about my granny.

i remember when coffee was a battleground.

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:35:00 -0500

i’ve written about it here a few times. of any and everything else, grandmother must have her coffee or else, Katy bar the door. it’s still that way, but the explosion is different. before when there was no coffee, she fought. she screamed and raged and threw things. now, she settles into anxiety, asks for is on constant repeat and eventually retreats to her room to cry.

you wouldn’t think you’d ever have to supervise someone pouring herself a cup of coffee, but over the past couple of years, we’ve had to. i’ve noticed the lapses in cognizance creep in slowly. first, she’d pour a cup and forget to put sugar in it. then, she’d open every cabinet and cupboard in the kitchen looking for the sugar, which always sits next to the coffee maker. then she began fixing her cup of coffee and returning to the table without it. this meant a return to the kitchen, but forgetting on the way that there’s already a cup waiting and getting a fresh cup. soon, there would be 5 piping hot cups of coffee in the kitchen and a confused 86 year old woman at the table wondering why we’re taking so long bringing her her brew.

prior to that, she forgot how to use the microwave. my brother, in his days of being an electrician’s apprentice, screwed up the wiring somehow, so we can only use it for 45 seconds at a time because otherwise, it blows the circuit and the electricity goes out in the entire house. in the beginning, she’d set the microwave for 10 minutes to heat a few swallows of coffee, and we’d have to stomp outside to the fuse box in all manner of weather, cussing and fussing all the way.

then she took to eating an entire spoonful of sugar before pouring one into her coffee cup. “just to see if it’s sweet,” she said. since then, she’s had her own personal sugar bowl due to our aversion to having to navigate clumps of sugar likely bound together by an old woman’s saliva.

we’re still trying not to do it for her—we want her to be as independent as she can for as long as she can, and when she fell ill, getting her own coffee was something she prided herself in. so now, instead of doing it for her, we walk in behind her and pretend to busy ourselves with other things—wiping down a counter, pouring a glass of water—to make sure the operation goes smoothly.

but we can’t watch her every second of every minute, not with other life in the house to live. last month, my mother told me that my grandmother got confused and poured her coffee into the sugar bowl rather than the coffee mug laid out for her. that was funny, she said. they had a laugh about that, and i laughed when my mother told me about it.

a few days later, she said she put flour in her coffee instead of sugar. we laughed about that, too, but not as hard.

last week, my mother called me with a marked weariness in her voice, saying that this time, my grandmother managed to put a bunch of coffee grounds in her cup and she sat spitting them out, all over the table, all over the floor, for hours. my mother sat and tried to explain to my grandmother that she really did have to try harder to hold on, and i felt a piercing in my heart. she spoke with such pleading, such helplessness. as she spoke, i caught a little of what she said, but mostly my mind drifted, wondering what the scene must have looked like, how it must have felt for them both.

i tried. and i think i got it.

———————-

The sound of her spitting is one that drives those around her into an instant rage. Since her strokes, she doesn’t swallow well, which I understand. But she spits. She spits on the floor, she’s spat at me. I give her napkins for whatever is in her mouth that she wants out, but she wipes her nose with them and puts them in her pocket. It’s why we can’t take her out to eat anymore. She chews her food and, best case scenario, she puts it in her hand and tosses it on to her plate. And we get to try to finish our food looking at a heap of chewed up hamburger or runny, mashed up turkey.

She has her spot at the head of the table that we walk past in a wide arc because we don’t want to step in whatever she’s spat out onto the floor when no one was looking. We can’t walk around the house barefoot anymore. We feel every inch of these small, forced changes every time we hear that ‘p-too! p-too!’ pinging at our eardrums. This morning, I can’t take it, already. She woke me and my migraine at 5 am, and I thought I’d be able to trust the coffee pot to keep an eye on her while I went back to sleep.

I stormed out of the room prepared to rage and already feeling bad for it when her face stopped my feet where they were. She looked confused and panicked, slobber and black stuff waterfalling from the corners of her mouth. She rubbed at her tongue with a napkin as if trying to remove a stain.

“Mama?” I said, half alarmed, “what are you doing?” Was she throwing up bile? Is this coagulated blood?

“Somethin’ wrong with this coffee!” she said in between spits.

“Wait, wait, wait. Wait, stop that—let me see your cup. Mama, stop that! Stop spitting!” She paid me no mind. I grabbed the coffee cup and looked inside. It was half full of coffee grounds. Anyone else would have laughed, but I just sighed a tired sigh. “Mama, how did you even do this?” When she heard my voice, she turned to look at me and I caught a mouthful of spit and coffee grounds in the center of my t-shirt. My eyes flashed red. “Goddamnit! Look at this! You do not do that! You do not spit inside your own house! Look at this floor, Mama! LOOK! Don’t you care about this place? Why do you treat it this way?? You’re sitting in front of a roll of paper towels and you’re spitting! Why? Why?! I told you to stop! Stop!!!“

She looked sorry, but kept spitting as if she couldn’t help it. I complained as if she could.

“Why won’t you listen to me, Mama?” I sank into the chair next to her. “Mama? Hey. Hey! Look at me when I’m talking to you. Please, look at me.” She glanced at me for a few seconds and went back to her frenzied spitting and wiping. I watched her quietly. She took the napkin that had been in her mouth, on her tongue, and started wiping the table with it, spitting all the while. I grabbed her hands and held them to the table.

“Mama,” I pleaded. “You have to help me.” She looked at me, wide-eyed, confused. “I want to keep doing this. Do you hear me? I want to be here. I don’t have to be; I am here with you because I love you.” She turned, spat, looked back at me. “I want to be here but I can’t keep doing it; not like this. Not by myself. None of your other kids are here to help us, Mama. It’s just me and you.” She opened her mouth to defend her 5 other children. I spoke louder because they didn’t deserve it. “I don’t want to live in a house where we spit on the floors and smear shit all over the toilet seat with our washcloths. You know better than that. You’re a grown woman, Mama. You’re a woman. Don’t forget your dignity.” I took stock of my emotions. I wasn’t angry. I was tired and defeated and hanging on with the last of my broken fingers and arms and legs and guilt-ridden over it.

“You just need to try, Mama. You have to try. Do you hear me? I want you to live in this house until the day you die, but I cannot do that if it continues this way. Try.”

“I do try—”

“You don’t! You don’t try! You’ve been here looking me in the face hearing me to tell you to stop spitting for 10 minutes and you’ve done nothing but! I don’t care that you put coffee grounds in your coffee, but I do care that you’re doing things like this, like spitting on your own floors, the ones you’re so proud about owning. You can forget how to fix your coffee, but you can not forget how to be an adult. Okay? That is not an option.” I let go of her hands, gave her a new napkin, and she got back to trying to clean the mess she made, still spitting. Not as much, but spitting still.

“I’ll get it, Mama,” I sighed. “Just go to your room. I’ll bring you some more coffee.”

She toddled off, leaving a trail of coffee grounds in her wake. I looked at the sunlight snaking through the yellowing curtains that I haven’t had time to wash in ages and angered at this perfect, unusable chance to cry alone. No one knows that I’m out of tears.

I set about cleaning the coffee grounds and droplets of coffee and spittle from the table and cursed every curse I knew. I volleyed between guilt and anger and was not surprised that the fire burned as hot in either furnace. I know it isn’t her fault. I know she can’t help it.

But it’s not my fault, either.

I can’t help it, either.

