Beginning (up for a new title)
If there’s one thing in life I know for certain it’s that there’s no point in planning for things. Sometimes I get a strong hankering for an ice cream sundae but by the time I can get to a McDonald’s the machine there’s broken down and all I can say is: “well I guess it’ll be an apple pie then.” Apple pies only taste good when their inevitable, like on a holiday when all that’s to be expected is an apple pie, or a pumpkin pie, or the much less popular mince meat pie. It takes a true man to eat a slice of mince meat, That is to say a true old man who knows what it was like to not have anything and wake up before the gas stations even were open to work long hours at a factory smiting the people he became.
I wanted a place to live. That’s how I came to this realization point about not ever planning. It was because I’d scheduled with my new apartment contractor to move in the 15th of May and by the time move in time rolled around, the landlord’s office was locked, and the apartment was not finished being painted. So then I had to call the contractor and he sent over this old guy. The man ha a nose the size of a small potato but unlike Chekhov’s image of human blood being soaked up by a ripe raw potato, his nose was red throughout.
A Grandmother:
Here is a list of things I keep on my desk of places to take my granddaughter. We still need to go to the zoo, and visiting the ocean with her for the first time last summer was one of the highlights of my life. There are so many things though that I will never be able to tell her. Not face to face. I’d want most of all to tell her that I love my little doodlebug more than anything in this world, but that isn’t something she doesn’t know already. I would tell her to try her hardest to take every moment in as if she were a human camera, constantly snapping shots of her surroundings. I’d want her to know that taking the time to listen to the world around her will much better equip her for this life than many things her mommy will teach her. I would want to tell my granddaughter everything I told my own daughter, but in many respects I understand that doing so would be infringing on my daughter’s parental right and obligation to fill her daughter’s head with as many senseless notions about the world which she herself retains.
My daughter, Mia, had her daughter, Natalie, when she was 24. It was two years after she ran away from home and she was dating this new schmuck, Ben. He was over weight, stupid, and dirty, and although I warned my daughter that her choices were endangering her life and wellbeing she threw it back in my face telling me that she was in control of her own life and that when I’d been her age I had already foolishly fucked up my marriage. I guess there isn’t really much to say after my daughter yells that I was the reason this entire time why she’s messed up so much of her own life.
“It’s just this intense pressure,” she’d turned to me at the dinner table while we were all eating one night. “I always feel like you guys aren’t letting me live my life and I’m in constant fear of disappointing everyone and not getting what I want.”
“Not everyone can get what they want all of the time. “ I said. “I didn’t know who I married when I married him, I thought he was somehow different, something he wasn’t at all.”
The man I married wanted to offer me the best of everything and being the woman I was the thought of someone truly caring about me and offering his life up in order to better mine seemed to be the most attractive thing about a man I’d ever experienced.
So I went with him, followed him all over the country while he learned how to fly planes with the US Air force and then went on to commercial piloting. He always wanted to be doing something different. Piloting got boring so he moved onto engineering. When that didn’t workout he moved to getting his law degree. I think after that he thought getting a prettier girlfriend would be most important to him. We started wearing on each other more and more. I was a nag, oh was I a nag.
I recently told my son a story. A story about how it was for me to have stayed with his father as long as I did. I always feared that he’d turn out just like his father and I love him more than I ever loved his father, for the one reason I knew I could never fully love his father, the constant fear of a person changing into someone I never foresaw him become. The constant thought that it is going to be like this for the next generation too, that my own son would walk in the footsteps of his father and trample all over another person’s heart.
My daughter somehow always knew the story. I mean she was an infant when her father, my ex-husband, left us without writing or mailing checks back from his tour in
Older Lady:
I’m fairly certain that there is a long linage of mental illness on both sides of my family. If there isn’t, then perhaps I inherited both side’s recessive traits, but as I think back I am certain that both my father and mother’s sides exhibited some form of insanity in its various derivations. My grandmother wore a girdle through both of her pregnancies, my grandfather’s brother killed himself, and I’m pretty sure depression is just the general tone that clouds my family. It has always been like this and I cannot remember a day I felt differently about myself than this. I wrote to my sister the other day. It was a fairly long letter and ever since a year or so ago she’s been sending me letters she tells me, but I haven’t gotten any of them.
My sister is the only woman living in my family besides me. Our entire generation was infertile, or that’s what we tell each other. Most of my siblings were just unlucky in love all their lives and ended all of their sorrow in one way or another before they could experience any intense romantic connection with any one. Or that’s just what I believe, but I for one didn’t fall in love until I was 30 years-old and every other experience before that made me want to end it all. I guess we Michies are just a more sensitive lot, we’re of Scottish blood, and I guess that’s where our sorrows spout from.
It’s raining out. Somehow the rain always makes things sadder, and I know that it is in correct to speak in imperatives like always or never but sometimes that is just the way things are - imperatives.
I grew up always being courteous and conscientious. I took an etiquette class a the age of eight down at the local department store, Jacobson’s. There I learned which fork to use and how I ought to respect my elders. At the age of eight I didn’t ever question my authority figures I simply obliged and obeyed their every demand and command. It wasn’t until I was pubescent that I wondered what it was that made these older people have any sense of power over me. It was from that point on that I really had issue with people in general trusting them and all that. The only people I ever trusted were my own family and Margie is the last of the family I’ve got left.
In looking back (and I told Margie this in the last letter I wrote her) I think not one person has wronged me and cared afterwards besides the people in my family. It’s only those few people who’ve ever come back to me after we’ve fought and said from the heart “you know, I’m really sorry, and I love you.” That could perhaps be the greatest tragedy of my life, that I never trusted anyone to let them be a friend or a true lover to me. Everyone in my life has known the topical layer of my personality, the one I’ve carefully constructed, which has since broken down.
Woman insecure in her relationship:
We were always tripping over one another. We could never walk apart. That was then. Way back then when we would coon into the telephone and tell each other all of our souls’ most inner woes.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” you said one night into the receiver.
“Don’t say anything; I just want to hear you breathe for a while until we both fall asleep.”
Then, money seemed to be no object. Telephone bills were the least of our worries and our most important priority was being together, all bundled up in a tangle of limbs and elbows, and sternums bucked up against each other.
When I met Brock at the hardware store there wasn’t much to think about. I had you and he was just a handsome stranger. It happens everyday, men look at men, men look at women, women look about, it all surmounts to trouble. That day I wasn’t out for trouble, I was out for screw fasteners. I was trying to put up the curtains I’d had stowed away in my closet ever since my mom brought them down for me.
“What can I help you with?” Brock greeted me at the door. I liked when people used affirmative statements like he had, rather than assuming a negative like “have you already been helped?” or the worst “you’ve already been helped haven’t you?” It is almost like the service industry forgot their manners all of a sudden once the millennium hit.
“I need some of the do-dads that fit in the wall so my screws won’t keep popping out” I said.
He laughed, and I immediately felt less awkward about wearing the shortest pair of shorts I owned on this, the coldest day of the summer.
Ever since that day we just joked around on the phone. I usually called him while you were working, I didn’t want to cause any trouble between us, and you know that’s the last thing I’d want.
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