frames

I shucked one bucket of family photos this morning before we went to her house.
I ended up with a thin sheaf of snapshots in search of an album and a distended white wicker basket full of junky dime store frames to throw out.

One of the pictures was backed with a quite good pen drawing of a crow clutching a pair of scissors. Another bird added to the flock surrounding our baby, a scavenger with a blade, one to keep an eye on.

The wife called ahead and asked if there was anything she needed. We stopped on the way for her Egg McMuffin.

Needle in the Hay came on when we hit the edge of town and the last note sounded as we parked in front of her house.

Another face from the past I don't remember had flown in from Canada.

"It's been so long since I've seen you!"
"Mmmmm."
There were pictures of their last visit, acres of snow and people I didn't recognize and two snapshots of a huge black wolf walking down the side of the road that at first they'd mistaken for a dog.

She asked me to get the will from her bedroom
I didn't find it because it wasn't there, but I saw the same brandy bottle full of unspent pennies, the same gargantuan jug of that perfume she never wore and the same matched set of combs and brushes that never touched her hair.
The same poster on the wall, a stylized gamine dangling a pair of shears from one crooked pinkie, out of its element and badly faded from hanging near a window.

The same props for the same show she's been starring in my whole life.



Postscript

Leaving we passed another of my mom's old friends pulling in.
She'd earned my enmity by periodically harassing the wife at work, peddling her opinion that the wife only knew half the story, and wasn't I awful for not speaking to my own mother and she really needed to give my mom a chance. The one who hauled her misconceptions into my work and waved them at me like a matador's red cape.

In keeping with the tenor of the times here's her theme song, courtesy of Mr. Smith.

you say you mean well, you don't know what you mean
fucking ought to stay the hell away from things you know nothing about

mortality

My mom's near the end of her rope & we went to see her the other day.

DO NOT CALL 911: CALL HOSPICE HOME CARE read the banner on the refrigerator door. She's cocooned in a hospital bed in the living room. There's an oxygen tank hidden behind the couch, as if everyone can't hear the compressor gasping or see the tangle of tubes on her chest. Just like her dad, except his sat at attention by his recliner in the living room like a temple dog. The same chair my grandmother shit in a decade later, passed out with an empty bottle in her lap.

I was there with her for two weeks that last time
Just us, the drawn curtains and the dog who jumped up on the dining room table and ate off her plate, and the ghosts.
My grandma was a hermit disabled by liquor and her dog had grown morbidly obese on a diet of hamburger & boxed mashed potatoes, so it wasn't physically dangerous.
Compared to other bad scenes my mom dumped me in the middle of it doesn't rate.

The only thing I hated was the song and dance when she picked me up.
"I didn't know it was that bad, I'll never leave you there again!"
She burst into tears while I observed her through the slits in my porcelain kabuki mask.

She never did understand the way I can see through people.
You shouldn't be able to tell when your parents lie to you.

My grandmother would secret vodka bottles in our toilet tank when she came to visit, like a vampire stashing a coffin full of grave soil in the manor house basement.
It was a bit of ledgermain I never understood. Her hiding spot always blocked the handle, and I'd lift the lid of the tank and shift it to the far corner so it would flush.

The first time I turned her in to my mom.
They had a big fight and mom poured it out down the kitchen sink & grandma went to stay in a hotel.

It was a dinner theater take on the Broadway production of The Concerned Family after my grandfather's funeral.
They herded her into their bathroom off the master bedroom, and made a big deal out of flushing all the sleeping pills and prescription drugs down the toilet. The medicine cabinet was decimated.
"You're not going to kill yourself, your family needs you."

The bar in the living room went undisturbed by these histrionics.

(The wife asked her mom recently "are you afraid dad might murder you?"
"Oh, I've thought that for years! But don't worry, I hid the handguns he keeps in his bedroom!
Do you think I should hide the shotgun, too?")


My mom gave me two baskets of family pictures with a big empty space between her own childhood and the two of us washing ashore on 11th street, a perfect puzzle piece match for the hole in my own memories.

I kissed her forehead on our way out and flashed on Needle in the Hay.

now on the bus
nearly touching this dirty retreat
falling out 6th and powell a death sweat in my teeth
gonna walk walk walk
four more blocks plus the one in my brain
down downstairs to the man
he's gonna make it all ok
i can't beat myself
i can't beat myself
and i don't want to talk
i'm taking the cure so i can be quiet
whenever i want
so leave me alone
you ought to be proud that i'm getting good marks
needle in the hay
needle in the hay
needle in the hay
needle in the hay

It's not a literal fit, even with the liter bottle of morphine & spoon on her bedstand. But the aura of narcissistic martyrdom is spot on, although hers lacked both irony & redemptive art.
And she was always chasing after The Man in some shape or form, dragging me along behind her by one arm like a doll she'd forgotten she was holding.


People always wonder at my facility with metaphors, the way I can sketch a connection between two seemingly unrelated things. A Joan Didion collection came in the other day, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. Whatever alchemy I command developed more from survival than craft.