——————————

my mother is thinking of putting my grandmother in a nursing home. it will be the death of us all, but this is something we’ve always known.
like death, it is something we can’t stave forever.

i do not look forward to it any more than i look forward to daily calls from my mother at her wit’s end. as caretaker, i support her and her decisions fiercely.
it is my job. i am dutiful.
it’s difficult, but far easier than having to be the one to make such decisions. she is doing what we can’t. i am in awe and unenvious.

it will be a long time before either of us is brave enough to explore the option in detail, to fully accept the reality.

until then, i have a few fingers and arms and legs in tact, ready to help hold it together.

my grandmother mourns everyday.

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 01:34:33 -0400

she sometimes seems to be more frown than smile. of her reasons to frown, most popular is confusion. the day of the week, the time of day, the person sitting on her couch. who is that? who? i can’t remember, baby. i’m sorry. if you know where to look, you catch the weary sadness that blinks fast across her face before she sends in the heavy artillery—sharp, beaming smiles lobbed like flash grenades at the center of your pupils. pay no attention to the stooped, forgetful old woman behind the wrinkled curtain of soft, pendulous flesh. instead, check out this cute, winking queen retired of her throne, resting her cheek in her hand, showing you every tooth she has in her mouth. how adorable is she?

but there is grief before that smile, unmistakable. the recognition that something is missing, something that will not come back.

it comes to play in longer stretches when the last drop of coffee is gone every morning, or when her company stands to leave at the end of a visit. where you goin? why? when you comin back? they, like her morning coffee, will return, but for her, every goodbye seems so final.

knowing this, my brother was openly against my mother’s decision to take my grandmother to her nephew’s funeral, my Cousin M. my grandmother is, and always has been, human-sized heart on legs. whatever she feels, she feels it with her entire body. it shoots from her eyes springs from her mouth and cascades from her pores and floods the entire room around her. in church, her voice carried above the choir’s during her favorite songs, and she has one of the worst singing voices i’ve ever heard—flat, obtuse, jagged. but she couldn’t quiet it if she tried, and she never did.

and she still doesn’t.

my brother worried that in her fragile state, her heart—which is less than 25% functional—would give out and she’d literally die of her grief. it was not at all an unfounded fear. before the strokes and seizures, back when she was much stronger, i thought i was watching her die the night we told her that another of her grandchildren was dead by his own hand. she screamed, she cried, she gasped for air, briefly found it, and fell hard against the back of her dining room chair. my mother shoved me toward the phone and told me to call 9-1-1 while she went to find the small vial of nitroglycerine she kept on her dresser. my fingers managed the buttons.

9-1-1, do you have an emergency?

yes, i think my grandmother’s—

dying? before i could force the word out of my mouth, my mother pushed me out of the way and took the phone. i was in college when this happened, so i know i was at least 18 years old, but when i remember it, i am much younger. 9 or 10, small, and completely useless.

remembering that moment, i got scared and agreed with my big brother. my mother is unmarried and my brother lives in another city, which puts me at number two in the chain of support. she can’t afford to push me out of the way anymore because i can’t keep it together; it’s now my job to hold my mother up while she does the same for her’s.

* * *

Cousin M. was my grandmother’s sister’s son and he was big into photography. though he lived nearly 600 miles away, he and his wife were always at every single family function, and he’d barely wait long enough to say hello before he broke out his camera. the kids—i, my brother, our cousins, and later my nieces—came to loathe that camera and would take off for the basement whenever he’d arrive to try and finish our christmas and thanksgiving dinners before he found us. Cousin M. didn’t care how hungry you were. so what if you’d been waiting all day for those yams and dreaming about that macaroni and cheese. he had a picture to take and you were going to put down the fork and stand next to your mother/brother/sister/cousin and put your hand on his/her shoulder, move closer toward the left, nope, too far, back to the right a little, okay now tilt your head towards him, just a little more, alright, that’s perfect, big smiles on one, two, three, okay now one more. oh, we *hated* it, and no one was more annoyed by the clicking of that camera than my grandmother.

too bad for her, though, because he and his wife absolutely adored her and spending time with her. there are countless pictures of my grandmother dressed to the 9s, posed, poised, and scowling the meanest scowl you’ve ever see in your life. but for every one of those, there is one of her bright-faced and smiling, wrinkle-free, chubby, gold-toothed, and alive, so alive, running around Washington, opening presents, wearing clothes that she herself shopped for, washed, ironed, mended, and laid out. how amazing it is to have proof of her this way. how jarring and gorgeous it is to watch her look at herself and remember.

no one ever figured that there’d be a day when the clicking would stop.

one of my most important memories came from Cousin M. my mother’s sister’s branch of the family is markedly different from my grandmother’s. as my mother and uncle explained, they (my grandmother’s sister’s progeny) were very sweet, non-confrontational people. my granny’s kids, on the other hand, often went to their cousin’s houses to beat up the kids their non-confrontational cousins had problems with. their nature, i assume, came from their faith. they are deeply religious people, the sons and daughters of a pastor, and a few of them pastors themselves. the second most important thing to them, right after religion, is family, which is why it was nothing for Cousin M. to make the 10 hour drive from virginia to kentucky to see about his folks.

he had done just that for a reason i can no longer remember—another relative was in the hospital, or a baby had been born, or they just wanted to say hello—and they stopped by our house on their way back out of town.

i’d been back in town for a year, maybe two, having moved back home from the east coast to help my mother care for my grandmother. i was in a horrible space at the time, stressed, angry, resentful, and not sure that i had made the right choice for myself. i couldn’t find a job, i had no privacy, i was still suffering through terrible writer’s block, and i felt like i’d successfully made every wrong decision possible i could have possibly made to land me in my mother’s attic nearing 30 years old.

before Cousin M. left the house that day, he walked up to me and asked how things were going. Cousin M. was a tall man with an even taller presence, and when he spoke, you listened. i said they were going okay. i didn’t spill my guts, but i didn’t sugar coat them either. then he put his arm on my shoulder, looked me in the center of my eyes and said, “i’m proud of you.” i felt a jolt somewhere in my gut and instantly sat up a little taller. i thanked him, and he held his gaze until it almost got awkward. when he finally left, i turned his words and his tone over in my head, and i came to the conclusion that i had won Cousin M.’s respect, and that was a big fucking deal. an ex-marine, Cousin M. was big on discipline and values, and i knew that impressing him was significant, that it really meant something.

for the first time since i’d given up my life to move back home, i felt like i’d made the right decision.

i did not at all take that for granted.

* * *

my mother said she decided to take my grandmother to the funeral because it would be wrong to keep her from it. if it were one of my grandmother’s children, she reasoned, her sister would be there. if it’s too much for her and we have to take her out, we’ll take her out. but we need to give her the chance.

i agreed with her. i, too, wanted her to have the chance to make it through the funeral, but more than that, i wanted her to have the chance to live normally. we grieve when someone dies. we ache, we rage, we cry. we are loud and inconsolable and overcome. but how alive we are in those moments, when we feel. and she is still alive. she’s in there, and she is still strong and i often resent the velvet gloves we have to don to handle her. give her the opportunity to be herself. this isn’t the same as crying over coffee or a broken tv. let her feel; let her walk through it, and let us help her when she needs it. give her the opportunity to be normal. let her have that.

my mother primed her carefully. she had conversations with her about it every morning during the week prior. you know the funeral is on monday, right? and you’re going to go and be strong for your sister, right? three more days until the funeral; do you know what you’re going to wear? do you still want to go? one more day, mama. the funeral is tomorrow.

i think she was hoping to give her enough time to get through the bulk of her sorrow, but it didn’t work. her agony was palpable; it played at the tiny hairs inside our ears and tickled the backs of our necks. we waded through it, dodging shards as her shrieks splintered and crashed against the stained glass windows. she tried to choke down the screams before they left her mouth, like someone with the flu with lungs too sore to cough, but she only really quieted when the choir sang. we thought she’d come through the worst of it when someone behind her screamed—Cousin M.’s daughter, i think—and she was off again. and again when they closed the casket.

i cain’t see M! she said, loudly—a question more so than a statement. no, mama. he’s gone now. aw, yes i can! another pleading question.

once the pastor took to the pulpit and did what he was there to do, i noticed my grandmother’s cries giving way to conversation.

i love you, she said loudly to my mother, but i don’t want you to leave me! i want you to stay with me for ever and ever and ever!

and then,

where’s my hat? i need my hat on my head!

followed by,

who’s that up there? i don’t know her.

soon my mother leaned over to me and said, “alright, tracy. she’s getting mean.” that’s a good sign, i said. she’s feeling better.

she made it.

