Coffee and My Morning Rant (Day 12 Unemployed) "Fragments" We stood around the mound of dirt, the place where my grandmother now lays in perpetuity, above the body of my grandfather, a man I never knew – the man who fell from the sky in his bright shiny plane when my mother was just a small child. Her memories of him nearly as vague as mine, both of us brought up with stories by those whose memories wane with time. We stood there, gathered around her, 25 us, a small and intimate cluster of people strung together by memories of a woman who unintentionally defined us as a matriarch. The oldest and closest in lineage spoke first, each of us sharing a memory, an important intangible artifact, evidence of the impact this woman had on our lives; there were new things we learned, and things we all had in common. But what we shared, and how we shared it spoke more about who we are as individuals. It became evident her legacy was not in memories of what she did and said as much as how we are defined by her, how she is buried in each of us, and how she will continue to exist through what we pass on. The definition of my grandmother is evident in many generations. She was not needling. She was not clingy. She was a rock. And at least three generations of us had lived with her, spent days and months and years beside her at the table, on the couch, in the kitchen, on the porch, in her bed snuggled up talking politics, baseball, and consequences of a life lived. We each took a turn tossing onto the cool San Diego wind swept up from the beach below the Ft. Rosecrans Cemetery the words of wisdom she’d bestowed, moments shared, memories of who she was and how she’d been perceived by not only us but also those who’d encountered her. In our testimonies, we learned about one another – our insecurities, our delights, our ambitions, our fears. Not so long ago, at my father’s funeral – a man I had a mad scattering of disjointed memories of – I sat beside my brother, holding his hand, strangers that no one there knew were his children, in the room of a box church that was not my father’s faith, among people who professed to know the man I feel I barely hold a resemblance to. I’d attended the funeral with the hope that these people would share stories so that I could better know the man my stepmother had denied my brother and me – we were not invited to speak, to share our memories, and the memories the few people who spoke shared were not of my father, but of themselves. I consider the difference between the two services. I don’t believe my father was a bad man. But in the end, I think he shared his life with people who used him as a platform for the lives they wanted for themselves: money, big houses, exotic vacations. This is what they shared. My stepbrother even confessed, in his crisp bully pulpit suit, to my father’s acquaintances (his sister was the only other blood relation there) how he’d stolen money from my father, and how he would miss their cruise ship vacations together. Had I been allowed to speak, I would have shared stories of a different man. A man who taught me to fish and camp with a stern obedience. A man who penny pinched and had to be legally forced to pay child support, but was gentle and patient with the hundreds of birds he raised. A tall, awkward man who strangers immediately liked (unless you were a waitress with too much perfume on) but that family members had difficulty connecting with. A man who seldom, if never read, but for some inexplicable reason gifted me Khalil Gibran’s “The Prophet” on my 10th birthday. I would have shared a glimpse of the emails he would randomly send me, critiquing my writing or radio broadcasts that he had somehow found online, and how, even after 25 years of estrangement, I still ached for his acceptance. Following Teeka’s funeral, after hearing my relatives’ accounts of her, I began to doubt the relationship I’d had with my grandmother. We did not go places together. We did not have a physical collection of stories shared. Our rapport was of words and thoughts and music and literature. I have more tangible memories of my father, a man I did not know. My memories of both of them, however, are mere splinters of framework, slivers that have buried themselves deep in my skin. Because of circumstances, and because of the differences between Teeka and my father, I feel I carry my grandmother in me, far deeper and with greater definition than my father. He is the phantom in my fragmented memories that haunts, and she is buried in me. The two, Teeka and my father, shared a quiet, if not secret correspondence up until, as far as I can ascertain, a few years before his death. I have stumbled across these letters while sorting through my grandmother’s things. His letters did not share emotion, nor mention of my brother and me; he wrote like a son who shared his successes in hope of having his mother’s approval. The letters I came across that I had sent to her in my youth were similar, wanting her acceptance, seeking her praise. This, it turns out, is a piece of my father that is buried in me.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 21:49:41 +0000
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