Cameras Came Then to Replace Descriptive Paragraphs

I took a class this weekend with Lynda Barry called "Writing the Unthinkable". In it we did lots of five-minute exercises designed to dredge up memories and excavate images. I'm going to try to keep doing these, and post the results every day. Sometimes I might draw pictures, too. Sometimes I might post the same thing as the day or even a week ago before, but with new bits added in. I really have no idea.

Oh, and I stole that title from a poem by Martha Ronk.


I am with Mary in our bedroom. We're sitting on the carpet, playing with the dolls we got as a hand-me-down from Mrs. Marshall's granddaughter. I'm holding Custer, Mary's is and Indian. Their legs are bowed, like they're riding horses, but we've already killed the horses.

"They bleed and bleed, until just water comes out. That's how you know they're dead," Mary says. Mary's always explaining things like that. Shes' two years older and has already started school. I'm scared, the way I always seem to get scared. How much do you have to bleed before water comes out? Are the horses dead forever? I don't remember ever playing with them again.

I can't remember ever playing with the indian again, either, or even what his name was, or if he had one. I think his horse did. And for years, bow-legged Custer haunted the bedroom, hiding beneath the bed, standing on top of the white plastic shelves, propped up against the wall, crashing barbie parties with his blonde mustache and his painted-on army clothes.

The top bunk was heaven. We took the horses up there, and the indian, and Custer, too. Mary's patchwork blankie was the clouds. The sun shone on the treetops outside while Mary and me hummed taps and Mary told me how the indians buried their dead in treetops so their souls would be closer to heaven. Later that day, I wondered how you'd recognize your family in heaven, if everyone were ghosts with the same big black eyes painted on their long white blankets.

Things I never knew about my (paternal) grandmother

1. She got her BA in nutrition because she loves science.
2. She prefers clean-shaven men.
3. She's the one that gave my great-uncle Buzzy (nee Oskar) his nickname.
4. Her dad favored her younger sister. "That took a while to get over."
5. She still wonders if she could have saved my grandfather's life.

Childrearing

I've decided that I should myself as I would a wayward child: discipline, structure, and a generous application of dessert treats as rewards. Writing (for the fun of it, to remind myself it *is* fun) every day for at least a half an hour upon waking, enforced hygiene (brush your hair one hundred strokes and shower at least every other day). If I haven't grown up to be the adult I would have liked, then by golly I will raise her myself.

In other news, I may have finally gone insane.

Achilles came to Troyland

The man on the right is my grandfather. The man on the left is, I'm guessing, someone he trained with at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. On the back of the photo, in my grandpa's messy handwriting, he's identified as "Lt Krause."

My grandfather took a fair number of photos of his days in the army. I can't help but wonder, looking at photos like this one and of smoke breaks and swimming holes and men and artillery, what happened to the other men. Did they make it home? Are they still alive today?



By the same token, I can't help but wonder about my grandfather. I know the basics, of course. I knew him, I remember him. I saw the man he grew up to be and I know how and when he died. But my grandfather -- who he was before I knew him, who he was when I knew him but never thought to wonder: who was he?

I guess the wondering is part of that bigger questioning: what makes us who we are?

Ghosts and Houses

The last few nights, I've been spooked at bedtime, reluctant to sleep in my darkened room. I've been leaving the bedside lamp on. It bothers me and makes it hard to fall asleep, but without it I start to imagine all sorts of things, like torsos, headless and legless, crawling up onto the bed, or strange figures watching from the foot. I never see anything, mind you, but the thought alone is enough.

When I first got here, when grandma was still in the hospital, I slept the sleep of the unimaginative, knocking out as soon as my head hit the pillow and not stirring until late every morning. And for the longest time that held steady, even when dad was here and the sounds of him stirring about at night sent my imagination scurrying.

But now, I lie awake forever, alert to every sound, catching shapes and shadows from the corner of my eye. Maybe it's the steady dredging of family photos and memorabilia -- staring into the faces of long-dead ancestors, reading their letters and asking questions that my grandfather would know, but isn't here to answer.


