10.31.99

It's a beautiful fall morning and I'm here without you. This is the only season, the only kind of day, that challenges the full range of the chromatic spectrum. Every color is represented and it is not overwhelming, but richly complete. It's Halloween. We are spared from rain, which is unusual. I associate Halloween with rain. Always rain, it did, when I was out there among the ranks in my plastic costume with the plastic mask that couldn't breathe my breath, causing it to condense into droplets on my cheeks and forehead. It always rained,which meant that whatever costume I wore included an umbrella as an accessory. I am tired. Despite falling back an hour, which I forgot to do until a neighbor reminded me of it, I got into bed too late and woke up too early. I had to get to work. I never ate a real meal yesterday, just sugar and Halloween candy, so I called Mae's and ordered a tofu breakfast, to go, before scurrying off to the office for a 9:30 appointment. They didn't show. Now I'm early for the next appointment and gifted with the time to try this and to gaze at the outdoors hanging on my wall. I spent yesterday sorting through family history. Through some complicated turn of events, I'm having to sort through all of the stuff Dave and I have in storage to get it ready for shipping to Philadelphia. A lot of it is stuff that belonged to my mother and my childhood. Many of those things are not things worth keeping, like my mother's check registers or my worn out shoes from Junior High. I spent some hours in the hallway of the storage facility digging through old clothes, photos, and papers. I must sort carefully because my mother didn't leave any formal record of herself (what she thought or what she felt) and now I am reduced to examining check registers to glean something of who she was. From the check registers alone I learn that she was meticulous. There is not one item haphazardly recorded and not one month un-reconciled. In them were clues to our transient years. The balances hanging low and lower. There was a balance of $3.68, against which she wrote a check for $3.00, followed by a string a blanks. The checks written against a negative balance were apparently voided. The register stops shortly thereafter and I am able to move on to the next book wherein the pattern repeats. We ate on bad checks, empty slips of paper. I can imagine the anxiety and shame she must have felt, being the careful person that she was, to have resorted to stealing for our survival. I found the divorce decree and the accompanying restraining order against my father, who was the drunk, insane man who would've starved us for his addictions. Later at my g-ma's apartment, looking at old albums, she told the pictures and I recorded what she said onto the paper margins beside each one. These are the early ones, the great and great-greats of my history. I just love looking at these faces and bodies. All of the women were shapely and their clothes were designed to accentuate the curves. The men wore their trousers high and capped their flapped-back hair with hats. I told her what I had discovered while digging through the stuff in storage and she helped me glue it to my memories of that time. Each day I spend looking through old photos with her, I am better able to place myself within a larger context of history and I feel less existentialist anxiety. There is a long trail of faces leading to this spot. In these faces I see physical features that match some of my own; and I know that long before I existed, it was predestined that the person who occupied my place would inherit this bag of bad emotional tricks.

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