Category Archives: personal

I.

I was prepared for you to not know me.  I was prepared when I decided to come see you anyway.  I was prepared when I packed my bag.  I was prepared when I stepped on the airplane.  I was prepared when they wheeled your tiny frame down the hall to me when I arrived at the center where you now live.  I was prepared for you to not know my name.  I was prepared.

I was not prepared.

I was not prepared to see the wariness behind your eyes when you looked at my face.  The uncertantity I saw there that said, stranger.  I was not prepared for the desperation that look in your eyes plunged me into.  I was not prepared to long for you.  I was not prepared to need you to know me.

Don’t you know me at all?  Anything?  Don’t you remember dancing with me in the kitchen?  Don’t you remember the five different batches of fudge you used to make at Christmastime?  Don’t you remember?  Santa Fe?  You and me and Grampa.  Side by side by side in the pick up.  Don’t you remember stacking telephone books up on the chair so I could sit with you at the dining room table?  Don’t you remember the Statue of Liberty?  I wanted to go to the top so badly.  You and I walked up every step together and looked out the tiny windows in her crown.  Don’t you remember?  Don’t you remember putting the cherries in my drink so I felt special?    Don’t you remember?  Me and you.  Don’t you?

I was not prepared.

 

II.

 

“I’m your granddaughter.”

Her face lit up in delight. “Well!  I’ll be damned!”  She squeezed my hand. “Thank you!  Look at these flowers.  Aren’t they pretty?  I love the colors.”

“I’m your granddaughter.”

“Really?  Well. I’ll be damned. Just look at this. Look at these flowers.  I love the color.”

“I’m your granddaughter.”

“Really?  Well. I’ll be damned. Thank you!”

“No, thank you!  I’m your granddaughter. I’m Mariah.”

“Oh, I loved that one.  Look. I kept this for her. Isn’t it a lovely piece?  I just love the color.”

“I’m your granddaughter.”

Look of surprise. “Really?  Well. I’ll be damned. Thank you!  Look at these flowers. Aren’t they beautiful?”

“I’m your granddaughter.”

“Really?”

“I’m your granddaughter.”

“Really?  I’ll be damned. Thank you!”

“That’s me in that picture. I’m her. I’m Mariah.”

“Oh, I always had fun with her.  Will you look at this?  Look at these flowers. I just love the color.”

 

III.

“This is Max.”  I pointed at Max’s beautiful little face on the page.  “Here’s Harry. Harrison Roy.  He’s named after Grampa.”  For years I have been sending my grandparents photo albums of the little family Chris and I have made together.  She touched the image of my face on the page.  “And this is the mother.” She said softly to herself.  Like she was looking at a laundry detergent advertisement in a magazine.  “This one is the mother.”

She turned to the pages that featured her own face.  Skeeter and Roy’s 90th birthday celebration. We celebrated my grandparents’ birthdays shortly before my grandfather passed away four years ago.  It was a great big bash with dozens of friends and family from all over.  A proper old fashioned party…  At a fancy country club where my Grampa wore a brand new suit and there were white linens on all the tables.  I tensed, unsure how she would react to what she saw.  She turned the page and her fingers immediately found my grandfather’s face. “There’s the old boy.” She whispered. “There’s my lover.”  She stroked his cheeks with delicate fingers. His eyes. His mouth. The line of his jaw. Tracing his features over and over again.

No one spoke.

Twin rivers of tears ran down both of our cheeks.

As we continued to flip through the pages of the book, one small image kept bringing her to the same spot again and again.  We would get towards the last pages, and she would turn back to find it again. A small, black and white photo from their birthday party. The two of them on the dance floor, wrapped up in each others arms. Her fingertips gently touched the photo again and again.  Silently caressing the small image of the intertwined couple.  The only two on the dance floor.

 