For instance: Is that a parrot in the top right corner? Were we once a bird-owning family? And whose summer home is that, who's at the piano?


I find myself wondering, are we a happy family? It's a funny question, and not one I'm comfortable asking my grandmother. In fact, I'm not entirely comfortable asking myself.


The pastoral landscape of my childhood could and did conceal any number of long-dead battlegrounds. But whose life doesn't stand on foundations that shift and creak sometimes in the wind? Tolstoy said that happy families are all alike and unhappy families unique, but I wonder if happy families might not be just as complex and distinctive as unhappy ones, their unique troubles soothed into another narrative, their private struggles forming the hills and valleys upon which future generations stand.

Were they happy then? Are we happy now?


I think it depends on what story you decide to tell.

Even More Family Photos

My grandfather, beatnik phase

My father, eccentric phase.

More Family Photos

My grandparents (and my grandfather's reflection) at their wedding.

Grandma, my dad and I found this in an album last night, after Grandma's birthday dinner.

"You look so young!" I said. "How old were you?"

"Twenty five?" said grandma.

"That is young."

"Twenty four? Twenty three? Twenty two?"

We all laughed. "Young!"

Some family photos

My grandmother and my aunt Carol, hiding behind the rhubarb leaves


One thing I always do when visiting my grandparents is pore through all the family albums. It's just a more elaborate kind of narcissism, I suppose, but I've always been somewhat soothed by looking at these sort of reflections out into the past.

It seems to soothe my grandma, too. She's in the early stages of dementia, and is often scared or sad, but I brought in some albums yesterday, and she and I had a lot of fun talking about her mom and dad, and her uncle Bruno (a dentist who made a set of bridgework for his elderly beagle), and the long hair my uncle Brian sported for "just a short while" in the 1970's, and how my dad's bedroom was filled with so many gadgets that it was hard to find the bed (note to grandma: nothing's changed on that front).

I've been taking pictures of some of the photos I especially like with my cell phone camera. I feel like a bit of a sneak thief, but I actually really like the look of these snapshots-of-snapshots.


Grandma in hat, on boat. My aunt Carol's there in the background.



My grandparents on the steps at camp, sometime in the late 60's. My great grandmother Erna Heininger next to my grandma. That's the top of my great-uncle Clem's head there in front of my grandpa.

Me and my dad, circa 1982 (ish?).

My sister and me. Mary's on the porch at camp. I'm smack dab in the middle of the awkward stage.

My grandma with her mother.

Smallness and Bigness

I'm in Vancouver, visiting my grandmother, who's in the hospital. It's been making for strange, tiring days that I'm going to have to sit on for a bit before I try to write for public consumption. This is a piece about my grandma that I wrote for her birthday last year. I found it tonight whilst rooting around in my grandmother's mementos looking for things to bring in to the hospital with me tomorrow.


“Grandmama Erika weighs less than nothing,” my sister told me once when we were little. “Literally.” And while that’s not entirely accurate, one could be forgiven for thinking it’s true. Granddaddy Alan once told me she that the only way that Grandmama could top one hundred pounds would be for her to put on all her winter clothes at once and dunk herself in the lake. I’ve been taller than she is forever now -- a giantess enfolding her small shoulders in my large and unwieldy arms every time we meet. My grandmother seems made of smallness.

You’d be wrong, however, to assume a corresponding fragility. Soon after Brian and I first moved to San Francisco, we headed up to Vancouver for an American Thanksgiving in Canada. Grandmama Erika had just entered her eighties, older than she’d ever been before (which is the way that these things work, I suppose), and on the flight up I was afraid that she’d be ancient. I was afraid I’d find her reduced somehow.

I needn’t have worried. Grandmama was the same as ever, guiding us on walks through the neighborhood and rooting out family photos and other artifacts for me to examine. By the time Brian and I tottered down to breakfast in the mornings, she would have already attended an exercise class, or met with some social group or other. Coffee would be percolating on the stove, and bowls with whole grain cereal and a banana on the side would be set out on the table.

