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February 08, 2005
In the Land That Knows No Parting
The sun came up on me in Kentucky yesterday. It was raining, Willie Nelson was coming through the car speakers, and my brother was driving me south to the airport, to Texas, home. Rambling by farms and rolling hills of orange clay, tobacco barns and stands of pine trees, trying hard not to think about how I spent the day before helping put my grandfather in a box in the ground.
The funeral was alternately comforting and intolerable. I loved hearing all the old gospel and bluegrass music, the stories of all the old guys in the smoker’s room and the lilt of the Southern accent that I grew up dulcified by. There were relatives with amazing names that I’d never met. There were fantastic stories, too unbelievable to repeat here. And there was my Grandfather, in a shiny, pretty box, at the front of the room.
And though the ceremony and mourning all transpired in the ordained Southern way, it wasn’t a natural way for me to say goodbye at all, and I still feel like I’ve not eked out all my sadness and loss, or had my proper ritual. I’m listening to lots of suitable music, and crying intermittently, and I’m sure that soon enough I will find an appropriate observance for this passing. If I were a praying sort, I suppose I’d go that route. Instead, I’m gathering up sips of bourbon and slippery, moppet memories and feeling very grateful to have known someone so unparagoned as my grandfather.
Posted by pogo at 06:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 02, 2005
Hardly Getting Over It
I’ve spent the afternoon listening to Husker Du and trying to figure out how to quilt. Lately, everything has been making my thoughts turn to my distant family, and this afternoon’s activities especially so. I guess the quilting is obvious — my great-grandmother was a quilter, one of those ladies who lived through the depression and never wasted a single thing. And thinking of her leads me to my great-grandfather, who is coming to a slow, sad end. My mother has, in the course of the last seven years, warned me that she thinks his race is run and I should prepare myself to say goodbye three separate times. And each time, my sweet Paw, who has been suffering from senile dementia, struggles on. And so in honor of his stubborn and fantastic life, today I’m trying to remember small, everyday and delightful thoughts of him.
* For as long as I can remember, he always carried a few buckeyes in his pants pocket, and would usually slip me one. The last time I saw him laugh, he mentioned that this was because someone once told him that it was “good for the rheumatids.”
* He was a cattle farmer and would take me to the auctions in Mayfield, which I referred to as “the cow store.” Afterwards he would always take me to the Dairy Queen. Actually, we just called it that, though it was not an official Dairy Queen, but something called the Dairy Bar, if I recall correctly. One spring he had four calves born at the same time, and he named them all after me, my brother and two of my cousins. The one named after Stephanie, who was always a hellion, sprouted horns almost instantly.
* He taught both me and my younger brother to drive on his tractor.
* The last lucid conversation I had with him was on my 25th birthday, over the telephone. He explained to me that it didn’t matter what my family thought of me, or if I was an old maid, or how I lived, just as long as I lived as I pleased and remained true to myself. It was only after I hung up the phone that I realized it had all been encoded speech and that he was, in his way, telling me that it was ok that I was a lesbian (which I am not.)
* I’m pretty sure that he was the only member of my mom’s family that my father ever felt any affinity with and unabashedly loved. He worked on a road crew at some point and got my dad hired for a summer when he was in college. My dad always told me that there were only two solutions for any problem that might occur with the roads: either apply some hot patch or some cold mix. And then he would giggle a really silly giggle.
* Every single time I went to eat at their house, no matter what else there was, there was always turnip greens and cornbread.
Posted by pogo at 08:15 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack