Am availing myself of the university library’s internet today. They have built an add-on to the library which is a thing of crystal and steel and and cement, and odd but comfy seating.
At the basement level the windows open and look out onto a lime-green pond inhabited only by slime and blood-bright scarlet dragonflies. Water refracts upwards onto cement beams, wrinkling and shimmering. Beyond, in a steep lush green amphitheatre of grass, millions of particoloured feral rabbits gambol. They are very happy and have no idea that the uni labs have their eye on them, the monsters (and not the good kind of monsters, with feelings and feathers and scales).
Recently I learned about a new science under the aegis of continuum mechanics: rheometry, the study of flow and deformation of materials, mostly polymers. And it occured to me that someone should measure the sheer flows of pond slime, and while we’re at it of sea milk, the Alaskan blob, amrita, nektar, soma, kava kava, the elixer of the chrysopoeia, and of mead. As well as creme marshmallow spread.
Haliaeetus leucocephalus + Rubus laciniatus, Rubus parviflorus, Rubus spectabilis, and possibly Rubus ursinus
Walking lately has been about eating: dewberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries and the occasional early blackberry, usually the one right at the centre of the whorl, at the tip of the club.
Dewberries are sweet as strawberries, overlaid with the perfume of blackberries, and have a solid core like loganberries. Salmonberries are tart and almost lemony. Thimbleberries are mealy but very sweet, and make a beautiful contrast to dewberries in the mouth. And classic blackberries are like nothing else, juice sweet and aromatic and somehow purple in flavour. Or maybe I just think of the flavour of blackberries when I see the colour purple. All of these berries are part of the rose family.
Another member of the rose family, the hawthorn trees, are heavy with myriad green pip-sized berries which will redden soon. The arbutus trees still broadcast their yellow leaves; I plan on eating some of their berries this year when they come, for curiosity’s sake, and stringing more into chains of red and orange and yellow and green. For no good reason at all, other than that they are shiny, in the whedon sense of the word.
Last night we walked through a stand of trees which rang with the absurd squalls of juvenile bald eagles, tonnes of them; we think they were being taught how to hunt. We ate berries, berries berries. We watched a neophyte hay-maker make crooked, much-belaboured windrows from yellow, yellow grasses.
We crossed a tidal river flowing upwards into the land.
We saw a blue heron flapping preposterously up it, and brown rabbits sproinging wildly across little, narrow grey roads.
And then we came home, hands stained, teeth full of seeds.
Right, cat post time.
Having three cats is revealing: cat culture reaches a singularity and then overwhelms human culture. In cat culture, though cats are independent to a point, what one cat has the other ones want, too. Sound familiar?
It all started with a big dramatic fight outside, leading to consolations inside. The marmalade is Rebecca’s tomcat Augustus.
…is what I’d call my essay on the etic literary confluence of earthly paradise and post-apocalyptic visions of the South Pacific. If I took a course on literatures of the South Pacific.
Context. In the process of mulling over my course options for this coming academic year I thought, how cool would it be to take a course on ‘South Pacific Encounters’: Cloudstreet and Tintin and ‘Lost’ and Cloud Atlas and octopus gods and Fatu-Hiva and Mad Max, especially ‘Beyond Thunderdome’, and Polynesian myth, and the Antipodes, and sweaty bingo nights in Guam, and nuclear testing, and Captain Cook and Cargo Cults and Haka compared with breakdancing, alterity versus autonomy, Bali and heavy metal and Eka Dasa Rudra, etc etc.
So I made a somewhat annotated bibliography. And for no other reason than sheer joy in making lists, I include it here, below the jump. I’d love to hear any other suggestions. The octopus is by Roy Henry Vickers (North Pacific, but apropos octopi, I thought). The garbage is on a Hawaiian beach.
…was the longest day of the year. We spendthrifted (spentthrifted?) it, profligate as mayflies, at coffee, and wandering around an abandoned lodge, and longboarding in the dusk. I watched a storm come in from the hammock, made a blue-green tent of a blanket through a skiff of rain. After sunset the power died; we navigated the house with our Babylon candle.
It was a windy, cloudy, fitful day; Lombardy poplars bowing pretty far over, air whistling through black Douglas fir branches, the smell of Olive trees and of fountainy, nose-tizzling Ocean Spray bushes whipping by nicely. The Arbutus trees are loosing their first round of yellow leaves, which always look to me like small air-afloat coracles. These leaves skim across the paving in gold and pink-gold drifts. When collected in a sheaf they shuffle cool and waxy as playing cards in the hand.