Cousin M.’s mother (left) and her sister, my grandmother. photo taken by Cousin M. rip.

my grandmother isn't afraid of anything.

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:04:00 -0400

i can’t think of a single thing she’s afraid of. seriously and literally. i’m not exaggerating even a little bit.

well, i guess these days, she’s afraid of being alone—she gets anxious when anyone stands from their seat and obsessively asks “where you goin?” when they move to exit a room she’s in.but that’s not her though. that’s what time and strokes have given to her. but my *real* grandmother, the her that is buried beneath the anxious obsessions is literally scared of nothing.

she always did the dirty work, my grandmother. when i was a kid, my mother was too squeamish to pull my teeth when it was time, and i was not about to tie a string to any of my teeth and sit while someone slams a door to yank it out. so, when my mother couldn’t take any more of my wiggling a dangling tooth, she sent me to my grandmother.

“my tooth is really loose,” i’d say to her.

“let’s see.”

“don’t pull it!”

“i ain’t. let’s see.”

and every time, i’d open up, point to the tooth, and she’d have it in my hand before i had time to protest. that happened with each and every tooth. i’d tell her not to pull it, she’d promise not to, i’d believe her, then she’d yank it. quick & dirty, in the middle of what ever she was doing.

i feel uneasy remembering this, because something else she isn’t afraid of is germs. washing her hands was hardly paramount to her, and it really should have been, given her pastimes: tending to her endless rosebushes she grew in the backyard (without gardening gloves), cleaning the fish & rabbits her brother brought by the house after his trips to the lake; cutting corns and callouses from her feet with her pocket knife; mindlessly picking her nose while watching her favorite shows. from her hands to my mouth, with no pit stops. i’m pretty sure that has something to do with my current germaphobism.

i always figured that she wasn’t used to having the time to stop for things as trivial as hand washing—raising six kids on your own, there was always a mouth to feed, a fight to break up, a meal to cook. i wish she was afraid of them, though. or at least wary of them. something i’ve been wanting to write about here is barriers, things that make me hesitant to get physically close to her. the main thing is hygiene. we see to it that she bathes regularly, of course, but there are the little things she doesn’t bother with anymore—eating neatly, keeping her nose clean. but i’m afraid of painting an unappealing picture of my grandmother and of aging: a weathered, sallow mass, face always slick with unchecked snot, thick streams of chewed food cascading from the corners of her mouth during meals; swollen, leathery fingertips from constant nervous gnawing; the dank smell of who knows what kind of bacteria incubating on her tongue because she won’t wash her hands before putting them in her mouth after using the bathroom. i don’t want that to be what anyone pictures when they read about her here. i don’t want that to be what waits for my mother or myself if we are blessed enough to make it to her age. i don’t want to acknowledge that part.

but i guess i just did.

i digress.

anyway, she’s not afraid of anything, my grandmother, in her youth or today. that lasting fearlessness comes in handy, because what we are afraid of, she faces for us just as easily now as she did in her able body. especially various and sundry critters—rodents, bugs, spiders. i’ve seen her kill huge, menacing looking spiders with the bare palm of her hand without blinking. and mice. oh, lord, the mice.

our house is old, and the wooden cellar door had been waiting to die for most of my childhood. during the cold months, little field mice would gnaw at weak, rotting spots in the door and slip in to try and wait out the winter in our basement. my mother wasn’t having that, though. the list of things that she is afraid of is very, very short, but mice undoubtedly own the top spot. so, she’d put down snap traps and sticky glue pads each winter. i hated them. it’s not that i liked the mice—i didn’t. but there are few things more traumatizing than listening to the panicked death shrieks of a mouse stuck on a glue trap while trying to watch cartoons mickey mouse cartoons. except, maybe, looking around for a barbie doll and instead finding a nearly decapitated mouse head in a pile of blood and guts.

it became unbearable when i looked at a mouse, frozen prostrate on a glue trap, and noticed that it was actually kind of cute. i once tried to convince my mother to take one of the poor bastards off the trap and set it free in a park somewhere, not understanding why taking it off the trap was impossible. i can’t remember if my mother explained it to me, but if she hadn’t i got the message loud and clear after i told my granny about the mouse. since she was fearless and apparently indestructible, we left mouse disposal up to her. i followed her at 10 paces as she went to get the trap, then stood in the door watching as she took the mouse out back, leaned over the railing of our deck, grabbed its thrashing tail and ripped half of its body off the trap. then she very causally tossed the free portion over the fence for the neighborhood strays to take care of, and tossed the trap and its remainder in a trash bin. then she walked back into the house and went back to whatever she was doing, maybe stopping to wash her hands on the way. and maybe not.

that insane fearlessness was called upon again this week when my mother walked in the kitchen to find my grandmother poking at a pile of newspaper with her cane. my mother started fussing about her not cleaning up her dinner plate when my granny pushed back the paper, causing my mother to completely lose her shit.

“OH MY GOD!! what is that doing in here?!??!” my grandmother shook her head.

“just a lil’ ol’ mouse,” she said.

“i know! what’s it doing in here?!?!”

“it’s dead,” my grandmother said, completely not understanding what the hell she was afraid of. she shook her head again and turned to leave.

“wait! aren’t you gonna fix it??”

“can’t fix it; it’s dead.”

“i know, but i can’t clean it up, mama! i need you to do it!”

my grandmother gave a long, exaggerated “tsk, tsk, tsk,” before going to get the broom and dustpan. i didn’t see her smile, but i can feel it even as i write these words.

she is needed again. she is still mama, the one who comes to her kids’ defense when they need her, who can still do for us what we can’t.

on her way back to whatever she was doing before, she grinned a taunting little grin that said “and don’t you forget it, neither.”

(i can’t remember if she washed her hands or not.)

picturing nostalgia

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:03:06 -0400

once, when i wrote far more often than i do now, i wrote a series of three prose pieces about 3 different pictures from our old photo albums.

one of those pictures was of my grandmother and her husband, my grandfather. i don’t have the picture to upload right now, but i want to share the piece that was written of it; maybe i’ll do this with some other pictures, too:

————

i was told that my mother was just a little girl when this photograph was taken. far younger than i. younger even than my niece, her son’s first born daughter. it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the image of my mother so small, still needy. she probably looked like me, or rather, i looked like her when i was the age she probably was when this scene was captured. new & knee-high to a junebug.

but this picture isn’t of my mother or myself. it’s about our rock, our foundation. our reason for life and the man she used to love.

this picture, like the frozen forms housed within it, has lived a long, eventful life. the ridges of an anonymous fingerprint grip the middle of the photo at the bottom, not far from the curling edge, yellowing with age. i like to imagine that this picture has seen more and heard more and lived more than any one person, one tree, one river cld ever dream of living in a thousand lifetimes. i like to think the same thing about my grandmother, too.

she sits close to him in this picture on his left hand side. to this very day, she still has the watch that she wears here on her right wrist; im sure that it doesn’t work anymore, but that’s no reason to throw away the bearer of so many memories. her hair is pulled back, displaying the fullness of her face to the world. her grin is subtle, barely noticeable, much like my mother’s mouth that easter morning in 1988 or 89.