IV

I packed the soft, brown mink stole.  Annie Cravens.  I never met Annie Cravens.  I never met her, but her name is embroidered onto the velvet lining of my mink stole.  The fur is thick and glossy, changing from a rich whisky to deep mahogany in the light. Chris bought it for me years ago from an estate sale.  It’s one of those beautiful little things.  One of those beautiful little things that women have.  The beautiful little things that we all have, and keep safe in our bottom dresser drawers… but that are much too precious to ever actually wear.   The fur is thick and lush when I run my fingers through it’s length.  I threw it into my suitcase as I packed to visit my grandmother.  I planned to photograph her, and I thought the stole might make her feel more glamorous in front of the camera.  She was glamorous once, though it was many lifetimes ago.  When she was a beauty queen with a houseful of servants and beautiful clothes.  Before she left it all to be a cowboy’s bride.  Before that chance meeting on a crowded San Fransisco street.  Before she learned how to cook, and how to catch a trout, and how to saddle a horse.  Before me.  Before us.  That was lifetimes before my lifetime.  When she was mine, she was past glamorous.  She was the soft edged, sparkle eyed confidence that comes from growing out of the need for glamour.  She was barefoot and sun drenched.  A laugh like tinkling bells.  Covered in silver and turquoise.  Spunky.  Charming.  All pink lipstick and whiskey at 5:00.

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They met on a San Francisco street.  He was on shore leave during WWII with some of his Navy buddies, and she was out for a night on the town with her girlfriends.  She dropped her handbag.  He picked it up.  That’s the end of the story, and the beginning of the story.  In that moment their lives ended, and a new life began.  

My grandparents’ beginnings could not have been any more different…  She was a trained dancer, an artist and a beauty queen.  Every six months a seamstress came to the house to take her measurements so that season’s wardrobe could be made.  While my Grandfather…  He was keeping the fire burning, at the bootlegging distillery that his family had hidden in the woods of Kentucky.  Then he jumped on a train at fourteen and headed west to California.  At sixteen, he lied about his age and joined the Navy.  Two different worlds.  But those differences never amounted to much.  Everything changed when he picked up that handbag.

I came along much later, when their life together was already strongly established.  She had already learned to cook…  (not a small feat when you grew up with servants who did all the cooking for you.)  The two of them had traveled, crashed parties in Mexico and danced all night with Mexican dignitaries, stomped grapes in California with Portuguese immigrants, broke horses, rode in rodeos, spread oil paint on hundreds of canvases, and raised two children together by the time I came into the picture.  As a child I enjoyed their love and laughter, not realizing how special they truly were.  They were just my grandparents.

We would get snowed in at their house in the foothills of Denver, and have to eat crackers and cans of sardines by candlelight when the power went out.  We visited New York when I was eleven, and I had my heart set on peeking through the windows of the crown at the top of the Statue of Liberty’s head.  My grandmother walked up hundreds of steps holding my hand and urging me on.  My Grandfather rarely caught a fish when he took me fishing at the lakes down the dusty dirt road from their house…  How could he, when he spent all of his time untangling my line?  But he taught me how to be patient.  To sit very still with my finger on the delicate line, the wind blowing ripples across the water and my hair across my face.  How to tell the difference between my hook merely bumping over a rock at the bottom, and the feel of a trout really taking hold.  Once, when I was a sophomore in college, I called them the week before my summer break.  I announced that we should take a trip.  Just the three of us.  Their only question was to ask where I wanted to go…  They packed up their trailer and we drove to New Mexico as soon as I finished my finals.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I began to comprehend what a rare treasure I had in my grandparents.  As individuals they were wonderful people.  But it was really how they worked together as a couple that strikes me the most now.  When you grow up with that kind of perfectly choreographed companionship, you don’t question it.  It just… is.  I never thought twice about the way they always held hands.  Always.  In the living room, at a crowded party, in a parking lot.  They were together.  Always.  The way they filled in the blanks of the stories they would tell together.  Tales of love and war, sunken ships, bootlegging and gold nuggets along roadsides.  The way she would snuggle under the crook of his arm and say, “Hi there, Sailor!” and giggle like a teenager. How he always remembered to bring a sweater for her when they left the house, because he knew she would get cold.  Or how he washed the dishes every night after she made dinner.  Then they would dance barefoot in the kitchen, the dishtowel still in his hand.  

They were two distinct stars.  Blazing, brilliant and beautiful in their own right.  But together they made their own unique constellation.  Just they two…  Dancing together in orbit.

My Grandfather passed away last year.  I took these photos of the two of them when I was there to celebrate their 90th birthdays.  Just three short months later he was gone.  These were some of the last photographs taken of them together.  I honestly don’t know how she does it now.  There is an empty space there that used to hold so much.  It hurts my gut to even think about it.  But she is strong.  So, so very strong.  Like I said, she is her own brilliant shining star.  But I think he is still with her, still holding her hand.  Still keeping her in orbit with the gravitational pull of his love.  A love that cannot ever die.  Still holding her hand.  Still dancing.

written in 2014, as seen in Beyond the Wanderlust Magazine, Edition VI

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