Nomenclature is an oddity. Douglas fir really belong to the Pinaceae family; what we call Arbutus trees in British Columbia are called south of the border Madrona Trees till you hit the Siskiyou Mountains, where they shift along some uncertain border to being called Madrone trees. Once I told Mark Garry Oaks were named for Garry Garryson, the first Viking explorer to hit land on the north west coast. He believed for me an instant. He has the gift of faith. These trees are actually named for Nicholas Garry, an HBC boss, but they have other names: the Saanich name for them is čəŋ̕eɬč (sounds something like “chung-ayhlshch”…maybe). Even midsummer is a loose term, celebrated anywhere between the 20th-25th.
I like how little we really know, and how nomenclature, how we divvy up the known world, is always changing–significances are defined by how you look at them. The other day I looked at the local concert arena’s lit-up news board; it read ‘Eagles cyber stars’. What it meant was, there was a webcam fixed on a local eagle’s nest which lots of people were watching online. But in the moment my head tried to make sense of the sign by envisaging some odd cyber-space-time continuum in which eagles blazed as stars in the electronic firmament, something like thunderbirds, something like garudas. A friend told me yesterday that, as his dad went over provisions for his will, it truly entered his head, just for a moment, that none of those details would matter if there were a viral zombie plague (he’s been reading World War Z). It’s nice to see the world these ways, I think, in ways mutable and odd. Like fridge men.
So yeah. Here’s a print Mark made for me of Garry Garryson. Inside it says, ‘”Through storm, gale and fog I stroke, / all to bring the West my oak.” – Garry’s Song (circa 790)’.
Happy midsummer.
An honest and lovely moment from a prolific blogger:
I took the dog out for a walk tonight, and together we wandered across the meadow next door. It was a warm summer’s night, dark, and moonless. There were a handful of fireflies flickering intermittently, some so close to me I could see they were burning green as they flew, and some further away, who seemed to be flashing white.
And in the sky above them a continual roil of distant summer lightning (the storm distant enough that it was silent) burned and flashed and illuminated the clouds. It seemed as if the lightning bugs were talking to the lightning, in a perfect call and response of flash and counterflash. I watched the sky and the meadow flash and flash while the dog walked ahead of me, and realised that I was perfectly happy…
And it made me happy to read something so pretty, so content, so fitting and so fine.
It is possible to be perfectly happy, for whole moments at a time.
G’night.
IN WHICH I EAVESDROP UPON MY IMMEDIATE SURROUNDINGS
I am, at the moment, sitting in Discovery Coffee’s quiet, dusty, rather liminal extra room watching punters wander in, stare around, and leave again (you order your coffee at the next room over).
And I’m eavesdropping on the conversation of a blonde, padded reporteress of a certain age with a somewhat still youngish Ken-doll-handsome Victoria Police officer. He is eloquent in a Joe Blow sort of way, and is defending his organization’s internal investigation process in light of myriad registered complaints–only a few of which have really stuck, he says. Like only fourteen.
This is what I type while they warm up:
jfkslajf ljkafjk f jklsalll
nmcsaj wh
They think I am not listening. Stealth pwn!
Now they get going. She is very flattering: “You have such a good memory,” she simpers. He bridles in a masculine sort of way. “We’re not afraid to investigate ourselves,” he says–and she says, “Oh, can you say that again into my recorder–I only turn it on after I complain about [indistinct].” (Me: Somehow I find this phrase, “can you say that again into my recorder” subtly, ineffably dirty.)
“We deal with the worst of the worst, the drug addicted, the sick, the mentally ill,” he says. (Me: “Wha-the-who-the-f***?) Compared to Oak Bay Police, he says–or, says she, Saanich Police. Yes, right, he agrees, in a sandy, passionate voice. His staff, he says, are great, even if they do swear sometimes: they “are not machines.” They stopped a suicide jumper off his balcony last night, he says. It’ll never be reported, because “those officers don’t want to talk about it.” A deep and moving tangential response follows: “I think you can’t win: I’ll tell you something, if they have it out for you, you can’t win…every act of kindness will be punished–” says the reporteress. (Me: Yeah, those bastard “worst of the worst” type people, so thankless.)
