystal ball for some misty tarot card of my own spoiled brat kid? I like watching or hearing about pretty much anybody getting used to the shipwreck of starting out, kicking off training wheels. But I play favorites with everything and she's my favorite. Shuffle a stack of these things and the flip book reveals Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, the Bronx, Brooklyn, all of them steering for where she ended up in Manhattan. Most of these places have amounted to road signs for me, articles in newspapers, anecdotes from friends or strangers---basically muffled elevator music in a stuck elevator at the basement of a building I don't know. But there she is, not much more than a stuffed animal (koala bear), being led around. First steps, first words---rumor. Maybe the first big triumph she'd have stashed in her memory might be riding a first bike which must have occurred somewhere between that photo booth shot with her dad and that other Christmas snapshot at Rockefeller Plaza.

What kind of algebra is anybody's life for somebody who wants to tag along? Wall Street dad carrying you on his shoulders---your face swiping so much of his it's spooky and more endearing than it has any right to be---and maybe we oughta retrieve the drawbridge from this castle already. Cats poking around in different houses. Which ones felt like home? Which ones feel a bit like lighthouses now in your memory? Maybe I'll ask you when you finish in an hour two. Maybe you'll shoot me down or deal me from the bottom of the deck like you do sometimes. How early on was the prerequisite for the fella you were looking for, "Someone I'd like to write to"? What brought that on? You're taking a bath in that one and I'm now in possession of child porn.

I got home last night around 2am. There was an opened letter waiting for me on my desk from January 2nd, 1984, written to my mother by my grandmother---my dad's mom---a year and two and a half months shy of her death on St. Patrick's day. I had a Shamrock shake in my hand when I found out. Her handwriting leans a little and if you hold it out at arms length it flows over the page the way a current creases the surface of a river. She had a little river bend at the foot of her property in countryside when she wrote the letter. Now my uncle owns that property and I helped him uproot all the peach and plum and cherry trees and dig all the holes and pound in all the posts and string all that wire and plant all those grapes for a vineyard eight springs ago.

I don't remember much of her, but I recall she was one of those people who had no weaknesses when it came to beginnings, middles, or endings with people. They were seamless and warm and welcome. I caught up with her late in the game, but she wasn't any different with me.

In her letter she was writing to my mother about not feeling bad for ducking out on a Christmas away from the city. Maybe she sensed some kind of rupture that might have taken place and sought to reassure. Only a couple years later my dad moved out, maybe she sensed it. It has all the unwavering bias she always gave to anyone she paid attention to. Holidays are a really rigged big deal in far too many ways. Which, at least for me, was a pertinent subject seeing how I attended another family's (and country's) Thanksgiving Dinner only a klutzy kid handful of days ago. My first time in Jersey.

Maybe it's this annoyingly true thing Dan mentioned before he left for Europe: "If you commit to somebody you worry a lot less than if you don't. Because all you have to worry about are the problems you've got together and figuring them out. But you're free of all the problems surrounding the actual or fantasized commitment bullshit. Which usually are way more and feel way bigger."

Dan's another guy whose got beginnings, middles, and endings down.

I only like the first two---and only if the first feels like the 2nd in all the important ways.

In keeping with lousy endings, there we go...