i wish she bore a full smile.

her hands lay serenely in her lap and the both peer assuredly into the camera lens. i wonder what they’re so sure of? maybe he was certain that he, in his white t-shirt, pale cap and slacks, wld be nothing less than debonair in the final print. and maybe she knew that he wld get jealous as other women’s lovers turned to watch her walking down the street on his arm, the whiteness of her dress kissed yellow with time, floating about her hips. my grandmother had all the genuine prettiness of a sunflower that had managed to grow in gravel, drinking only when heaven spared libation. maybe they knew then that their children and their children’s children would see them this way someday and meant to show them what they had to look forward to—stark brown beauty. commanding mouths and knowing eyes for the women. chiseled faces and soft cheekbones for the males.
he wasn’t the most handsome individual, but he is beautiful with her sitting there, so close to him.

maybe they were only sure of each other’s presence.

i think more than anything, though, she was secure and sure in her love for him.

love lives in every corner of this picture and dances on its right hand side, in the extra space on the bench, vacant because my grandmother has positioned herself as close to him as possible. all the mutual adoration they lost, all the sunrises and prayers and silly lover’s quarrels they shed as they watched their children grow older and fall in love themselves, it all thrives in that space next to her here.

i feel almost like a voyeur seeing them this way.

i cannot tell whether my granny is happy here
or if she wld rather ride the first wind out of this picture
but she did love him. the way she leans into him tells us that much.
after giving him 6 children, why shldn’t she?

and after being left to fend for them alone,
why shld she smile?

maybe she knew then that this moment was fleeting. maybe she was sure then that she cld raise three brown boys and three brown girls to be upstanding black men & women on her own. she was sure of her strength. and she loved him, but not more than she loved herself.

he has alzheimers today.
he doesn’t remember my mother, or me or any of his other children or grandchildren.

i’m sure he knows my granny, though. and if he was shown this picture, im sure he’d remember himself, too.

the picture is in black and white.
a sheet hangs on the wall behind them in a pattern than resembles some curtains my grandmother still has today. they, like this picture, are old, tattered, jaundiced with years.

she loves them though.
maybe they remind her of the evenings she hid from the setting sun
& kept her babies still during summer thunderstorms.

Your blog is super cute, I found you on Huff Post. I was drawn to it because it looks so awesome, but when reading, I was floored that we have so much in common. I probably don't have as much writing under my belt as you do, but I write. Also, I am caring for my mom, who has early onset dementia. She is incredibly healthy, not yet 65,actually a college writing professor until this past semester and has rapidly graduated to sixth stage early onset. It was helpful to know someone's story.

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:04:01 -0500

aw :) thank you so very much. of the 8,000 writing projects i have going on right now, recognition of this one always means the most, and i mean *always*. going through this stuff is hard, and writing about it seems even harder at times.

but in the end, both are worth it. it takes a special kind of person to do what you’re doing, and to make the sacrifices i’m sure you’ve made; and sharing our stories helps because it feels good knowing that someone else out there understands what may be hard to explain.

i understand, and i thank you very much.

strength & positivity to you & your mommy.

this is my favorite picture of my grandmother. i don’t...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:45:56 -0500

this is my favorite picture of my grandmother. i don’t know when this was taken or how old she is here, but i know that i wasn’t born, and some of my aunts and uncles weren’t either.

i feel like she’s much younger than she looks, though. living will do that to you.

she worked it on out though, didn’t she?!

so, things are okay.

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:06:45 -0500

and by okay, i mean we’re in a state of stasis, locked into routine. same schedule. same places. same frustrations.

we’re holding steady, but we’re holding in a very stressful place. but, it’s better than backsliding. we complain, but stay thankful.

…but we do complain.

since my last entry, i moved out of the house i grew up in with my mother and grandmother. it was tough to leave—i know they both missed me very much, and would be sad to go; and i know it’s terribly convenient having another adult in the house to watch after my grandmother when my mother couldn’t due to schedule or stress. i felt very guilty, and still do, but i had to.

there have been priceless benefits. i no longer feel like running away and not telling anyone where i am… i’m much more relaxed and i like this city a lot more when i have my own space. and probably the best benefit is that without having to handle my grandmother every single day—which is exhausting—my patience has grown exponentially. it’s easier to handle all of the crying fits, the cussing, the turned up nose, the fight over dinner and pills. but, ironically, what is still hard for me is the obsession with affection.

ive been struggling to find the nerve to write about this for a very long time. i mean, what kind of cold, souless little imp gets tired of being hugged and kissed and told how much they’re loved? i want to present it in such a way that it’s easy to understand, buti don’t want to offend anyone who is missing their grandmother, who would give anything for one more hug, one more kiss. i also don’t want to look like a callous asshole.

these are the moments that i turn to fiction, where i can hide bits and pieces of the truth in dazzling arrays of words and distract with pretty phrases and cheeky dialect. but even that has been difficult.

this is why i try not to journal here. fact is often much more terrifying than fiction.

anyway, this isn’t a flowery prose piece or anything. just an update. we are still here, we are still breathing. we are still nursing calloused hands and hearts and tired smiles. we’re still laughing to keep from crying and laughing til we cry. we’re still rioting and against the long days and lamenting the shortness of life. we’re still trying. still flirting with dangerous fantasies that we know we all share, but will never acknowlege.

some of us are still praying. some of us are tired.

but we’re still here, better or worse, fact or fiction.

I just want to say I love this blog, my grandmother passed away due to alzheimer's when I was 12 and I never had the chance to connect with her on a more mature level, and seeing this makes me know tumblr isn't all about white girls posting porn gif's and trolls asking rude questions anon. You should have 1,000,000 followers, or maybe you shouldn't ;-D

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:11:05 -0500

aw :) thank you so much for reading, and so much for taking the time to share some kind words and a bit of your story. it would be really cool to have tons of followers, but that’s not what i’m writing for, yknow (…but feel free to pass the link around though. lol!)? messages like this make it totally worth it.. please keep an eye on this blog! ive been bad with updating, but i’ll try heard to change that soon.

thank you again.. god bless you, your grandmother, and cheers to living life while we’re able to. :)

you made my day!

my grandmother has always said grace at each of our...

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 20:35:33 -0500

my grandmother has always said grace at each of our feast-centered family holiday functions, namely thanksgiving and christmas. lots have changed since the first time i can remember standing around a dining table holding hands with relatives while my granny prayed. that circle of bowed heads and held hands has gotten increasingly smaller each year—i lost great-uncles to old age, lost young cousins to suicide, lost siblings to new families of their own. c’est la vie, i guess. and some has changed about my grandmother as well, of course—she sits and delivers grace now that she can’t stand for very long anymore; you have to strain to hear her clearly and strain even harder to make out the words she says thanks to her twisted esophagus, which she got thanks to the last stroke she had.

but what has never changed is the aria in her voice, the poetry in her tongue, the way she almost seems to become another person once her head is bowed, a stark contrast from the woman who used to pull my teeth by hand, cut callouses from her feet with butcher knives, and peel mice from glue traps without wincing. her accent, rough-edged and thick, is still there, but she fragile, she is delicate, she is crystal that you are afraid will crack beneath the weight of her pleading, the tide of tears threatening the corners of her eyes. she is swaddled in her Sunday best, reams of pastel humility and the deep blue of her earnestness, reserved for the only thing fully deserving—her God, her Heavenly Father, the only one who can save her soul and provide for her children once she is gone. when she prays, you become voyeur, bearing witness to a desperate bargain: if you spare me, if you have mercy on my children…

when she prays, i hold my breath and breathe my own thanks when she pauses. thank you, whoever you are, for another year with her; thank you for another chance to be serenaded, even through slurred tongue and impeded mouth, by the heart of a woman fighting and loving in the same breath.

