|
written on 2005-05-18 @
7:45 p.m.
Grandmother's Memorial
Perhaps a million pages in we'll have figured out the complexity of her.
Discerned the text. Structured the narrative. Pieced together the story. Perhaps a hundred more days in, we'll have scanned, analyzed & been surprised by it all -- the words, the sounds, the paint. I will have applied neat Photoshop tricks to use techno tools to echo her alternately distracted and focused mind. My curiosity will have gotten the best of me along with my fear, my need for perfection, my gorgeous irrationality. There are a thousand jagged keys buried in the heart of all these scribbles. I'm loaded down with locks I have barely noticed. There are twenty-five million indecipherable vowels. Curled dyslexic consonants begging for one more cursive hint. Writing like brushstrokes over print in these books. She dares me to think anyway. Write anyway. Be political or artsy anyway in a world that values other things. Care. Perhaps inches deep in crusted paint on the brushes or deep under the funky Turpentine smells, there are stories that can change me. Buried mirrors. There are hidden secret moments documenting what is God, what is sublime, what is art. And even deeper under piles of paperbacks, the journals, the stacks of thin typing paper twice as heavy from the correction tape, there is a beauty in a thousand truths even stronger than my romanticizing of it all. I am full of nine hundred fifty thousand memories of fire, news, discussion, ice cream trips, arguments, confusions, advice sessions, calls, refrigerator news clips, gardens, tire swings, dressmakers, garlic cheese grits, bank trips, museums, restaurants, "Red Roses for a Blue Lady," Monet prints, Leonard Cohen poems, talk of the importance of perms and tolerance, history and colons. Two hundred thirty-two thousand slides to play of Georgia O'Keefe, Pisarro, Miro, and the others. All crowded in the deep solitude of the house of her. The May Sarton farm of her single-mindedness from where she typed and painted and read and told stories. Here she'd pluck out words she found peculiar like those we were supposed to be pulling out of the dictionary. She'd remember a flower she saw one day in Oklahoma when the sky was dark and she'd make a note, or pin some other piece of paper to it. Here she would reflect on how she loved all of us even as we battled over this or that. How her heart belonged to "Daddy." She'd plan to tape lessons or arguments, consider how to be loving: first God, than others, then self. On this beautiful farm of her she'd love the bluebonnets, see them in a way we don't. In the morning she'd greet the day, sell the kids around her on
orange juice as brain food, mix up an omelette or poached egg. She'd think about death in many shades. Her rich inner life. Her complex, well-considered world.
Her colorful fountain and the very roller coaster of her.
previous
/ next
Miss These?
Movie Rankings - 2005-08-09
Grandmother's Memorial - 2005-05-18
The Latest - 2005-03-22
Harvard Summers - 2005-03-17
Rainbow Brite - 2005-02-18
|
