A Black Feather, A poison pen... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For J.R.M. 1916-2003 One more subtraction. One of my uncles called me a few minutes ago to tell me that my grandmother out in CC,TX passed away last night. I can't really say i was close to her, but the loss is a sharp one nonetheless. I had hoped to learn more from her first chance i got, about bits and pieces of the family history that like a lot of the houses on those streets have begun to cave under the weight of time. My spanish was never so good that she and i could ever really carry on a great conversation, even when i could hold my own with most of the campesinos and other denizens around these parts, she said she didn't always follow. I am now bereft of parents and grandparents, and as far as i know their antecedents were in on the big sleep before i was even hatched. there is a certain odd coincidence to it, just as my siblings and i are, in a way, severing a tie to our past, so time and nature have separated us from a living tie to it. I only hope that whatever stories she may have held did not, like ancient languages, slip away with her. 27 years and 25 days after her husband. I barely remember Grandfather George, vague snips of him playing in my mind, shorter stockier version of my father, they had the same face, Indian face, there are days when it shows through me in the mirror as well, but not as clear and obvious as the progression from father to son was between them. It was just a couple of weeks after my fourth birthday that eternity came for him, and on the anniversary of the day we buried him, a couple of weeks after my 18th birthday, my dad reached his expiry date. Grandmother always seemed genial enough, though sometimes a bit stern, keen counterpoint to my mother's parents who always seemed easygoing and sweet-tempered. Something in my dad's parents was grounded in slightly harder stuff. My childhood memories of Grandma Julia were always of her in her sweeter mode of operation, but my father inherited a pecutliar sharpness to his gaze that was not passed to him solely by his dad, i could see if she was intent on somehing, you would have been keenly aware of it. Even after my dad died, there was a certain robustness to her figure and character, that stereotypical assumption of the "matronly" woman. Though not rotund or in anyway particularly corpulent, she had that seemingly intimidating heft that some old-ladies have. In the weeks immediately preceding my own reminder of mortality, i saw her for the first time in a couple of years and was surprised that though even though i had not grown any taller, she seemed no bigger than my other grandmother had been before she died. A bout with cancer and a couple of heart attacks had made her physically small and largely encumbered by a wheelchair though not totally bound to it. The energy was still in her eyes, like a glint of a knife-edge, but she was so frail time-worn i had to convince myself she was the same woman. In our last conversation, we talked about things that had come and gone in the family, we understood each other a lot better. She showed us some old pictures of my dad and my uncles and we showed her some to illustrate where time had led us. i had wanted to go see her again, i had even started rebuilding my traveling expenses again from the depletion wrought by a few dozen household disasters so that i could visit the array of aunts, uncles, and cousins who live out there on the gulf-coast. Eighty six years, if i remember correctly. bye, grandma. 6:26 p.m. - 2003-04-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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