They lean in now, closer, quieter, winding down. He thanks her for the interview. “We’re helpful sometimes, aren’t we,” says the reporteress. “I wish I could help you more some way,” she says.
Then she waxes eloquent about the art of reporting: “Sometimes the best response is a non-response… Now I just don’t say anything.”
She tells the policeman he once said something which did inspire her to buck her boss. “Who is the source for the story?!?” she says she said. Then, “I hate this [indistinct] town.”
They’re leaving now; she’s still chattering.
“Thanks [her name],” he says. “Well, I’m probably no good,” she replies. (Me: Is feminine self-denigration still a flirting technique??? No really, I want to know.)
Hem. I’ll bet she works for the Times Colonist. A reporter for the Times Colonist once called me when I worked for Bolen’s Books and asked for a list of titles about, I thought, “Crohn’s.” But no, she wanted titles pertaining to “crones”. She didn’t care that the books were out of print. Stellar.
Anyways. <pushes glasses back up bridge of nose>
IN WHICH I GET TO THE POINT AND MEDITATE ON THE ENDING OF THE THE CITY AND THE CITY
In an interview between John Scalzi and China Miéville, CM states “Crime novels never end well.” I think this quite funny and also quite a dangerous statement to make, lest it be applied to one’s own novel. However I liked the City ending well enough. I liked the ending of The Scar better. This is perhaps an unfair comparison because I am passionately susceptible to sea voyage romances and only moderately receptive to political allegories. The City’s ending is fairly conclusive, and yet equivocal; that is, the crime is solved, yet the solver’s fate is delightfully, pragmatically tenebrous. (SPOILER BEHIND THE HIGHLIGHTING:) The solver is dissolved. In terms of the predominant paradigm anyways.
IN WHICH I POSIT MOMENTS OF READER/WRITER AB-TRANSVERSION
There are times, when reading a novel, that I feel the author writes very much from their heart direct onto the page. These moments make good stories great: these moments are like arcs of electricity which connect weather fronts, or, I don’t know, like Ann Carson’s erotic disconnect.* This is one of the ways fiction tells truths.
There were a few moments like this with City. Four especially.
One: the novel is dedicated to the memory of CM’s mum. I think she died in a way that was sad: all dying is sad, but some more, just more. I think he wrote this novel through it. I think it became a vessel for his grief. Don’t ask me why I think this: his characters are as spiny and potty-mouthed as they ever are. Just–something. Sad.
Two: there is a moment when the protagonist is working with a detective from the other city, and he watches the guy make a huge effort to communicate even though he really doesn’t like him. And I thought, CM knows that feeling, he knows what it’s like to sit across from someone who really just can’t stand him.
I know: who wouldn’t like a human being who’s eloquent, ardent, articulate, verbose, a fan of the Matrix, the unmarked erotic, Beckettian failure, cephalopods, teratology, the literal fantastic, social justice, dustbin monsters, Doctor Who, Buffy, and is considering writing something in the pornography genre?? Still.
Three (INEXCUSABLY FLAGRANT REFLECTIONS FOLLOW BEHIND THE HIGHLIGHTING, MY ONLY DEFENSE BEING THAT ALL ART COMES FROM THE MELTING POT OF EXPERIENCE AND IMAGINATION –AHEM): CM looks skinny in his picture at the back of City–he used to be kinda built. It is a truth universally acknowledged that sadness makes one fatter or skinnier. I think he is no longer with the partner acknowledged in previous works–she’s not acknowledged in City. This somehow felt true as I read that the protagonist has not one but two indifferent female sexual partners who would not mind if they knew each other. I dunno. It’s depressing. Compare this to the flagrant, disturbing, blasphemous mutual consumption of The Lovers in The Scar, or Cutter’s total and perfect longing for real, erotic love from Judah in Iron Council. All this is, you know, perfectly not my business.
Four: this novel, besides (SPOILER:) mediating what it is to lose a life and have it replaced with something new and sidereal (”interstitial”), also meditates on the difficulty of dwelling in an enlightened state while limited by the larger reality of one’s socio-political milieu. It seems to me that CM, a self-described, honest-to-goodness, full-blown Trotskyist, is trying to attain to a certain degree of balance, or nirvana, or equanimity.