——-

last year, i got the idea to record my grandmother as she said grace, but i got the idea too late. this year, i came to the table prepared and was able to capture her on my iphone. i wanted to share the audio here; i know it may be hard to make our the words, so have transcribed her prayer below.

father, we thank thee for another thanksgiving holiday.
thank you for all the blessings that thou hast bestowed upon us
through days have passed and gone
father, we know thee
and we love thee
with all our hearts
grant unto us such things as we stand in need of
grant unto us the things that thou would have us do and to go
go with us, stand by us,
and when comes our time,
give us a home in thy blessed kingdom
for we give thee the praises forever and ever
amen.

i know it's been a while since you last posted, so i don't know your current situation. i just wanted to say that your stories are heartbreaking and beautiful. i went through pretty much the same thing a few years ago, (thankfully my gran improved and can take care of herself now), but it's still a lot to take on and digest. you're brave & strong for doing your part to take care of her.

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:36:07 -0400

this message made me tear up :) i can’t thank you enough for reading, and for your kind words. i’ve been avoiding updating that blog because as time goes on, things get tougher, and it’s hard to look it in the face, you know? but to know that someone’s out there reading, understanding, and appreciating means so, so much to me. i get a lot of LOLs and retweets for the funny/silly things i write, but truthfully, this is what touches me the deepest.

thank you beyond words. :)

I don’t know what year this photo was taken, and I’m...

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:55:52 -0500

I don’t know what year this photo was taken, and I’m sure she doesn’t either. My grandmother still does this sometimes when she smiles, especially when she’s flattered or given a gift. first she cocks her head to one side, cradles it with one hand, hugs it with the other.

Something I really like about this picture is her teeth. By the time I was born, my grandmother had dentures, and in place of the darkened tooth in the picture above was an open-faced gold tooth. In that same spot in my mouth, I have a baby tooth that never fell out, and in pictures (though no one else seems to notice), my smile kind of looks like hers here because you can’t see the tooth.

Maybe she had a baby tooth there, too. Maybe we’re more alike than we are different in these days of shifting roles and polarization. I like to think so, and this picture helps.

prayer to whomever is listening.

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:42:55 -0500

help us remember to be thankful for where we are
and what we have

fill our hearts with enough love and compassion
to push ourselves out of the bigger picture

forgive us our humanity
when we get angry and yell and scream and slam doors
when we can’t find the patience we need
when we choose not to look for it
when we’re fresh out of strength
remind us that it is woven into our struggle
remind us to look for it now and again

remind us of what a perfect person would do in our shoes
and help us attempt those dance steps
teach us how to not take life personally
show us how to do this
show us how to do this
show us how to do this

and whether or not we think we understand,
help us to be thankful for the lesson
if we can’t manage to look past our scars,
help us find the beauty in them

and when we lie in our beds at night,
alone with our thoughts
left with the echoes of yelling and screaming and slamming doors
help us to forgive ourselves
rather than remain our own executioners,
sitting on the floor of a locked cell,
key in hand.

maintenance things.

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 22:36:32 -0500

i wanted to take a quick moment to thank any and everyone who happens to follow this tumblr. i haven’t blogged/journaled personally in a very, very long time, and it’s not easy to be so naked in front of perfect strangers. this particular project is especially hard, as it involves confronting some pretty uncomfortable feelings and emotions. but, it helps. it helps that the words are coming out, and it somehow helps that they’re finding their way to actual humans. this sort of consciousness raising, even online, even without real names being used, is healing, and i thank you all for helping me heal. even if there were no one reading this, i’d still write, but it is exceptionally moving that anyone cared enough to click the follow button. thank you.

also, need to make some mental notes for myself:

as i notice/become brave enough to acknowledge that my granny’s getting a bit worse, i feel moved to write about her obsessions and compulsions, just to capture them, i guess. to take as sharp a snapshot as i can. i’ve been keeping a mental list, and so far it looks like this:

coffee
hugs/kisses/affection
helping/wants
the weather
jewelry (specifically, people stealing it from her)
spontaneous undressing
hats

i need to capture these few now, because i feel like i’m watching it grow longer.

also, i need to write about happy/funny times here. sure, this is a sad thing that is happening, but there are chuckles along the way, and those are every bit as important. so, i have an uproarious story about a bath that i’ll share here.

i also want/intend to just write here more often. i don’t because it’s scary, i think, but i will find the balls. it’s one of my new year’s resolutions. please hold me to this!

see? my granny dressed!

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 22:21:24 -0500

see? my granny dressed!

i want my grandmother to put her teeth in.

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 22:07:00 -0500

she has been without them nearly all day. i gave her dentures to her at lunch time this afternoon so that she could eat the tuna sandwich and handful of cheez-its she had (which she turned her nose up at, of course, but ate anyway). after lunch, she retired to her room, and when i saw her again at around 5, she was toothless again. four and a half hours later she emerges again for something cold to drink, mouth still sunken and shapeless without her dentures.

yesterday morning, she smiled at me when i poked my head in her room to wake her up. i saw teeth. a few minutes after i gave her a plate of whatever was for lunch yesterday, she poked her head into my mother’s room, where i was watching TV.

“i cain’t find my teeth nowhere.”

again, i saw teeth, then realized the mistake i’d made that morning. i’d taken the visual proof of upper dentures as proof enough that the bottoms were in too. they weren’t. i went into her room and first looked under her pillows, which, for some reason, has become her favorite place to keep things—nightgowns, her remote control, the newspaper, and on occasion, her teeth. this time, i found each of those items plus a small stack of neatly folded kleenex, but no dentures. i moved on to the length of her bed, pulling sheets and blankets from it and shaking them out. no dentures.

the last time i couldn’t find her dentures in her bed, i ended up having to rummage elbow-deep in kitchen trash that had been in the garbage can for a good day or two, absolutely filling the house with flies and eau de rotten chicken. before i went about kicking things on my way to get the protective gloves this time, i remembered that i once found them inside her pillow case. thankfully i found them there.

but i digress.

all this is bad news because there was a time when she wouldn’t be caught dead without her teeth in her mouth. my grandmother has never been a vain woman, never considered herself particularly pretty (though i and most people disagree), but she was dressed. i mean, *dressed.* she kept herself cleaned up quite well, especially on sundays. and she was never, ever without her teeth. she even slept in them at night.

but she’s been without them for a day and a half. purposely.

this feels like another loss. another piece of who she was is slipping away from us, if not gone already. and not three minutes ago from this very moment, she called me into her room to cover her up because she was cold. rather than reach down and pull up her own covers, rather than get up and put on an extra pair of socks, she got up and sought out her granddaughter to tuck her in.

i rolled my eyes and shook my head at her because it is easier than looking at her laying there, than watching another darkening shade settle on the horizon.

tsk. so lazy. she won’t even cover herself up anymore.

won’t. not can’t. won’t.

“won’t” is a fantasy. “won’t” implies that if she’d just make the conscious decision to cover herself up, to stop undressing in the dining room, to get over the freaking coffee thing already, she would. it suggests that where we are is not permanent, that we can somehow stop and even reverse time.

but “can’t” is our reality. any active will that she has to do any of those things lessens a little more everyday, and i notice that these days we roll out eyes a little harder and comment on this delicious laziness a little louder as if trying to will it into existence.

i tucked her in, though i did not want to. rather instinctively, i began to lean down to kiss her on her forehead, but stopped short, uncomfortable with the motherliness of it all.

i instead called out to her, “good night, i love you” as i stepped out of her room and further toward the land of can’t that i have been so fiercely avoiding.