Many of my memories of Grandmama’s house involve food: sitting in the morning sun at breakfast; lunches of walnut bread and soup and tofu; the three of us – Grandmama, Brian and I -- watching a coyote poke through the backyard as we clear up our dishes.

Grandmama’s kitchen is a warm room, built to suit its cook perfectly, with workspaces and cabinets and sinks exactly where you’d want them. There’s an appreciation for food here, both for the way it tastes and the nutrients it contains. Meals with Grandmama incorporate every food group, and ingredients in their most natural state, unprocessed feasts imparting energy rather than lassitude.

And so we were perpetually up for adventure, for walks in the park and all around Vancouver. At the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, she entertained Brian and me with anecdotes about the construction of the museum and the artists that she and granddaddy had known. Outside, she blazed trails through overgrowth and up hillsides as we investigated the Haida House complex. Standing by an eroded memorial pole, I turned to watch Brian and Grandmama as they walked around a large structure. Eagles were circling overhead in the large overcast sky, and Grandmama’s red coat stood out sharply against the gray clouds, small but bright.

I Heart Milk

Right now, they're filming Milk, a movie about the life and death of Harvey Milk, on location here in San Francisco. Certain parts of three blocks of Castro street have been made over for the movie, with storefronts returned to their 1970s facades, and era-appropriate cars parked on either side of the street.

It's a funny effect -- fliers and signs from 1974 visible in one store window, while next door Gay Porn DVDs and erotic devices Barbarella herself could have never imagined sit proudly on display. Walking down Castro street the other day with Brian, I was reminded of one of my favorite passages from Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud describes the mind as being like a city where nothing is ever torn down.

...in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the palace occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand -- without the Palazzo having to be removed -- the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire waw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero's vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should not only find the Pantheon of today, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Aggrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.

Here in San Francisco, perhaps because it's my adopted home and therefore one I'm less likely to take for granted, I often feel like I'm catching glimpses of other eras, walking on streets downtown where there are shipwrecks in the landfill beneath the cobblestones or passing the spot on Ashbury street where Charles Manson and the Grateful Dead were once neighbors with a convent of French nuns (only the nuns still remain). Seeing the past made real on Castro this week is an odd sort of delight, a sense of a world made new and old again at once, and a reminder that our lives, our pasts, do not perish entirely, so long as time and memory conspire to keep us present in the people and objects that take our place.

Uncanny Valley

A moth is sitting on my ring finger as I type this. It feels so strange -- not just tickly-strange, but unheimlich, like I'm breaking some deep-set and rooted taboo. Just my luck: sit down at my desk to finally write, next thing you know, I'm the Moth Bride.

Anyway. So I'm done with school. That might be fairly temporary though; I'm looking at a few grad programs (one a Ph.D, one yet another MFA), both of which have deadlines looming, both of which I might apply to. I say 'might' because I'm having trouble deciding which to go with, and because, well, I'm busy enough already.

Busy with what, you may ask, O imaginary reader. 'This and that,' I'd reply, and then we'd both sit and ponder how much of our lives are spent this-or-thating, and before you know it whole weeks dissapear out of the 'future' drawer, only to show up crammed inside in the overstuffed 'past' drawer and oh God the moth is going for my beer.

Anyway (did you know Brian has started counting how many 'anyways' it takes me to finally get to my point? Not all the time, that would be horrible, just sometimes, when I'm being especially pedantic and digressive). Anyway.

I have been busy. With the Day Job, which takes up an awful lot of air, despite only being 6 hours, thrice a week, and 3 hours, twice a week. And with getting ready for teaching next semester, which entails lots of reading & listening to lectures-on-tape, and basically giving myself my education thus far all over again, so that I don't feel underqualified. And with not writing, which takes up more time than you'd imagine.

Meanwhile summer's here, and even though seasons in San Francisco bear almost no resemblance to the ones I had growing up in Massachusetts, there's always that funny tug of memory when the weather changes (like the distinctive beach-ball smell of sunblock, which pulls me, for a moment, back into every summer day I've ever lived all at once).

And now I'm thinking about summer, and I've lost my train of thought entirely.