In this vein, I happened across a cool new blog called allumination which says this:
For me, that image felt like the crystallization of an internal opposition, between China the Marxist (who believes in the possibility of radical, positive change in society) and China the Realist (who has a perhaps more nuanced and pessimistic view of human nature). I thought it was a wonderful presentation of two opposed stances; and I also wondered where he’d go from there, how he’d reconcile the tension between the two viewpoints.
My mistake was to see the choice as a binary one. Miéville’s built on the moment by finding a third way, and is now operating – far more effectively than at any previous point – as China the novelist, China the Image Maker. Rather than building narratives that endorse or discuss particular political viewpoints, he’s creating open image sets that resist simple, final conclusions, and instead encourage readers to think for themselves.
IN WHICH I CONCLUDE WITH MORE PRAISE OF THE CITY AND THE CITY, MAINLY
Upon finishing The City and the City, some thoughts: marry, what a puissant and fecund metaphor–Miéville’s premise of cross-hatched city borders, of unseeing using cultural signifiers to filter out one’s consciousness of others. It works equally well for Canada and the USA as it does for Buda and Pest or for Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Bosnia. Moreover, what a slew of linguistically slurried names. The novel could have well done with a ‘cast of characters’ list in the best detective tradition. Secondarily, as Catherynne Valente notes (SPOILER), it would have been cooler if the nebulous Orciny were real. Just saying. Sixth and lastly, I really liked his bold use of contemporary technology: email and people’s subversive avoidance tactics thereof, browser cookies, Google, iPods, CCTV and cells/mobiles are key to the process of detection. Thirdly, these things are part of life now, they comprise a large part of our recurring vocabulary, our topoi. And, to conclude, it is with them that we navigate a great deal of our dasein.
TOWARDS SOME LINKS TO DO WITH CM
An interview in full between CM and Jeff Vandermeer. It’s a good one, an’ I quote:
VanderMeer: Now, because it is the 85th anniversary, there will be a lot of questions with the word “weird” in them, but the word “new” will be nowhere in evidence. So: “What does the word ‘weird’ mean to you?”
Miéville: I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’m teaching a course in Weird Fiction at the University of Warwick, so this has come up a lot. Obviously it’s kind of impossible to come to anything like a final answer, so I approach this in a Beckettian way–try to define/understand it, fail, try again, fail again, fail better…I think the whole “sense of cosmic awe” thing that we hear a lot about in the Weird tradition is to do with the sense of the numinous, whether in a horrific iteration (or, more occasionally, a kind of joyous one), as being completely embedded in the everyday, rather than an intrusion. To that extent the Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird.
I’ve been thinking about the traditional notion of the “sublime,” which was always (by Kant, Schopenhauer, et al) distinguished from the “Beautiful,” as containing a kind of horror at the immeasurable scale of it. I think what the Weird can do is question the arbitrary distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime, and operate as a kind of Sublime Backwash, so that the numinous incomparable awesome slips back from “mountains” and “forests,” into the everyday. So…the Weird as radicalised quotidian Sublime.
***
VanderMeer: And, finally, mammals or reptiles?
Miéville: please. PLEASE. Mammals Schmammals. In ascending order, it goes Mammals and birds equally, Reptiles, Amphibians, Insects, Fish, Cephalopods.
This link leads to a series of guest blogs by China Miéville on Omnivoracious. Nice recent ones.
And a Shared Worlds’ list of five phantasmagorical cities inspiring to some writers, including CM. My two cents? Beijing’s pretty freakin’ surreal. Dimashq is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities ever. And what about Tokyo, or St. Petersberg, or Sidney (Au not BC), or Baltimore?
IN WHICH I OFFER SOME MORE GENERAL LINKS PERTAINING TO THE SUBLIME BACKWASH
Tadpoles rain down on various districts in Japan.
Stealth warfare will use sonic blackholes (sonoluminescence goes goth).
*
‘For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationships, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates…When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible… The difference between what is and what could be is visible… Desire moves. Eros is a verb’ (pp 16-17).
My grandfather’s name was Harold Willard Spencer the Second–my dad being Harold Willard Spencer the Third. My dad goes by Will. My grandpa always went by Harold, so far as I know. Never Harry. Grandma called him Haroldy, or Poppa. What his name is now, I don’t know. My grandpa died Sunday.