This morning hasn't been the best.

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 11:14:00 -0400

(an old entry from a few months ago)

—————-

As deep as I’m sleeping in the midst of the rain drumming a lullaby on the roof outside, I manage to hear the little footsteps take to the stairs leading to my room. It’s my youngest niece, 6 years old, 7 this summer. I roll my eyes beneath my lids and take a deep breath, stockpiling the patience I’ll need when I’m asked for breakfast or juice or whatever 6 year olds think is important enough to wake someone up for.

“Are you sleeping?” she says, softly. Her voice is high and squeaky, her whisper like the tinkling of glass on a sidewalk.

“Why ?” I say with purposeful irritation in my voice. She’ll need to know that it’s ridiculous to wake somebody up for juice, and I’m dropping the hint before the full message comes.

“Granny’s in the kitchen.”

God. This is far worse than a kid wanting toast to watch with her cartoons. I thank the kid for letting me know (when she came to stay the weekend the night before, I deemed her my Official Granny Watcher, and she hasn’t slipped up once), take a deep breath and whisper for somebody, whoever was listening, to give me strength.

I look at the clock and I swear I hear it giggle mockingly as it ticks to 6:43.

I decide right then that this is too early. I went to bed at a decent hour, but was still tired because it wasn’t even 7 a.m. And beyond that, I hated the idea that she or I should have to be such a slave to her coffee addiction that our normal sleep patterns and natural lives should be so dramatically interrupted by it (she typically sleeps until 10 at the very least; I don’t know what this pre-7 a.m. business is about). Routine is very important to me because I want it to be for her. When she got sick, she became unable to remember the time of day or keep track of the passage of time, and now she doesn’t even try anymore. In trying to hold on to some kind of routine, I guess I’m trying to hold on to who she used to be.

So that’s it, then. I’ll go downstairs and tell her that she can have her coffee, but it’s a bit too early to be up and at ‘em. I’ll have her lay back down for a little while, which she won’t mind since the only thing she likes as much as coffee is laying down beneath a pile of quilts and comforters.

I walk into the kitchen and see the familiar scene: every cabinet and cupboard door is open along with the microwave, the countertops are spattered with random bags and containers of things, the top has been taken off the sugar bowl which lays next to an empty coffee cup and spoon, and my grandmother is in a mint green nightgown bent completely over with her head inside an open drawer.

“Mama?” She sees me and smiles.

“Hi, baby!” She points to the coffee maker and her lips move silently as she searches for the words she wants. I nod my head, already knowing what she wants and what she means.

“Mama, it’s a little too early for coffee, sweetie.” I say this confidently, expecting a little protest but never doubting that victory is inevitable; I heard my mother say once that she tells her to go back to bed all the time when she gets up too early.

Protest comes first in the form of an alarmed look on her face that soon spills into panic, then anger, then sadness.

“It ain’t too early,” she says calmly, though the way she’s bunching her mouth suggests anything but serenity.

“It’s not even 7 yet,” I coo to her. “We’ll get you some coffee, but first let’s rest a little bit longer, okay?”

“I don’t wanna rest, I want—“

“It’s too early, Mama.”

“Not for me!” Now she’s full-blown anxious. Her hands are fat, nervous butterflies flying recklessly between balling up and squeezing the length of her nightgown to scratching nervously at her scalp to rubbing the side of her face. They soon end up in her mouth where she gnashes at them violently with her dentures. I speak slowly, trying to hold on to my patience as long as I can; I know that I only have a few more Mama-please-it’s-too-earlies in me, and I want to savor them for the both of us. She spins around to grab her coffee cup and I try again. This time her shoulders slump, like a boxer before he hits the mat, but her voice gets louder and her eyes fill with tears. Victory is visible. I now have a decision to make.

I can stand my ground and insist that she go back to bed, which she will eventually do, but not a second before all hell breaks loose. I’ve been here before and it got so bad that I had to call my mother all the way home from work to settle things down. Lots of tears. Lots of tears. And yelling. I think she even threatened me with her cane once. Or I can throw my hands up and fix her the damn coffee, giving in not only to her, but to the way things have become.

I don’t like my options and seeing no other way out, I snap.

“Fine!” I push past her towards the coffee pot, which is a quarter full of cold, day-old coffee which I pour violently into the sink. I slam the coffee pot onto the counter and go about making a fresh pot, fussing all the while. “It is way too early for this, Mama. Nobody wants to be up this early on a Sunday making coffee because you can’t think of anybody but yourself.”

“I do think of you, too!”

“No you don’t! All you think about is coffee, coffee, coffee! You don’t care that I’m tired!”

“Well, you shouldn’t stay up so late!” That struck a nerve. I’m yelling now.

“I WASN’T up late! You need to stop acting like a two year old over coffee!!” Hearing myself, I take a quick breath and lower my voice, but I’m still angry. “Just go sit down.” She lingers, reaching for her coffee cup. “I said go sit down, I’ll get it.”

“You think I cain’t wait on myself no more,” she accuses.

“You can’t.” As soon as the words leave my lips, I know that that quiet utterance cut her much deeper than any of my yelling did and I feel ashamed.
I know my grandmother can’t help it. I know that the strokes have turned her into what she is today. But I can’t help it either; I’m angry, at her, at life. I had plans today. They weren’t big plans, but they were plans. But when you’re taking care of a sick old woman, plans don’t matter. You don’t matter. Her routine becomes yours. The unfairness is colossal, and other than put her in a nursing home somewhere, which we could never do, there isn’t any way out of it other than…

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it. Sometimes, when I’m so angry and frustrated, I ask myself the question very, very quietly in the back of my mind and I avoid looking people in the eye just in case they’ll be able to see what I’m thinking. But I do wonder if we’ll be happier once she’s gone. We’d be sad, of course. Nobody wants a loved one to die. But I’m speaking logistically, once we get over the hurt. When we won’t have to structure our social lives around where she will be and what she will need, when my mother will have the extra money for that fishing trip to Florida she’s been wanting to take, but can’t because of the time she has to take off to make doctor’s appointments, when we can eat dinner in the dining room again without having to watch the infantile mess she makes with her food. When we can make plans again. When we don’t have to hate coffee anymore. When we can step back into our own identities and again become people with hobbies and tickets to plays that we can actually go see and the option to work overtime if we want to. It is a very uncomfortable, guilt-ridden fantasy, but it is a fantasy. I keep quiet about it. I wonder if my mother has it, too.

I am 28 years old and I don’t have any children. I worry that this experience will make me never want them. As cute and fun as my grandmother can be, caring for her is not. It’s a chore, and often inconvenient. I don’t delight in it. I can’t enjoy her company because looking at her reminds me of the woman that we have been robbed of. The frail body swathed in wrinkled skin and mysterious bruises, the wild-eyed stare she gives everyone and everything, the slurred tongue, the slow, stooped gait, the horrible hygiene habits, the odd need for constant hugs and kisses. It was fun the first couple of weeks, and now it feels like a trap. I fear that having children will be the same way. What if I object to being awakened in the middle of the night to breastfeed? What if I don’t feel like giving any hugs one day? What if I just want to sit and read and be left alone for a little while?

I have a friend who confessed to me once from the bottom of our second bottle of wine that she doesn’t like being a mother because she doesn’t have the luxury to be herself anymore. Everything she was, everything she enjoyed, all that has been taken from her and she feels both resentful of it and guilty for it because society sells this dream to women all the time, that motherhood is (or at least should be) the greatest joy a woman can experience. You’re supposed to love this. You were made for this. But what happens when it isn’t a joy? Does anyone ever even allow for that possibility?

