Ye who are weary come home.
Aug. 31st, 2007 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raybearTonight at work, I suddenly thought about my father and considered calling him. I didn't. I did remember that he was supposedly planning to e-mail me a CD of digital pictures taken from my grandmother's funeral. I came home and there were 3 giant e-mails from him with attachments. They were mostly various family combinations on a couch, and half a dozen pictures of the 'altar' at the funeral -- she wanted to be cremated, so my cousins made a collage of photos to hang.
I didn't open the e-mails at first. I laughed at being psychic and shut the computer and went to read a little in my office. Later, curiosity got the best of me, and I opened them up. I have stared and stared at this collage, it is less interesting to people who are not related to my family, and it is also less interesting if it is viewed small, so I beg your pardon, there will be an extraordinarily large photo behind this cut.
I was in bed and started to drift off and thought back to these pictures, trying to remember names, years, experiences. My mother will be 60 in a few months. I am the age she was when she birthed me. I realized that maybe my great-aunt Margaret and great-uncle Dub have probably passed and no one told me, yet I could also see them alive and well in some assisted care facility. I should e-mail my father and ask.
I started to think of the song Mississippi Goddamn, because I keep saying 'goddamn', and then crabgrass yard and crickets buzzing and my aunt's leather cigarette pouch. Spinning divinity and ice milk on peach cobbler. The freezer in the garage and the house in Purvis with the wood burning stove and Simon the poodle and at the age of 19 I went to a country rock bar in an old train depot with my aunt and her friends and ordered a Heineken and felt so refined and mature. There is banana pudding in the fridge and Days of Our Lives recorded on vhs tapes and a waterbed. Funny how memories can be so far away, so fuzzy and indistinct, but then you finally lock on one and suddenly everyting unexpected tumbles out. I keep looking at these pictures.
I keep looking at these pictures of my family and I do not come from a gene pool of traditionally gorgeous people, except everyone is beautiful when we are young.
What is sort of most extraordinary to me right now is how I'm feeling. Sure, I am sad. But it feels sort of pure, not muddled with panic and anxiety and fear. I am also...there. It is not even nostalgia. I am in it, but not taken under by it. I'm floating, existing, getting washed ashore.
I didn't open the e-mails at first. I laughed at being psychic and shut the computer and went to read a little in my office. Later, curiosity got the best of me, and I opened them up. I have stared and stared at this collage, it is less interesting to people who are not related to my family, and it is also less interesting if it is viewed small, so I beg your pardon, there will be an extraordinarily large photo behind this cut.
I was in bed and started to drift off and thought back to these pictures, trying to remember names, years, experiences. My mother will be 60 in a few months. I am the age she was when she birthed me. I realized that maybe my great-aunt Margaret and great-uncle Dub have probably passed and no one told me, yet I could also see them alive and well in some assisted care facility. I should e-mail my father and ask.
I started to think of the song Mississippi Goddamn, because I keep saying 'goddamn', and then crabgrass yard and crickets buzzing and my aunt's leather cigarette pouch. Spinning divinity and ice milk on peach cobbler. The freezer in the garage and the house in Purvis with the wood burning stove and Simon the poodle and at the age of 19 I went to a country rock bar in an old train depot with my aunt and her friends and ordered a Heineken and felt so refined and mature. There is banana pudding in the fridge and Days of Our Lives recorded on vhs tapes and a waterbed. Funny how memories can be so far away, so fuzzy and indistinct, but then you finally lock on one and suddenly everyting unexpected tumbles out. I keep looking at these pictures.
I keep looking at these pictures of my family and I do not come from a gene pool of traditionally gorgeous people, except everyone is beautiful when we are young.
What is sort of most extraordinary to me right now is how I'm feeling. Sure, I am sad. But it feels sort of pure, not muddled with panic and anxiety and fear. I am also...there. It is not even nostalgia. I am in it, but not taken under by it. I'm floating, existing, getting washed ashore.
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-31 11:33 am (UTC)I love looking at friends' families' photos.
In my family, there's a similar picture of my great-grandmother peering at my mother's veil.
I took a class about memory in college and I remember that one of the things the prof said was that before age 3/4 people tend to remember in pictures, which is making me think about your comment about all the memories tumbling out which is making me think of that people must organize their pictures in their heads differently--some in neatly labeled shoe box file thingies, some in albums, some in a gigantic pile crammed in a box all whopperjaw. So the memories tumble differently, and depending on who you are, differently (or the same) each time.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-31 09:25 pm (UTC)to the right of the wedding veil picture (that's my mom, actually) is a picture of my uncle david hugging granny, and i like it because i can see how my brandon genes have come out over the years. and to the right of that photo, granny is hold a child who i initially thought was me -- except she looks so much older, so i realized it must be my niece. that sort of took my breath away.