It was fast, but not unexpected. He had Parkinson’s for a long while. It was advanced; he went from stooped to immobile; his hands shook, his fingers were swollen. He could speak some, understand some; but communication was impeded by an increasing slur, and by visions of things unseen, brought on by his medication. After a long stint of a lot of years of Grandma resourcefully and intrepidly taking him out to White Spot and the Nazarene Church on Highway 33, talking rapidly to him the whole time (the arthritis in her hands will never hit her tongue, which is hinged in the middle, as they say), he was moved to a hospital bed in their rest home. In his bed his organs shifted, complications arose.
I wasn’t there; my dad was, Mum, and my grandma. Grandpa was awake when he died.
When Grandpa was young, he was tall and strong and handsome. He had wavy dark hair brushed off a wide brow, droopy movie star eyes, a crooked smile. Moody, I think. A good singing voice. He served in the army, was almost sent to Korea, but was sent to Nuremberg instead, to guard nuclear stuff. Later he worked as a machinist for the Aerospace Corporation in California.
I don’t know much about my grandpa, really. What I do know is somewhat obscured by my grandma’s romanticism. She likes to embellish; she likes to incite; she will be doing this still at one hundred and eleven years old. Her name is Yvonne Celeste Spencer, née Platt.
Once her mother, my great-grandmother, told me that there was this time, this time that she was praying, praying hard; and that God told her to get into her closet and kneel and close the door and pray in there, as per the biblical injunction–But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly; and so she did. And when she was done, she saw a mole on her hand where there had been none before, and this mole smelled as sweet as roses, sweet as the prayers of the saints: ‘And this, precious, was mah re-wa-ruhd.’ I always wondered, why a mole?
Grandma has told me at separate times throughout my childhood that she once had long, lush red hair as a girl; thick, raven-black hair; and beautiful blonde curls. Her hair has been, for all my life, a halo of white perm, so it’s hard to say what was really what. She’s told me I have skin like a southern peach; that I am her favourite; that I have the Platt teeth and nose and figure. (Hm.) I think she’s told all her granddaughters these things. She is past mistress at making ambrosia salad, with multi-coloured mini-marshmallows in; she is southern to the core, from Alabama to God’s ear. I do love her; her propensity for fiction resonates.
When I was little she told me the story of the unicorn who drowned in the Flood, too proud to get on Noah’s Ark. When the rains abated, she said, Noah and his family looked out onto the water and saw the unicorn floating dead beside the boat, its long, curling indigo mane waving and undulating and billowing with the motion of the water. This image made me cry. At the time it occurred to neither of us that crabs and sealice, autolysis, putrefaction, adipocere and bloating would have been the least of the unicorn’s aesthetic concerns.
Grandma and Grandpa met at a southern bible college. She decided to marry him, and did.
Grandpa was always pretty quiet around her. He liked to whistle. He talked about the end of the world. About Carl Sagan, the Big Bang, and about NASA. When he was amused by my childishness he would say, ‘Aw, that’s bee-yoo-dee-full, Jasmine. Bee-yoo-dee-full.’ I learned about black holes from him. My dad continued my education in this regard, answering the billion questions seven-year-olds have about these things.
I know only that Grandpa grew up somewhere in the States. It’s possible he was born in Chicago. That I do not know by heart exactly where, or exactly when, or exactly what religion he belonged to, nor what his genetic pool or his ancestors were, is perhaps again down to Grandma. She got us to call him Zeyda in the very early years, because, she was pretty sure, he had some Jewish blood back there. My mum finally put her foot down and we switched over to ‘Grandpa’. This shift is, I think, emblematic of the often peculiarly female warfare that sometimes goes on for the hearts and minds of family. England, Scotland, the Huguenots and Germany have been posited as family background, all without the corroboration of my no doubt more informed southern relatives with whom we’ve had only a little contact. We were not terribly close; and maybe there were reasons.
Once my dad said–when Grandpa got angry, you knew to head for the bottom-land. The bottom-land was the boggy lower portion of the hillside farm that Grandpa moved his family to when Dad was fifteen, Dad and his four siblings–three redheads, two with black hair, all pale and freckled and mosquito-delicious. All of them went into culture shock: from San Diego at the height of the California Dream to the roughest, meanest, toughest, loneliest and snowiest wilderness in the south central interior of British Columbia. They left behind them the swingers and jet set, Lord of the Rings seances, cocktail blazers with suede patches at the elbows, orange trees everywhere; they left hot evenings spent tormenting lizards, jumping over cliffs of iceplant, skateboarding down suburban roads that dropped sweet and swift and lethal from mesas into valleys. They left behind ‘Looney Tunes’ and Jimmy Hendrix and family-sized double baker’s dozen boxes of donuts. They left behind the wild, innocent debauchery of the 70s, the having of a second-nature smattering of Spanish; they left behind the sea.