Somehow, I knew exactly how she felt, and I increasingly wonder if my mother feels the same way. After all your parents do for you—raising you, feeding you, clothing you, sacrificing for you—the least you can do is give them the same when they need it. My mother refuses to put Granny in a home because she fears that it would kill her (literally—she thinks she would die of grief) and also, I think she feels that she owes it to her to take care of her. But maybe this isn’t for her? That’s possible, right?

Helping to care for my grandmother has filled me with lots of questions that I know the answers to, though I’m too scared to acknowledge them. Right now, I’m too scared to acknowledge her after our little row in the kitchen because I know that she’s already forgiven me. She’s probably even forgotten it all. I’ll go downstairs and she’ll smile the world’s biggest smile and sing “hi, hon!” and open her arms for a hug, and I will be eaten alive by my shame from the inside out, like acid. I won’t hug her because I fear that I’ll burst into flames and I don’t want the heat to singe her nightgown.

I asked my grandmother if she remembered taking this picture,...

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 17:47:04 -0400

I asked my grandmother if she remembered taking this picture, though I already knew the answer. She shook her head no and said, “Goin’ to church, I guess. I’m dressed up.”

I’m very taken with the youth in my grandmother’s face in this picture. Since she doesn’t remember when this was taken, there’s probably no way to know how old she is in it, but she looks so young. Her cheeks have the same smooth fullness that my 17 year old niece’s do. But she still looks mature somehow, older. If she’s 18 here, she would have at least had one child by the snapping of this picture. Maybe that’s what it is.

When I was little, I thought this picture was weird because of the squiggly things that seemed to be hanging out of her hat. I didn’t get what they were for; they looked silly. But looking at it today, I notice that the squiggly things are actually attached to the bottom of a veil connected to her hat.

It’s the only veil I’ve ever seen her wear; I’ve never seen any pictures of her wedding day, if they even exist. She doesn’t remember when that happened, either.

whiskey & weathermen. (fiction)

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:29:11 -0400

(note: this isn’t a true story, but another imagining; a fictional story based on my grandmother & her life. my actual granny doesn’t drink.)

———————————-

I know you ‘posed to thank God ever morning and be happy He woke you up, and I am, but sometime I won’t mind if He didn’t. I’m old. Cain’t go where I want, do what I want. All day, I just sit, sit, sit; sit so much I cain’t tell the days apart no more. I wake up, I think I know what day it is, what time it is, but then somebody yells, “Mama! What you doin’ up, it’s 3 in the mornin’! Go back to bed!” or “Mama! You need to get up out the bed and eat some dinner!” Always yellin’. Make me sick.

Cold out today, I think. Don’t make me no matter; I be cold no matter snow or shine out there. Sometime I just sit on the couch or lay in the bed (usually the bed) and listen to the weatherfolk talk about cold fronts and heat waves and I turn my head to the side, squint my eyes tryin’ to understand. I shake my head ‘cause I cain’t remember, don’t recall how it feels to know the difference between thangs. Hot and cold? Puh. When you got old blood on top of takin’ blood thinners and whatever else Brenda throws in that pill box ever week, it don’t make no matter. In the end, it won’t matter to nobody, and here they got this fancy weatherman in a fancy Sunday suit, done spent up all this money to buy television cameras and computers covered in Christmas lights to tell us stuff that don’t make no difference no way. Waste of money.

They oughta gave that money to me. I could do plenty good with it. I’d get all my grandbabies everthang they needed—send ‘em to school, see that they clothed and fed good. I’d call up Kenny and see if he need anythang for his wife or that new baby comin’ along and put some money on his oldest one’s college schoolin’. I maybe get Annalea a soft new bed to sleep in upstairs, make sure she comfortable. I’m so tickled to have her back, I wanna make sure it’s happy as it can be for her. And I’d send Brenda someplace nice, real, real nice for a week and let her get some rest from me (and I get some from her, too). And then, once I tooked care of everbody else, I’d have somebody take me up to Walgreens or the Krogers and get me all the chocolate I could ever eat in the rest of my lifetime.

I didn’t never touch the stuff when I was young, but ooh boy! I’d eat ding dongs and Oreos for breakfast and rocky road ice cream for dinner if I could. But I cain’t, of course. Seem like evertime I sit down at the table they pushin’ somethin’ else I don’t want in my face. Toast and jelly, fishsticks and peas. Well, I do love fishsticks and peas, I confess that, but they make me eat it when I don’t want it. “Mama, you cain’t take all them pills and not put no food in your stomach, it’ll make you sick!” Shit. Already sick, I say. But I know they don’t leave me ‘lone til I eat it, so I eat it. With my eyes closed, ‘cause it piss everybody off. You can make me eat, but you cain’t make me look at you.

So I take a bite, close my eyes and remember. Church. The donut shop. Mamie. When Dean was borned and how nobody could believe I did it all by myself in Ray’s old dusty pickup truck (that’s how come we came to call Dean Dusty as a nickname—it sound better than “truck baby,” which LuBell took to callin’ him). I had Dusty on a Wednesday, kissed Poe goodbye before the sun came up and had a baby wrapped and waitin’ on him when he come home sundown. Then I showed up at Sugar Jane’s on Saturday night in a brand new dress and big brimmed hat, not a piece of brown on my new white heels even though we had to walk down a old dirt road to get there, me and my cousin Patience. I walked to the kitchen and ordered a whiskey and Lord, honey, they just went crazy. “Zenith James, ain’t you home with that baby?” I grin and say that the kids takin’ care of him. “Ain’t you feedin’? You know if you drink this, it’ll be in your milk?” I grin again, say it’ll put hair on his chest. Then I walk out to the main room, click my heels on the wood floor in time with the music. Down home bluuuuuues, down home bluuuuues…

I open my eyes and Brenda lookin’ at me like I’m a alien. I don’t know how long I been settin’ there with my eyes closed, noddin’ my head to B.B. King. Don’t care either. I close my eyes again.

I ask for a cup of coffee a few times and they tell me no, louder and louder each time, swearin’ I done drunked a whole pot already. That’s all anybody say around here anymore. No, no, no. Piss. I get up from the table, toddle off to my room to look at them know-nothing weathermen some more before I go off to sleep and dream. Or just lay thinkin’, I don’t know which.

Sometime I can’t tell sleep from bein’ awake no more.

my mother's birthday was a few days ago.

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:28:21 -0400

my brother sent her flowers and chocolate, while i went downtown to buy her a bottle of her favorite gin. my mother gave me a ride home from all my errand running after she went to pick up my grandmother, her mother, who is 84 and very, very forgetful.

“tootsie,” i said (this is what we call my grandmother), “did you wish the birthday girl a happy day?” she put her hand on her cheek and gave a sad smile.

“i forgot,” she said. “i’m so forgetful, i forget my own name anymore.”

“oh, don’t be silly,” i said.

“yeah,” said my mom. “what’s your name?” my grandmother paused for a moment, then looked at my mother as if she were an alien, trying to figure out why she’d ask such a dumb ass question.

“zilpha,” she said. duh.

“and when’s your birthday?” she put her finger between her dentures and thought.

“may… 12th,” she said. (she was actually born on the 6th.)

“what year?” she paused again.

“1926.” i smiled. it makes me so happy when she remembers things.

——-

we get home and i rush into the house to put my mother’s gin in the pretty bag and top it off with the bright blue tissue paper i bought. i wanted to have all her gifts on the dining room table waiting for her when she walked in. my grandmother somehow made it in before my mom did, and she sat at the table in front of the roses and the chocolates with the big green bow and the bag with the blue tissue paper cascading from it and her eyes lit up a bit. she picked up the birthday card and squinted trying to make sense of my handwriting (it said “to: mommy” with a big smiley face next to it). i caught her before she opened it. “hey hey hey! that’s not yours! it’s not your birthday!” she frowned a bit and took a look at the riot of color before her.