They were looking for Eden, they were looking for Zion. They were going to live off the land and be beautiful, and resourceful, and escape the attention of the Draft, of the Anti-Christ, of disappointed department stores looking for their ‘bonus card’ payments.
What they got in place of all the things they’d left were plunging, black and green, tree-thick, sun-silent wilderness valleys, Dante-dark and wild; cougars screaming in trees on hillsides so steep cat and human were eye-to-eye; marauding bears that ate their food, and were shot and eaten by them in turn; nanny goats and kids living in their kitchen to save their lives; caroling hippies and wild-eyed, grease-coated lost boys; cowboys and drug-growers and all the violences peculiar to these folks. Winters spent shoveling their way in the dark to the school bus, and shoveling their way back home in the dark. Powdered milk and leaking plastic barriers collapsing under the weight of snow and more snow. No electricity, no water, no phone, no sewage, no gas.
Dad caught and broke his own wild horse as payment for day and night labour at one of the ranches.
He learned to shoot, to hunt, to slaughter, and to help animals give birth. He learned to hay and husband cattle, to cut trees with chainsaws and drag them out of the bush; to build shelters, fix engines. More besides.
Through this Grandpa drove his family hard, I think. They harvested and sold Christmas trees, scrounged unlabeled cans at supermarkets, ran snowploughs, and picked cherries to get by. Dad slept maybe three hours a night.
Not everything was bad. They grew up in the south Kootenays, saw cacti and mountain goats, gorged themselves on real peaches and real cherries and real apples, fished and snowmobiled. They had a massive Siamese cat called Old Man so smart he ate their cakes and meats even when such vittles had been suspended from the ceiling. Had a Blue Heeler crossed with Dingo (said Grandma–German Shepherd, said Mum) called Banjo, who was trained assiduously by my mad uncle–who has always been able to whip any living creature, child, woman, man, dog or chicken, into a froth of hysterical hilarity–to bark faithfully at anything airborne. Banjo was a good dog so faithful he ‘ruffed’ every airplane across our yard till the day he died. He would herd my little sister and brother out of the orchards and back into our yard.
When I was very young we lived on Grandma and Grandpa’s farm for a while. Mainly I was conscious of how buggy the land was, how steep the the rutted track from bottom-land to farmhouse. I remember yellowing trees in the autumn, aspens, I think, their leaves falling in gusts of wind; a half-built log home sweet with the smell of sawdust and particle board, and the air ringing with the bell-bright ting-ting and echo-boom of hammers pounding in long, sharp nails; I remember shattering crystalline skims of ice on all the puddles, and my mad uncle staring at me in mock-consternation from huge blue eyes under a mop of fiery curls. I remember Grandpa had a tweed and pleather recliner that stuck to the backs of my legs; I remember a dizzying little deck off the farmhouse living room that lead nowhere and had no rail; I remember Mum was into headkerchiefs and blue velour.
And when everyone had moved out, Grandpa and Grandma sold the farm, moved to the town I was born in, and settled their mildewy electronic organ, their encyclopedia collection, their humongous television, their conch shell, their giant abalone shell, and Grandma’s belt collection into a townhouse. Grandpa worked manufacturing trucks. They went to Hawaii. They got old.
And now, without even knowing what it means, totally, I find he’s gone. His taste for whistling, for speculative astro-physics, his fascination with the Apocalypse–his temper–these things I see in Dad–not the temper part, that skipped a generation–in me. His story is tangled, and fading. Parts of it cannot be told.
For me Grandpa is mostly an intersecting of my experiences of others. I’m sorry about that. I’m sad for my grandma, and my dad. I think it’s possible that losing one’s parent is a difficult and disorienting passage–wounding, maybe; maybe bringing up old wounds. I’m not sad that he is dead: it was his time. But I do love him.
*
ETA: My sister just told me–Grandpa was born in Indiana, August 1, 1932. He played the cello. And this is his picture:
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