“this is mine?” she said. sometimes… sometimes, i swear, she pretends not to know things, pretends not to remember in order to get the things she wants. her light has dimmed a bit after all the years and all the strokes, no doubt about that, but she’s in there. the tack is sharper than she’d care to admit.

“no ma’am,” i said. “those are mom’s birthday presents. it’s her birthday, remember?” she pouted. i turned to leave the room for a moment.

when i walked back in, my grandmother had her arms outstretched to me, reaching out for what looked to be the biggest freaking hug ever in the history of hugs. i entered her arms and she squeezed, hard, and when i pulled away, she looked into my face and said, as if to convince me:

“happy birthday to me!”

…i laughed. hard. for a long time, until my mother walked in and i told her what happened.

“oh, honey,” my mother said to her mother as she reached out for her own biggest hug in the history of hugs, “that’s alright. we can share birthdays.”

mom handed granny the box of chocolates. happy birthday to everybody.

time. (fiction)

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:11:00 -0400

(note: i spend most of my time wondering what my grandmother is thinking. when she sits nodding her head to music i can’t hear, when she seems to tune us out and not hear us talking to her. when i ask, she either can’t tell me or she won’t, and when my curiosity won’t let me be, i imagine where she may have gone and write it down. none of the names are real. the voice is pretty spot on though—i do a good granny.)

———-

6:30 in the mornin’, Brenda come barrelin’ in my room, flickin’ all the switches, turnin’ on all the lights. Barkin’. “Mama, come on, it’s time to get up.” 6:30 in the mornin’! I’m re-tired; that ‘posed to mean I never get up before the sun again a day in my life. She not retired, though, so she don’t know what it’s like. Or she just don’t care.

Some days I fight her on it, but it’s easier to just get up out the bed. I take some big breaths, thank the Lord for wakin’ me up and ask ‘em for strength before I throw off the quilt one of the kids down home made for me. I done forgot who it was; probably Janie or ‘Cora Lee. I put my hands on my pillow and push myself up. It take me a long time, but I get there. I look at my hands while I do. They fat now, look like big, greedy, wrinkly worms. And some of my rings is gone. Missin’. Somebody probably come in here while I was out sometime and took ‘em, or lost ‘em while claimin’ to be cleanin’ up. I don’t have nothin’ no more, all my stuff just keep disappearin’ a little more everyday. My rings, my money. Dolls and trinkets the kids give me years ago. Take, take, take. Everything getting’ took from me.

I try and swing my old legs around off the bed and on the floor, but I stop ‘cause I done got a catch in my back or my hips; pain shoot everywhere, so I cain’t tell where it come from. I cain’t move without hurtin’ no more; my legs and hips hurt me all the time. They say I got that general back disease or whatever they call it and it make me hurt so bad sometime I could just lay down and wait to die. And sometime I do. But I mostly don’t, though; I just swallow it ‘cause soon as I frown my face up over it, they run for medicine bottles and try to stick some more pills down my throat. I tell ‘em naw, I don’t need it. Them pain pills is full of God-knows-what anyway, be gettin’ all them people addicted. I don’t want to get dependent on no stuff like that. I carry it on my own. Like I always done.

I don’t know how much time pass before Brenda runnin’ through the house yellin’ for everybody to hurry up. She gotta go to work, Amanda, that’s my grandbaby, she got to go to work, too, and Queenie, my great-grandbaby (Kenny’s oldest one), she got to go to school. And I got to go up to the center. I hate that damn place.

By the time I pull my coat on and walk out my room, Brenda and Queenie in the car and Amanda just comin’ down the stairs from her room, still half dressed. She slow as smoke off shit. And lazy, always has been. She still faster than me, though, and even though she in the dining room when I reach for the front doorknob, she in front of me and on the porch before I even touch it. I stick my leg out, slow, cause my legs is hurtin’ me today, and I turn my body round some so I don’t have to move my hips too much. When I do, I can see over to Ms. Wolff’s house next door and my old eyes find her old chair settin’ on the porch. Seem like I ain’t seen her in a hunnert year; she don’t come out the house no more since she got sick.

She used to set right there in that chair whenever she was home. Mornin’ and noon and right up to bedtime except when the stories was on, right there in that chair. Probably ‘cause she kept such a nasty house. I wouldn’t wanna set in that shithole, neither. She used be settin’ out there when I come home from the bus after getting’ off work up at the donut shop in the afternoons and some days, dependin’ on how I’m feelin’, I walk across my yard to go sit with her a little while before goin’ in my own house.

We talk and we laugh and we gossip ‘til the sun go down. Back before I got sick I’d sit up tall and smoke me a few cigarettes. After I got sick and they made me quit, I’d borrow one from Ms. Wolff and have to bend my head down to smoke it, lest Brenda or Amanda see me and get to hollerin’. I like Miss Wolff. She lazy and she couldn’t never make that grandson of hers mind and she wear too much blush on her cheeks, but she good to talk to.

“Hey, James!” she say, wavin’ big when she see me cuttin’ cross my grass. I reckon that’s how you know I liked Ms. Wolff a tolerable lot—I didn’t ‘llow nobody in my yard and I only stepped in it to get to my flowers, but I didn’t mind a few secret tiptoes to get next door a little faster.

“Hey, sugar babe! What’s the word today?”

“Whatever it was yesterday,” she say and laugh. If ain’t nothin’ goin’ on she start chatterin’ bout the weather or somethin’ light like that, but if she got some gossip, she wait ‘til I get up on the porch til she say somethin’ else.

“So,” she say, leanin’ close, “what’chu think ‘bout the new neighbors?”

“Don’t know nothin’ bout em,” I say back. “You?”

“Not much. She got three kids, all different colors. She herself black as old leather.” We laugh. I light up.

“Three kids? Boys or girls?”

“Girls.”

“She married?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Mmph. What church she go to?”

“Ain’t found out yet. I told Jeanie at New Bethel to look out, see if she see her next Sunday. Told Polly at Holy Catharsis and Helena at 17^th St. Temple, too.”

“Josh meet the girls yet?” (Josh that ol’ nappyhead grandson of hers.)

“Naw, not yet. I’ma send him down to play this weekend.”

“Tell him to come get ‘Manda to go with him. You know them kids tell everything.”

“Chile, I know that’s right. They tell Satan all Jesus’ secrets if he offered ‘em cookies and ice cream.” We laugh. I take a big, mighty puff and hold it in til my lungs get to burnin’. Remind me of when I was a young girl workin’ Daddy’s land; when that sun get up high and you done worked up a good sweat but still got more to go, your body start takin’ in more air, much as it can hold like the whole earth is ‘bout to run out of it. Soon it start to feel like a thousand little pins is stickin’ you in your lungs and it burn a little, but it don’t hurt. Kinda wakes you up, make you feel alive. Starry Mae ‘nem stayed in school but I quit to work with Daddy. Nothin’ like good hard work to make you feel like a woman.

By the time I remember that I ain’t talkin to Ms. Wolff and my lungs is unfortunately full of clean air, ‘Manda’s talkin’ to me soft but strong, and before I can say anything she herdin’ me toward the front step. “Come on, Mama. We gotta go, they waitin’ on us.”

Shit. Let ‘em wait, I wanna say. What yall so worried about? Time? Puh. Time don’t give a shit ‘bout yall. When you need more of it, it run out on you, and when you don’t want it no more, it latch on to you like a leech in a pond that done got too cold to swim in and won’t let you go, won’t let you get out.